Digital Photography Software

I recently converted from Film and "wet darkroom" photography to digital. Serious digital photography involves use of some kind of image processing software. I do know something about software. I have been working with computers for a very long time. I started in the late 1960's, working on computers that filled a room. I have worked with many different computer systems, operating systems, software systems, and written a lot of programs, even operating systems, so I have formed some definite opinions.

Currently, I use Apple's Aperture program to organize, edit, and print my photographs. I like the program a lot, even though it still has a few small bits of anomalous behavior. I use Photoshop very infrequently, and the vast majority of my images have never been modified in any way by Photoshop. I especially avoid changing the content of an image. I will edit images for exposure, or contrast, or maybe sometimes to adjust perspective, but I will not remove people, or move buildings or make other gross changes to what was in the viewfinder.

I started out a few years ago using a program called GIMP. I was running the linux operating system, and so Photoshop was not available to me. (I'll write my diatribe on operating systems some day, and put a link here.) GIMP is not only available on a wide variety of operating systems and machines, it's free. I found GIMP to be pretty powerful, and still use it for some things today. I only switched to using Photoshop after I switched to digital photography, got a Mac Pro, and found there were some things that Photoshop could do for me that GIMP couldn't, but it's not a huge difference. I recommend that people take a look at GIMP if you don't want to spend a lot of money on Photoshop. Try looking here.

My main gripe with Photoshop is its complexity. I understand that it tries to be all things to all people, but in my view that's a mistake. The designers of Photoshop should either have made several programs, one for digital photographers, one for web designers, one for graphic arts designers, etc., or they should have had different modes in photoshop, so that I could set it to photography mode, for example, and all of the graphic arts specific buttons and menus and stuff would be hidden. As it is, it's hard to navigate through all the possibilities. There are menus upon menus, button, little icons, pop-out thingies, many of which do different things if you right click, or left click, or shift click, or some other combination. It's impossible to remember them all. There are hundreds of books, tutorials, and even multi-day classes to help try to make sense of it all. Yes, it makes a huge amount of money for Adobe, but think of all the time spent by all the users trying to get something done.

On the other hand, Aperture, which is designed purely for digital photography, I find to be much more usable and has a very intuitive feel to its user interface. Yes, it has lots of menus and buttons etc., but I find that they seem to be easy to figure out and use. I also find that the basic philosophy of Aperture fits in very well with the way I work. That philosophy is non-destructive editing. Basically, this means that any changes you make to an image don't actually change any pixels inside the image file itself. Instead, a file called a Version is automatically created, and this version, instead of being a bit-for-bit copy of the original with the changes added, is actually just a short list of instructions to Aperture describing the changes you made. When you click on the version to view it, Aperture grabs the original images, applies the changes in the version file, and then shows you the result, all almost instantly. The thing I like about this is you can experiment with changes as much as you want without worrying about accidentally overwriting your original and losing it forever, and without using much disk space. You can achieve something similar in Photoshop, but its complex, not automatic, and, I think, prone to error.

The other really amazing thing about Aperture is its organizational capabilities. One of the blessings/problems associated with digital photography is that you can take a picture for free. What I mean by that is you can take lots more pictures than you could with film. With film, the more pictures you took, the more it cost you, and unless you were in a big city, near a source of film, there was always the concern that you could run out of film. With digital, this is almost not true anymore. There is no cost in taking a picture (well, to be honest, there's a very, very tiny cost for the electricity to charge the camera batteries). If, like many digital photographers, you carry around a sufficient number of storage cards, and/or external storage devices, there isn't a significant limit to the number of pictures you can take in a session. This is the blessing. It's also the problem. When you get back from a shoot, you can have thousands of images to deal with. Very few photographers had this problem when shooting film. Aperture makes organizing, rating, categorizing, and dealing with this number of images very easy, and it has quite a few powerful functions and tools for this purpose. I have tried to use Adobe Bridge for this, and I think Aperture is many times more powerful and more useful for organizing images than Bridge. Aperture has things called Stacks, Smart Albums, Albums, Project, Folders, Keywords, Ratings, and some very advanced search capabilities. If you are interested in learning more about Aperture, Apple has some very good on-line video introductions.