Software

There are a lot of options for software. I edit on a Mac, but some of the same software packages are available for the PC (excepting of course iPhoto and Aperture) I break the software available down into 2 main categories: Image Editors and Image Organizers. Some software has a little bit of both categories, some are simply focused on doing one. Here are some of the ones I’ve tried:

iPhoto – This is a good entry level Image Organizer with some rudimentary photo editing capabilities. It is passable at organizing photos, but I feel it lacks some things that are necessary for processing large amounts of images. Many of its photo editing capabilities are dumbed down in a way that makes them hard to use to fix the sort of color problems you are going to have with music photos. It is also not particularly good at white balancing RAW imagery. You probably want to avoid iPhoto unless you are a really casual shooter.

Aperture - This is iPhotos big brother, primarily an Image Organizer. It has better organizational skills and far better integrated editing capabilities, including non-destructive layered editing of RAW files. It supports categorization and metadata in a sensible way, and its handling of RAW files is pretty good. My biggest issue with aperture is that it stores your entire library in one huge file/folder combo called an aplibrary file. This makes it hard to manipulate images in other programs, and backing up your library requires you use Aperture to do so. It maintains the hierarchy and the metadata for all images and edits inside that file, so if anything happens to it, you are in a lot of trouble. I like aperture, and I used it for a while, but once i got over 10-20,000 images, I needed something that scales a bit better, and allows me to have multiple libraries that I can merge, export, and re-import.

Google Picasa – Primarily an Image Organizer, but provides some very rudimentary editing capabilities. The best thing about it is it is free. The second best thing about it is it directly integrates with Google’s Picasa, blogspot, etc. for sharing and publishing. If all you want to do is crop, white balance, and color correct your images and pop them up on the web, this tool may be all you ever need. I found it’s editing abilities to be lacking, but the organizational stuff is totally adequate as it doesn’t store files in a single library. This allows you to use something like Photoshop with it for your heavy duty editing and still maintain a disk full of folder and files. Overall a nice tool, especially if you already have a solid Image Editor.

Gimp (GNU Image Processor) – Image Editor. On a mac this runs under X11 so it is painfully slow to launch. It is an open-source alternative to Photoshop and gets the job done. It is hard to argue with free, especially when it comes to image editing software. I don’t particularly like it but thats mostly because I have photoshop and have used it for a long time. It may work perfectly for you, and if you combine it with Picasa you get a free solution with most of the features of the closed source stuff.

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Flying Lotus @ Terminal 5

Adobe Photoshop (with Bridge) – Image Editor. This is the standard by which all other editing software is measured. Its been around since computers have had mice, and it has steadily evolved into a bloated, feature-rich juggernaut of Microsoft Excel proportions. Personally I use about $15 worth of Photoshop’s features, but when you need the Clone Stamp tool, you need the Clone Stamp tool. It also facilitates the use of layers which are extremely useful for adjusting certain things in images. And, of course, there are the bevy of plugins that are available, some of which are near requirements for low light photography (things like sharpeners and noise reduction) Get your hands on a copy if you can (its actually affordable if you get the student discount) The biggest problem with Photoshop is that its ability to organize images is terrible. They tried to fix this by basically replacing the “Open…” dialog box with something called Bridge, which doesn’t even rise to the level of iPhoto in my opinion. Additionally, importing raw imagery into Photoshop requires the use of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) which allows you to do preliminary white balancing and adjustments before editing, but I prefer to do that while simultaneously processing the rest of the image. In my workflow, I only use Photoshop as an editor.

Adobe Lightroom – Image Organizer and Editor. I find Lightroom to be the perfect balance of editor and organizer for the kind of shooting and workflow I need. I do 95% of my post work in LR. It organizes without getting in the way, It has some really smart things for keyword and metadata manipulation (see keyword painting) and its tab approach: library, develop, web makes a lot of sense to me. It supports all manner of external editors, including photoshop. It has a plugin architecture for exporting, which allows me to publish in a wide variety of ways, including setting up presets for various clients who have specific output requirements. It does image watermarking, which I like for publishing to public places like flickr. Raw handling is flawless (it is ACR under the hood). The editing side is amazing. There are adjustments for almost everything you would want for a photograph, it’s all non-destructive, and you get to see a list of your edits so you can easily roll back to previous states. Best of all you can copy and paste adjustments from one image to another, so if you have a series of photos where they are all underexposed blueberries, you can fix one and apply it to the rest. Bottom line: if you are serious, get yourself a copy. Its not that expensive (at least not if you are used to spending hundreds on camera gear) and the time it will save you will pay for itself in extra sleep in about a month.

Photoshop / Lightroom Plugins

• Nik dfine – Noise Reduction plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. A tad on the pricey side, but I find it worth it. It is one of the rare cases where the default automatic setting works well much of the time. Which is nice, because the nitty gritty internals of noise reduction is pretty arcane, and it’s something I still have a lot to learn about.

• Nik sharpener – Sharpening plugin for Photoshop and Lightroom. When I need to sharpen beyond what the built in

• Noise Ninja – Noise Reduction plugin for Photoshop, also has a standalone app. I’ve only used this a few times, but it works quite well. I have already invested in Nik’s dfine so I didn’t see a need to spend more time / money on this one, but it does offer extremely granular control over the noise reduction. Several of my friends swear by it.

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Moby @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

Next Up: Editing and Post Processing (using your software)