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Digital Photography

Microsoft Expression Media 1.0 Review by Jay Kinghorn TakeGreatPictures.com contributor and digital workflow consultant Jay Kinghorn offers a review of Microsoft Expression Media 1.0, formerly iView MediaPro. Article rating: 9.29

In a successful digital workflow, each stage of the process, from image editing through to archiving, flows neatly from one step to the next, efficiently and easily. As a digital workflow consultant, I work with photographers of all skill levels, across all photographic genres. All these photographers want to spend less time at the computer working on their photos, and more time behind the lens. From experience, Microsoft Expression Media, formerly iView MediaPro, can help you do just that. Expression Media is a convenient tool for cataloging, managing, editing and sorting for all types of photographers. In this article I’ll discuss the differences between asset management programs and file browsers and walk you through each stage of the digital photography workflow to review Expression Media 1.0 and offer tips to help you streamline your photography workflow.

Asset Management vs. File Browsing
File Browsers like Adobe Bridge, and Windows Photo Gallery allow you to view the con-tents of a single folder at a time. File browsers are quick to visually display the photos within a single folder. However, file browsers are usually limited in their ability to man-age image libraries containing several thousands of images stored in multiple folders.

Asset Management programs like Expression Media, Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Ap-erture create a visual database allowing you to manage, edit and reference photos scat-tered across several different folders, even photos stored on different hard drives. Asset management programs can even help you find photos stored on CD/DVDs or external hard drives that aren’t currently connected to your computer. This makes it easier to find the exact photo you need from the multitudes of photos in your image library.

Why Expression Media?
Once your image library becomes too large to fit in a single folder it is often advanta-geous to begin cataloging your photos in an asset management program like Expres-sion Media. The Expression Media catalogs you create contain thumbnails of your im-ages used for editing and sorting, your keywords and metadata you enter into the cata-log and internal links to reference the original files. This is what makes Expression Me-dia so quick when working with large image libraries: you aren’t searching the original files, merely a proxy image that references your original photos.  This allows you to store files in multiple locations yet search them all from a single catalog. Photographers find this greatly simplifies tasks related to batch processing, captioning, archiving and finding photos.

A great strength of Expression Media is its adaptability almost any workflow. There are several ways to add photos to an Expression Media catalog and the same photo can be referenced from several different catalogs allowing you to structure your workflow in a way that makes sense to you. One of the guidelines I always give photographers is to find a workflow that you feel comfortable with. If it’s simple and easy to understand, the workflow tasks like archiving and keywording will quickly become second nature and you’ll find that you’re actually doing these important steps instead of putting them off.

To give you an idea of how Expression Media compares with other workflow programs currently on the market let’s go through four stages common to every photography workflow: Import, Editing, Image Corrections and Archive/Backup. For each stage we’ll examine the tools Expression Media provides photographers for managing your digital photography workflow. 

Import

Importing photos from a memory card seems like a rather mundane task, yet if used ef-fectively it is one of the greatest workflow boosters for photographers. The trick is to use the import process as an opportunity to rename your photos and add your important copyright and contact information. This saves you the hassle of having to perform these tasks later. Plus, I can tell you from experience, if these steps aren’t completed during the import stage, they are often forgotten.

Fortunately, with Expression Media it is easy to rename photos as you import them to your computer and add your copyright and contact information within your photo’s metadata with the Camera Import dialog. Here you can specify where you’d like the photos downloaded to, rename the photos, and use the Annotation feature to batch-apply your copyright and contact information in one easy step.

While the direct camera import is simple and very easy to use it is not without its flaws. It lacks some of the professional features found in other applications: the ability to download files to two locations simultaneously for instant backup and the ability to burn an archive DVD with a single click. Amateurs and most professionals will likely find the camera import feature in Expression Media suits their needs just fine but high-volume shooters working in the field will find the absence of these advanced features disap-pointing.

Editing

After you’ve downloaded your photos to your hard drive, you’ll want to find the very best images from the shoot. This is one of Expression Media’s strengths as it is an efficient and versatile editing program. There are four methods of looking at your photos in Ex-pression Media; List, Thumbnail, Media and Light Table.

 List View

Thumbnail View

The List view provides a simple list of your images along with basic information like file name and file size. This is useful for sorting or locating images. The default view in Ex-pression Media is the Thumbnail view, which, as you might expect, displays thumbnails of the images in the catalog.  The Media view gives a larger preview window, which is very useful for the initial edit of your work. For the most accurate editing, you’ll want to switch into Light Table view.

The Light Table view will quickly become your favorite tool for editing images because it allows you to preview a single image at a time in full-screen mode, while having the abil-ity to use the Magnifier (Keyboard shortcut “M”) to look at your photo at 100 percent magnification to check sharpness and detail. What’s more, you can add a second image to the Light table to compare sharpness and detail to find the best image in a series.

Tip: If you use the Light Table view on a regular basis you can customize Expression Media to jump into Light Table view by double-clicking on an image. Open Expression Media’s Preferences (Edit>Preferences: Windows, Expression Media>Preferences, Mac) and open the General sub-heading. From the pull-down menu next to Double-Click, select View In Light Table.

