Mac photo software

[Gad-Westy]

Quite likely to buy an imac today and I'd like some advice on photo editing software for it. I currently use a mixture depending on what I want to do but it's normally something along the lines of:

Tweak white balance, picture control, contrast, brightness, sharpness etc on Nikon NX viewer (probably the slowest, most unstable software I've ever used but I have no choice for raw), I then do any cropping or straightening on Seashore. Any thing more advances, like panoramas or HDR, I'd do on some sort of free stand alone software or maybe Gimp. I shoot in raw + jpeg but I don't edit every photo I take, just the arty ones. However I would like a slicker solution!

Things it needs to do:

Handle Nikon Raw files
Be able to do basic editing, rotation, colours, cropping etc...

Thing that would be nice:

Ability to stich panoramas
Ability to do basic HDR
+ other nice things that I can't think of at this ungodly hour

I don't want to spend a lot of cash, £100 tops right now, which I think rules out Photoshop and Lightroom (does this do the same sort of stuff as PS?) unless I buy a used earlier release but I'm a little wary about doing that.

Top of my list is photoshop elements for about £80 but I can't seem to find out if it does all of the above.

I also keep hearing about Apperture, which is only £45 right now but again I'm not sure if this a PS alternative or something in addition. Help much appreciated!

[Ammo 7]

iPhoto that comes with the Mac will do basic stuff pretty well and cope with RAW files. I survived with this for around 8 months before I felt I needed something extra. I upgraded to Aperture recently. It does everything iPhoto does and more. At £45.00 I would get this as a matter of course.

I also use Photoshop but only for re-sizing ready for printing.

I don't do stitching or HDR so cannot comment, although I think Photoshop can do this.

[GeraldSmith]

Where is Aperture for £45? It's £173 in the Apple store, even the upgrade is over £80...

[andy-xr]

Elements will do all that

[PlaneFan]

GeraldSmith said:

Where is Aperture for £45? It's £173 in the Apple store, even the upgrade is over £80...

Mac App Store - £44.99

[AndWhyNot]

Elements will handle your list and more, with the exception (i think) that any HDR will come from manual exposure blending. Didn't find it intuitive to pick up but been working in Elements for 8 weeks and can now handle several of its basic functions well enough to produce the results I'm after, including composited files of several layers. Go for v9 if you can as v8 doesn't have the Layer Mask tool. At this stage that might mean nothing to you but once you're up and running you'll be thankful for the ability to hide things from view rather than delete them when you're working on individual layers.

Aperture is more akin to Lightroom. Won't work with multiple files (so no layers and no HDR) and much more of a processing engine than manipulation tool. IME not great at noise handling, and most adjustments you make (exposure/ contrast/ saturation etc) will affect the whole image- the selective-processing plug in is pretty primitive.

[Stu R]

For 45 quid in the Mac App store, Aperture is very hard to beat.

Photoshop Elements is what beats it though. It's that bit better and more feature packed. It depends what editing you plan on doing though, for me, Aperture is more than enough, simply because I don't do a great deal of super in-depth photo editing. I imagine for most people it'd be fine.

[Gad-Westy]

Cheers all. Apologies for not getting back to this earlier. I think I was overcome with iMac excitement! That soon wore off as I began the tedious process of transferring all our old files from the macbook and various hard disks and usb sticks.

I decided to go for Aperture in the end. Partly this is because John Lewis didn't have PS Elements in stock and partly as it seemed like I'd be maybe mad not to buy aperture at it's current price.

I'm pretty confident that it will do everything I want it to do 99% of the time. On the odd occasion I want to do anything more advanced, I'll just use some freebie software for now.

I do have a few questions about it but I'll put them in another thread. Many thanks again.

[PlaneFan]

Excellent. Ask away. :-)

[lasagne]

Hi

Long time lurker and thought this would be a good time to join in on Pistonheads!


For panorama stitching of photos I fully recommend a program called hugin - looks daunting at first but extremely straightforward to use and produces fantastic results with lots of output options, eg rather than your bog standard panorama you can output fish eye looking photos and also copes very well with short range panoramas, eg car or room interiors. I definitely recommend this and I am still learning after 6 months.

Hugin does also process HDR photos but I have found them to lack the grandeur of those from Photomatix. I had the trial on windows (watermarks pictures) but didn't see it viable to get the full version. I stuumbled across HDRtist the other day and the ease of use was very impressive (drag and drop from iPhoto, click align and then adjust "intensity"

Hugin and HDRtist are free and Photomatix has a free trial.

I use all of these on my mac, not sure about windows versions for others reading this.

[BlueMR2]

I have a sealed unused copy of Elements 9 you could have for £50 if your ever over in Leeds.

[Original Poster]

I use Aperture 3 on my iMac, it is brilliant, even more so at under £50!

[Gad-Westy]

lasagne said:

Hi

Long time lurker and thought this would be a good time to join in on Pistonheads!


For panorama stitching of photos I fully recommend a program called hugin - looks daunting at first but extremely straightforward to use and produces fantastic results with lots of output options, eg rather than your bog standard panorama you can output fish eye looking photos and also copes very well with short range panoramas, eg car or room interiors. I definitely recommend this and I am still learning after 6 months.

