A crisis like the death of a family member, or a broken leg or back, or even something as mundane as a sick pet can knock you seriously off course. Even without a major event, a convergence of smaller distractions, commitments or interruptions can similarly disrupt your work. Not only does this mean you’ve lost the hours you were unable to focus on real work, you generally have to waste a bunch of hours just to get back to the point you left off: you forget what your thought process was, you forget what work has already been done, you forget what you were planning on doing next, you forget, you forget, you forget.
Don’t wait for the crisis or convergence to strike.
Just like you (hopefully) backup your digital data on a regular basis, it’s far easier, and more realistic to continually backup your life data than it is to hope to remember to do so when an actual crisis or convergence of bad events hits. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
In a law firm, you often get half a dozen or more different projects, each containing a multitude of discreet tasks, thrown at you at any one time. It’s impossible to keep track of all the ideas floating around your head if you don’t write things down. It’s very helpful to write a quick note at the end of the day about what you were working on/thinking about last, steps you were thinking about taking next, etc. Takes a minute, but can save hours in duplicated effort the next day.
For those doing any sort of creative work, documenting each step in a process can also be incredibly useful, not only so you know what’s been done on a piece and where you left off, but also so you can duplicate it in the future. I find this unbelievably helpful when editing photos: there’s simply no way I could remember what I did on something I edited 3 years ago if I didn’t take notes. With those notes, if I want to go back and improve something, I can see where I might have screwed something up, or where I could employ a new technique. If I want to apply a similar effect to a new photo, I can go back and know exactly what I did to achieve that effect the last time.
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I’m curious, how do you take notes of the editing process? Is it digitally, or with pen on paper, and what information do you write down?
I recently found the ‘History log’ option in Photoshop and even though I haven’t had the need to go back to it yet, I’ve had lots of previous occasions where I created an interesting effect but couldn’t possibly remember the steps.
I’d love to know how you cope with this.
Hi Rumena. I literally just open up a text file and write down each step in a numbered list, save it with the same name as the image and keep it in the same file; super simple. I tend to write down each major step, logging enough info that I can know what I did and recreate it. A typical file’s log might look something like this:
1. ACR (don’t usually log this since settings are saved automatically; only do it if I’m trying multiple versions and settings get moved)
2. Capture sharpen -> (Settings)
3. Cleanup Image (remove twig from lower left, clone dust spot in upper right, etc., etc.)
4. Color effect (LAB 100/100/100/90) 110, 85, 245) <--this might be the values I've adjusted to if I used LAB 5. Tone effect (100->120, 90->70, 180->200) <--this might be the values I've adjusted to in curves 6. Burn edges for vignette, dodge tree at left 10% (Settings) 7. Creative Sharpen (Settings) 8. Tweaks ( ) 9. Output sharpen (Settings) Depending on the image, this can be very, very detailed, or like above, very simple. The text file permits you to write as little or as much as you want, and it's easy to review. I've been doing this lately in other areas of life, as mentioned in the post, and I find it incredibly useful for picking up where I last left off. Hope this helps.
Cool! Thanks for that 🙂