Workflow

Here we’re going to dis­cuss the work­flow to make using your den­tal pho­tographs prac­ti­cal, as they’re kind of use­less unless you actu­ally DO some­thing with them, right?  And this is IMO THE sin­gle biggest chal­lenge in den­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, because this is where choos­ing the right soft­ware to accom­plish the tasks you want is most crit­i­cal.  This page will be a work in progress, as I want to go ahead and start get­ting the con­cepts out there, but will be adding mate­r­ial for quite a while.

After You Take the Pic­tures, Then What?

I’ve recently described the 8 most com­mon uses for den­tal pho­tog­ra­phy, so now I will describe the order in which I do things that allow me to accom­plish them all.  Obvi­ously, there are a tremen­dous num­ber of vari­a­tions pos­si­ble, and if you don’t use the same soft­ware, you will have to choose either (1) to get this soft­ware, or (2) find a sim­i­lar route with your soft­ware.  Please bear in mind, how­ever, that this process is evolv­ing on a reg­u­lar basis as soft­ware changes, so as some­one once said, “If you quote me, you must date me.”

BTW — I will be adding video tuto­ri­als for many of these steps within the next 1–2 months.  If you don’t want to wait that long, you can sign up for Lynda.com, Adobe.com, or KelbyTraining.com (among oth­ers) for truly pro­fes­sional video tuto­ri­als, although you will have to pay for them on a monthly or yearly basis, and they are not specif­i­cally geared towards dentists.

BTW #2: I know this will seem like a lot of steps at first, but after you’ve done it a few times, you can whip through it in less than 1 minute per group of photos.

Step 1: Get The Pic­tures of the Teeth into Pho­to­shop Light­room

1. Open Adobe Pho­to­shop Lightroom
2. Remove mem­ory card from the cam­era and plug it into a card reader.
3. Choose “Import”, and when the Import screen opens, make sure the source selected is the mem­ory card.
4. Using the “CTRL-right click” or “Shift-right click” steps to select the pho­tos you want to import
5. Uncheck all pho­tos you don’t want imported in this batch (this is really impor­tant, if you don’t want to import all pho­tos into the same folder!!!!)
6. In the “Apply dur­ing Import” sec­tion on the right, in the “Key­words” box, type in the appro­pri­ate keywords
7. Click “Import” to bring the pho­tos into the appro­pri­ate folder

Step 2: Import into your Prac­tice Man­age­ment Soft­ware if Needed

Hon­estly, I do not do this step EXCEPT for pic­tures that my staff may need for insur­ance pur­poses.  It is not actu­ally nec­es­sary, though, as you can sim­ply Share the folder across the net­work, and they can go to the pic­tures through Win­dows Explorer to grab screen­shots, etc. for NEA attach­ments or to print.  We use Apteryx for our dig­i­tal x-rays, and there is for­tu­nately an easy short­cut to drag/drop them from Win­dows Explorer directly into Apteryx.

Step 3: Select the Ones You Think You’ll Want to Use

My expe­ri­ence has been this: if I don’t select the images to be used for later mar­ket­ing (espe­cially for ortho, when the After Pic­tures won’t be avail­able for many months, even years) right away, I am far less likely to go back later and find them, even with the great search capa­bil­i­ties in Light­room.  So my 3 suggestions:

• Use a 1-Star rating
• Use a Color selection
• Use a spe­cific key­word, i.e. “Marketing”
• Imme­di­ately add the pho­tos to a “Col­lec­tion”, i.e. Veneers, Whiten­ing, Fill­ings, Bridges, etc.  These are very help­ful when you want to batch-process photos.

If you use 1 or more of these tech­niques to “mark” the images you really like, it will be FAR eas­ier to find them in the future, and the whole point of this work­flow is to make it easy!

Step 4: Edit­ing Your Pic­tures if Needed

Most of the time, I don’t do any edit­ing, and this is a whole topic unto itself.  How­ever, if nec­es­sary, this is when I will use the edit­ing tools in Light­room or in Pho­to­shop to crop, brighten/darken, etc.

Step 5: Out­putting the Pho­tos in a Usable Format

Here’s where the fun starts and the power of Light­room or a com­pa­ra­ble pro­gram comes into play vs. a den­tal pro­gram.  With Light­room, you can cre­ate ALL of the fol­low­ing media:

1. MPEG4 videos of a series of pictures.
2. Cre­ate & print cus­tomized tem­plates for col­lages, posters, etc.
3. Pub­lish to online photo ser­vices such as Picasa, Flickr, Smug­Mug, Kodak, Face­book, Word­Press, and more.
4. Cre­ate either Flash or HTML web gal­leries with a few sim­ple cus­tomiza­tions, then send the whole gallery to your web­mas­ter to be included in your website.
5. Export to a Win­dows 7 photo gallery that can be used as Wall­pa­per or Screen­savers in your operatories.
6. Batch pho­tos to a folder to be synced to your iPad and then included in the DDS GP or DDS GP YES! apps for pre­sent­ing to patients.
7. Batch pho­tos to a folder to be included in a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion that are already sized for easy import with­out bog­ging down your computer.
8. Send a bunch of pic­tures directly to Gmail to send to your lab for shade matching