I admit a personal need to get some feedback on this one.
A recent photo essay on The Bitter Southerner got me thinking that I really need to up my photo editing and organization game. I know there are some quality photographers out there. You send me great photos frequently! What all works for you?
Also perhaps we should separate this out between casual user and photo enthusiast?
For those firmly ensconced in the Apple environment, as I am, it should be noted the forthcoming iOS 8 and OSX Yosemite will eschew iPhoto and Aperture (the latter is what I use to manage both my DSLR shots and iPhone pics) for the simply named Photos app, and introduce overdue cloud storage and management of photos (and hopefully videos, but not sure about that). I don’t know about others, but even with a 64GB iPhone, space management is a full-time concern and most of that for me is photos and videos (I blame two mercilessly photogenic toddlers). Yes, those photos and videos can be offloaded onto my Mac, but if I don’t have access to them on my phone, which is how most people end up seeing them and I myself consume them, then it’s almost like they don’t exist. So very excited for true cloud handling (similar to how Apple already allows you to access your other media — music, podcasts, purchased movies and eBooks — from any Internet connected device without actually having to store it on said device).
http://www.macworld.com/article/2375212/apple-retires-aperture-and-iphoto-to-be-replaced-with-photos-for-os-x.html#tk.nl_mwbest
I’m sure that’s an improvement long term, but my first second and third thoughts are that there is no way the transition will go smoothly.
I really need to spend a weekend organizing photos, but that sounds like a deadly dull weekend. They just keep piling up!
Point 1 is a safe bet, as those kinds of rollouts are always fraught with hiccups. That said, thinking back to the introduction of iTunes Match, it actually wasn’t that bad. Fingers crossed, and just be sure to make plenty of backups.
Adobe Lightroom –
+1 — Learning Lightroom has really upped the quality of my finished photographs.
Adobe Lightroom. I wouldn’t even think about any other. And you need to be shooting and processing in RAW, not jpeg. And of course the original photo has to be amazing. So yeah, nothing to it!
Apple is no longer developing Aperture. No question, Lightroom.
Are you Lightroom guys ‘mere photo mortals’ or ‘enthusiasts’?
I just want to be able to store, search and find pics from my phone or DSLR — I don’t do any real editing per se.
Before I made the switch to Lightroom, I always found Google’s Picasa the best tool for organizing and finding photos. There are versions for both OSX and Windows.
Google offers 15 GB of free photo storage. I can access my photos anywhere I can access the web.
Yeah for those uses, Lightroom could be overkill. Picasa actually is quite good.
Lightroom. Photoshop (Elements is fine) for the occasional need to remove telephone lines and the like.
As for organizing, no one can really “organize” for you, that has to be a methodology that you create for yourself. Easier said than done, I know..
I still happily use Picasa (http://picasa.google.com/intl/en-GB/)
Free, works will all image types and video, syncs with google+ if you use that, decent editing capabilities although not as good as lightroom.
Gratuitous plug here, and slightly off topic, but my biggest issue with my DLSR is just the space and dealing with cables for transferring photos.
I ended up using an eye.fi SD flash card which has a “virtually” infinite amount of space by uploading it to your PC/Mac when within range of your wifi, and has a relay service that uploads to your PC/Mac when you are on a guest network, and will delete the photos from flash once guaranteed transfer has been done. It also uses skyhook for embedding GIS into the EXIF meta data based on the signal strength of APs around it when taking photos.
By far the slickest accessory I’ve gotten for my DLSR.
+1
Just started using an EyeFi card myself and quite impressed with it so far. Now my 6 y.o. MacBook Pro has become the weakest link in my photo processing chain… 😉
No love for GIMP? It’s free, it does all I want it to do (and more), and it’s easy to find all the tutorials and hints/tips you need online. I used Photoshop Elements happily for a long while, but became frustrated with Adobe’s pressure to buy a new version every year.
For organizing and storage, I use iPhoto for what’s on my hard drive (“drives” is more accurate because we all back up, right?) and Picasa when I want to share with friends & family. Picasa became VERY awkward and inconsistent across platforms when Google+ kicked in the other year, but I have yet to get motivated to shop around for its successor.
As a photographer I am a true amateur (I do it for love) who also takes pictures for work (social media-type stuff as well as DIY woodworking).
+1 for Gimp…dumped photoshop for gimp and never looked back
If you want to know what software professionals use to edit and add metadata, it is Photo Mechanic (www.camerabits.com). It has faster imaging loading than Lightroom and is very easy to move your images into specific folders for easy retrieval. It also has an excellent FTP uploader, which I use all the time. It does not have a RAW file processor, so if you want to convert RAW to JPEG, you will need Photoshop.
My 2 cents…
Also, if you’re just looking to up your game a bit, I recommend classes at Showcase.