Hugin does also process HDR photos but I have found them to lack the grandeur of those from Photomatix. I had the trial on windows (watermarks pictures) but didn't see it viable to get the full version. I stuumbled across HDRtist the other day and the ease of use was very impressive (drag and drop from iPhoto, click align and then adjust "intensity"

Hugin and HDRtist are free and Photomatix has a free trial.

I use all of these on my mac, not sure about windows versions for others reading this.

Cheers. Great minds. These are the exact two programs I have used up to this point. Quite happy with both of them at this stage. With aperture, HDRtist, Hugin and Gimp I think I've got the bases covered.

[Gad-Westy]

BlueMR2 said:

I have a sealed unused copy of Elements 9 you could have for £50 if your ever over in Leeds.

Cheers, I would have gone for this a couple of days ago but think I'm going to stick with just aperture for now.

[Gad-Westy]

PlaneFan said:

Excellent. Ask away. :-)

Ok, well I've always managed files manually (previously windows explorer) and more lately just using finder on the Macbook. I never got into iPhoto on the macbook for some reason.

As I understand it aperture does not use a file system as such but rather merely reference files and stores it's own information about those files internally. I think I can get my head around that bit just about.

But here's an example of something I'm struggling with at the moment and I haven't developed a tidy 'work flow' for.

I'm doing a photo 365 this year. Before I had aperture, typically I would do the following:

Shoot Raw image on camera
Upload camera image to Nikon RAW software
Tweak levels etc and create a jpeg in my 365 folder and sometimes create a copy elsewhere if it's a keeper.
Upload Jpeg to Blipfoto.
Done

On aperture though, things don't seem so simple, or I haven't got my head around it yet. What I've done so far is to import the RAW file into an aperture 365 project and then export a JPEG from there to a 365 folder on my hard disk. I can then upload that jpeg to Blip. All that is fine but it means that the 365 folder and 365 project aren't necessarily in sync. As I could change either without affecting the other. I could import the JPEG into the aperture project as well but that seems like an unnecessary extra step. Am I missing something?

One other query to those that shoot RAW. Do you just leave the files as RAW only and only convert if you need a JPEG for some reason?

[andy-xr]

Gad-Westy said:

One other query to those that shoot RAW. Do you just leave the files as RAW only and only convert if you need a JPEG for some reason?

My workflow is to catalogue through Lightroom, export to Photoshop as psd, work on it, work on it some more, then save as jpg in a seperate folder. I still keep all RAW though

[tog]

Gad-Westy said:

One other query to those that shoot RAW. Do you just leave the files as RAW only and only convert if you need a JPEG for some reason?

Basically, yes. I use Lightroom not Aperture, but it keeps all the RAW files, with settings applied, and I can simply export a jpeg as I need it, then usually bin it once sent. There are lots of plug-ins available too, so it will generate the jpeg as it uploads it for some services. I can save presets of settings for the various jpeg sizesI need for different uses and clients.

[Gad-Westy]

Cheers chaps. That's how I'd prefer to do things. I think I may be over complicating this in my mind a little.

Couple of other questions:

If all of your adjustments are stored in aperture's own knowledge file rather than in the RAW/JPEG file itself. If I ever ditched aperture for another piece of software, would all my changes be lost?

One other question, is there a setting that will delete pictures from the camera as Aperture imports them? I couldn't find one.

[andy-xr]

Gad-Westy said:

One other question, is there a setting that will delete pictures from the camera as Aperture imports them? I couldn't find one.

Might I advise that you use a card reader, copy/paste and then when you know you've got them safely stored you can format the card in camera? It's *allegedly* better for the card that the thing that writes to it also does the deleting/formatting. I've never really tried it any other way but heard stories about write errors from those who arent formatting after copying

[BlueMR2]

Gad-Westy said:

BlueMR2 said:

I have a sealed unused copy of Elements 9 you could have for £50 if your ever over in Leeds.

Cheers, I would have gone for this a couple of days ago but think I'm going to stick with just aperture for now.

I use Aperture to catalogue photos and make simple adjustment's then have PSE9 as an external editor if layers etc are needed.

You can do alot automatically with Automator.

If you have a program like Transmit 4 that can be used to upload photos. There was a synchronise option, so you should be able to make a folder action or similar and put a copy of the photos you want to upload into the folder and it will upload on its own.

If you are lucky you can do pretty much everything automatically.

You can get automator to export files picked in aperture (the ones you have edited) to a folder in a specified file format, size etc(look in aperture output settings to find the huge choice or make your own) then allow transmit to upload/sync/mirror the local folder for you, you can even make another automator action to download files from your camera / memory card then import them into aperture. Change/mark the ones you want, then let automator save them, size them and let transmit upload them. you can browse the web or just go and spend time with the kids, wife , ps3 etc.

If you do use automator please always check it works as planned with copys of photos etc not your only ones which you accidentally delete.

Edited by BlueMR2 on Tuesday 15th February 18:54