From Film to Digital

It has been 10 years since the last UPDIG Guidelines were released. A group of professional photographers from all over the world representing a host of professional photographic associations to encompassed the Universal Photography Digital Imaging Guidelines, or UPDIG. I’m very proud and honored to have been the UPDIG representative for the Professional Photographers of America.

UPDIG started in the mid 2000’s when digital was suffering from new technology meets inconsistent methods of control. The successful attempt was to bridge the gap between the new technology, what constitutes consistency, and work with manufactures to start implementing standards for color management and digital workflow as a whole. Headed up by Richard Anderson, Michael Stewart, David Riecks, Peter Krogh and Greg Smith, other content contributors can be seen here http://www.updig.org/about.html with the likes of Judy Herrmann, Bob Merchant, Sam Merrell, Mike Upstone and the list goes on. There is also a list of international photographic associations that were involved.

Even though the group is no longer active, the website is, and the resource page has active links that are indispensable to understanding the science of digital imaging along with equipment supporters and much more.

One of the greatest successes was the intervention with manufactures to mandate color space and metadata standards, and in one case instrumental in having DNG (raw digital negative format) available outside of the proprietary format, along with concurring workflow standards among professionals across the globe. An exciting time to be in the transition from film to digital including hybrid.

Today, the use of workflow standards and color management has become almost seamless to some degree yet is paramount to any successful photographer’s workflow.