Philoking.com

I have been into digital photography since 2003. I first started messing with RAW then using Phase One’s Capture One software. At the time I was shooting with one of the original Canon Digital Rebels and printing large prints. The ability to tweak the RAW photos in Capture One was an obvious advantage, but the need to still use Photoshop to remove dust spots, fix blemishes and the like meant that my workflow was take photos, download card, open photos in Capture One, edit white balance, contrast, exposure, export all photos, open up photos in Photoshop, correct issues with photo, save, select photos for prints, reopen, resize to output, save.

I had been teetering between Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture for awhile and a friend offering to sell me Aperture 2 for $100 tipped the scales of economics towards that direction and I picked it up.

Now I can point you to plenty of articles about all of the features, and I will at the end of this post, but the real value here is not the editing tools themselves, but the way they change your workflow. This Sunday, I shoot 186 photos, all in RAW. Here is a little peek into the process of how I managed them.

When I got home, I plugged my CF card into the card reader and it began to download photos. Even as it is downloading photos, ones that have already imported are available. I started rating photos right away. The view that shows a large photo and thumbnails at the bottom is fantastic for this.

By rating photos there were usable 2-3, and photos that were fantastic a 4 (I don’t rate anything 5, I am pretty critical of my work), and skipping over 1 in the favor of 9 (discard), I had whittled the 186 photos down to 54, 9 of which were 4s, the rest twos and threes. I then re-sorted my photos in reverse order, highest ranking first, and looked through the twos and threes for a photo I remembered wanting to place on Flickr.

At this point, I went through the photos one by one, adding cropping when needed, adjusting the exposure on most of them to punch it up a bit, then finally a sharpening to make things look just so.

Then I selected my 10 photos, exported the "Versions," which are Aperture’s edits, to jpg and gave it a resize to have no edge longer than 1,024 pixels wide.

I uploaded my photos to Flickr and I was done. 10-15 minutes, 20 tops.That’s some serious time saving for going through nearly 200 photos.

Today I learned that there is even a plugin to export your photos directly to Flickr!

If you shoot raw, or think you want to, this software is a serious time saver.