software

bigjoe

i am taking photos for next school year in a middle school. i need to know what kind of equiptment and software can i use?

Richard

bigjoe wrote: »

i am taking photos for next school year in a middle school. i need to know what kind of equiptment and software can i use?

Hi Joe and welcome to Dgrin . That's a pretty big question. Maybe you could tell us a little more about what you are planning on shooting and what your budget is.

Pupator

Joe, answering Richard's questions will get you a good, specific answer. You might, just as a starting place, want to check out Google's Picasa. Its free and will allow you to do lots of helpful edits to the pictures you take. You may find that it's all you need for right now.

bigjoe

Richard wrote: »

Hi Joe and welcome to Dgrin . That's a pretty big question. Maybe you could tell us a little more about what you are planning on shooting and what your budget is.

thanks for the welcom!! well i will be shooting the yearbook photos .I have a meating with the person incharge by the end of july. I don't want to go in there with no knowlage or software and money is not an issue, be side i currently have my studio, I would like to know if there is a kind of software for schools out there

bigjoe

Pupator wrote: »

Joe, answering Richard's questions will get you a good, specific answer. You might, just as a starting place, want to check out Google's Picasa. Its free and will allow you to do lots of helpful edits to the pictures you take. You may find that it's all you need for right now.

thank you for the reply !!!!!

jnsuffolk

Your best bet would probably be light room or cs5

Pupator

Knowledge of how to work with photo files is going to be more important than knowledge of a particular piece of software. Make sure you understand about the different kinds of files (raw, jpeg, tiff, psd) that you'll likely be working with. Make sure you understand what makes a good photo and how to crop and make changes to the image to improve it. I think if you get those things down well you'll be in good shape. I would not buy any software until after you've had your meeting and found out the specifics of what they're after. You don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop to find out you didn't need it (not to mention the time you'll spend learning to use it!).

You ask about software specifically for schools - and I'm wondering if you're more concerned about the organization and handling of the photos than the software for editing the image itself. If so, maybe Lightroom would be a good investment for you. It is a powerful database tool that can help keep things organized and tagged to make them easier to work with. It also does a killer job for post-processing. Still, I wouldn't be buying anything until after you've talked with the school. They're hiring you for your photography abilities, not your knowledge of software.

Arnim

The chameleon workflow package (www.krasbit.com) would meet your needs. It allows you to import student names beforehand, connect this data to images, and then output to a variety of products and different image sizes. You can produce customized order forms for students within minutes of taking their picture and then re-render all the photos for use by the yearbook people.

PupWeb

Major players are:
BigJoe,

The main question is how many students? Is this school size less than a hundred or over 1000? You will be shooting the yearbook so the school will expect for you to deliver a completed page layout and/or a PSPA CD for their yearbook pages. This will have the students name, link to jpeg and grade level in a standard format the Professional School Portrait Association came up with. You will also need a list/database of students and teachers from the school. For a small amount of students you can create your own PSPA CD for larger amounts see major players below.

Since you said you have your own studio you probobly have the photo capture-edit part down. Adobe Lightroom and photoshop are good for fixing those photos that need a little help but doing this for every student will take forever.

Major Players:

Many of these softwares automate the workflow and create yearbook/PSPA formated CD automagically. They are all expensive.

Express Digital Assembly Edition
They have workflow recipe's which are great and even has barcode and student ID capabilities to help save time keeping track of things.
Does what it says it will do but the customer support needs improvement IMO. This is the only non lease software out there that I know of so you own it. I use the ED profesonal edition a lot. I haven't had a large school portrait shoot to justify the Assembly edition but ED does an awesome job at total workflow. From portrait packages to lab print to yearbook layouts. It is also networkable so you can have multiple shoot stations set up.

PhotoLynx
I don't have any experience with photolynx but a lot of labs use it.

Lumapix yearbook
This software you lease with your yearbook publisher.

BradfordBenn

Also all of this software can be rendered moot if the images themselves are not quality. So don't skimp on lighting and backdrop preparation as well.

KRP

bigjoe wrote: »

i am taking photos for next school year in a middle school. i need to know what kind of equiptment and software can i use?

Hi

I used imagequix http://www.imagequix.com/ last year & though there is a learning curve, it did pretty well. I posted my proofs for each individual student on their own private gallery (through Webquix) and although some parents found it hard to navigate, most were able to place their oredrs easily.

I've also reciently discovered Snapizzi http://www.snapizzi.com/ I'm seriously concidering them this year.

Sorry for the late response, I just now logged onto DG to find an answer to something else.