Like many other workflow programs, Expression Media uses both star ratings and labels that can be selected with a single keystroke (e.g. “1” for the red label). I find the labels invaluable for culling the best photos from the shoot during the editing process.

My favorite method for editing is to run through the photos quickly in the media view marking obvious errors (lens cap on, out of focus) with the Gray label “#9” for reject and Red number “#1” for above average. I then target these images by clicking on the white circle next to the Red label in the Organize Panel. This hides all the images except for the photos with a Red label. I perform the second round of editing in the Light Table view using the Magnifier to check sharpness and add multiple windows as needed to perform comparisons between similar photos in a shoot. I apply a Green label (#2) to the very best images in the shoot that will receive further correction in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. 

Image Correction W/ Adobe Photoshop
No matter how proficient you are with selecting the right exposure in the camera, you’ll still want to perform some image correction to your photos, even if this means nothing more than cropping, sharpening or resizing. While Expression Media can perform basic image corrections, the tools can be clumsy compared to Lightroom, Aperture or Photo-shop. I perform all of my image corrections in a program like Photoshop. Once again, Expression Media moulds easily to my workflow, offering me several ways to open pho-tos into Photoshop for image correction and continue to manage my edited files in Ex-pression Media.

The simplest method of opening files in Photoshop is to select an image and click on the Open With icon in the toolbar. This allows you to select the default, or secondary application to open and edit the photo. If I save the image in the same file format as the original, the thumbnail preview will automatically update to reflect the changes. If you save the photo in a new format, you’ll need to manually add the new photo to the cata-log unless the Auto-Update feature is enabled. We’ll cover the use of Auto-Update in the next section.

This system works very well unless you are working primarily with Camera Raw files and Adobe Camera Raw. Adobe Camera Raw never adjusts any of the original informa-tion in the file. Instead, it saves your corrections in an XMP sidecar file. This XMP file can be read by Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw, but not by Expression Media, so your camera raw files will not preview correctly in your Expression Media catalogs. One solu-tion to this problem is to save your Camera Raw files in the .DNG format, which saves a full-resolution JPEG preview with the raw file. This JPEG preview can be read by Ex-pression Media giving you an accurate display of your RAW files.

Archiving and Backup
Almost any workflow system works well when you have only a few hundred images. For a workflow to be truly successful, it needs to stand up to the pressures of managing several thousand photos. This too is one area where Expression Media separates itself from other programs. While one can write an entire book on the ways Expression Media can be used to manage your image library, you need to know about three features that help make a photographer’s life easier: Keywords, Auto-Update and the Backup-To command.

One key to managing your image library effectively is to begin using keywords to de-scribe your photos. Keywords are short, descriptive “tags” you apply to images that dramatically expedite the searching, and finding, process. You can create and apply keywords within Expression Media and the program automatically reads any keywords you’ve already applied in another application and displays your existing keywords within the keyword palette.

Clicking in the white circle to the right of any keyword will perform an instantaneous search for all the images with that keyword. This is one function that is dramatically faster in an asset management program like Expression Media because all the keyword data is found within the catalog, not just in the original files. This allows Expression Me-dia to perform searches at lightening speed and makes finding photos with keywords a breeze.

Of course, Expression Media can only find photos that are referenced from an Expres-sion Media Catalog and it can become difficult to stay organized when manually adding photos to your image library catalog. This is where the Auto-Update feature becomes a lifesaver for photographers.

When Auto-Update is enabled, Expression Media automatically searches the contents of designated folders and imports any images that aren’t already in the catalog. This is most useful when you have a dedicated hard drive or set of folders to store your image library. Enabling Auto-Update will import photos from your shoots and corrected ver-sions of photos edited in Photoshop. This means your image library catalog is always up-to-date and complete.

However, having a current catalog doesn’t mean much if your hard drive goes down and takes your photos with it. Every photographer must have multiple backup copies of their photos. The number of backups and the sophistication in the backup routine will vary depending on the photographer’s needs, but one helpful rule of thumb is to have all your photos in at least two locations, preferably on two separate types of media.

One scenario I often recommend to clients is to burn a DVD of the entire shoot immedi-ately after importing the photos to your hard drive. Once you’ve completed that task, you should back up your image library to a second hard drive on a regular basis. Both of these tasks are facilitated by the Backup To command in Expression Media which al-lows you to backup files to a DVD or separate hard drive. Expression Media would benefit from making these two processes simpler and allow for incremental backups to a second hard drive. However, most users will not find the current system to be much of an inconvenience.

Conclusion
All told, Expression Media is an outstanding workflow tool for digital photographers who want asset management to be easy, intuitive and powerful. Existing iView MediaPro us-ers will find the new version to be only cosmetically different from MediaPro 3. The most notable external difference is the missing manual in Expression Media that was freely available with MediaPro. At the time of writing, there is no PDF manual, nor is there a help menu with online resources.

This shouldn’t deter new users from diving into Expression Media or existing users from upgrading. The new look of Expression Media compliments an already time-tested and solid asset management program and the intuitive interface makes the program easy to learn. To help you get up to speed quickly with Expression Media, we’ve created a se-ries of video tutorials aimed at helping new users, and existing MediaPro users, harness the powerful features in Expression Media to address all aspects of your digital photog-raphy workflow.

You can find the tutorials by clicking here

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