Photo Software For MacBook

[Keith1010]

For those of you with one of the MacBook Pro computers which photo software do you use in addition to iPhoto. I ask this because I believe some photo software does not work so well with Mac products so I welcome your thoughts and input.

 

Thanks,

 

Keith

[TLCOhio]

For those of you with one of the MacBook Pro computers which photo software do you use in addition to iPhoto. I ask this because I believe some photo software does not work so well with Mac products so I welcome your thoughts and input. Thanks, Keith

 

Good question, Keith! As you and I have communicated in the past, I also have a MacBook Pro computer and have been using iPhoto. I have tried out and played some a couple years back with Aperture, the more advanced and sophisticated program that Apple offers for doing more with photos. You can achieve and perform some very dramatic and smart things with Aperture. But, however, I have been so happy with iPhoto that I have not felt the need to move "UP" to this program and/or another option. You can see more on this program at:

http://www.apple.com/aperture/

 

Time/Cost Factors?: Aperture costs $80 as an upgrade. As I re-call other programs can cost lots more. Not too much in cost for me to do the Aperture upgrade. Fortunately in Columbus, Ohio, we are near two different Apple stores with the very good training and help staff through their One-to-One program. For me the challenge has been whether it is worth the added time and effort to use this more sophisticated tool. Learning these new "tricks" is possible, but if you are not going to use these technique that much, is it worth it? I do lots of pictures of our young grandsons and travel pictures. So, given my needs, how "high-powered" do I want and need to go for photo editing? Have you spent time with the Apple staff to learn the best "tricks" and techniques with iPhoto?

 

Look forward to hearing what others have to share.

 

THANKS! Enjoy! Terry in Ohio

 

Did a June 7-19, 2011, Celebrity Solstice cruise from Barcelona that had stops in Villefranche, ports near Pisa and Rome, Naples, Kotor, Venice and Dubrovnik. Enjoyed great weather and a wonderful trip. Dozens of wonderful visuals with key highlights, tips, comments, etc., on these postings. We are now at 127,508 views for this live/blog re-cap on our first sailing with Celebrity and much on wonderful Barcelona. Check these postings and added info at:

http://www.boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1426474

[TheOldBear]

You may want/need a pixel level editor that can be used as an 'external editor' in iPhoto. Some suggestions here are either Pixelmator or Adobe Photoshop Elements. [both in the OSX App store]. The free GIMP software may also be used as an external editor.

 

If you have lots and lots of photos [over 10,000] you may want to look at the iPhoto Library Manager [ http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/ ] as an aid to organizing your libraries.

 

You may want to look at a pro level photo organizer, with the obvious choice Apple's Aperture. The current versions of iPhoto and Aperture share the same library / database information and can open each other's libraries.

[Keith1010]

I was hoping I would get more input on this.

 

Keith

[awboater]

I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with my iMac. It was more or less designed for Mac I think. At any rate, Lightroom runs faster on my iMac than on my PC.

 

Amazon has Lightroom ver 4 for $120, which is significantly less than ver 3, which originally sold for $300.

 

But Lighroom ver 5 is in beta, so you may want to wait for that if you are interested in Lightroom.

Edited April 19, 2013 by awboater

[c230k]

Go to the Adobe web site and download Lightroom 5.0 free to use until June 30. I use Photoshop 11 also and Picasa for a quicky.

Tom :cool:

[TheOldBear]

I was hoping I would get more input on this.

 

Keith

 

It would help if you mentioned what features / capabilities you would like to have.

 

iPhoto is a fairly powerful organizer, supporting a 'non destructive' editing workflow. It currently only supports basic image adjustments [but these are useful for the majority of editing tasks].

 

If this is not sufficient, an external editor can be configured for use with iPhoto, with iPhoto handling the organization and the editor handing layer based or pixel level edits.

 

If you need better organization, the pro level 'Digital Asset Managers' like Aperture offer extended photo organization features - and also offer more sophisticated versions of iPhoto's adjustments. Adding either an external editor or plugins further extend the editing actions available.

 

You may want to look over at dpreview.com - they have forum sections for 'Mac Talk' and 'digital darkroom' topics.

[Mr. Click]

I have used Photo Mechanic by Camera Bits for years along with Photo Shop. PM is great for sorting, editing and organizing and Photo Shop is toning, cropping, etc. They work together, you can sort in PM and just double click an image to open it in PS. For most amateurs you can use PS Elements instead of the full blown PS.

[TheOldBear]

Don't want to start a flame war [plenty of them over on dpreview], but PM seems both less capable and more expensive than Aperture.

 

[And for that matter, without knowing the original poster's needs, I would hesitate to recommend software at this time. iPhoto is a decent organizer/asset manager and sets the minimum standard fairly high]

[Keith1010]

Let me explain more.

 

I like iPhoto. I have Aperture but honestly I like iPhoto more.

 

I organize my photos very well.

 

I would like to be able to do more to the photos.

 

Examples include taking out portions of them. I know I can do this with the other two but the quality is so so. I would like to be able to make color adjustments and adjust items such as contrast to just portions of the photos. I would like to add in items from multiple photos.

 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

I did try the free trial of Lightroom 5.0 as recommended by c230k but it didn't really address these items.

 

Keith

[TruckerDave]

Photoshop is the gold standard. (with the price tag to go along with it)

 

Photoshop elements is sort of "photoshop lite". Can do many things PS can do, but not all and at a much cheaper price. (about $100 or so).

 

Lightroom is not really a editing program per say, more of a cataloging/data base program. It is designed to work with photoshop/elements. It does use the same raw converter that PS uses. Plus it does have some editing features. (spot removal, red eye, croping etc etc.) It is all non destructive editing and the original is untouched until you export a final procdut. If you want to get into heavy duty editing you would have to export to PS or PSE for instance.

 

They all have free full version trials on abobe's website. just download and go. I think you get to use them for about a month before you have to decide to purchase the activation code.

 

I have a macbook and don't use Iphoto at all. I use lightroom for almost everything.

Edited April 21, 2013 by TruckerDave

[TheOldBear]

Let me explain more.

 

I like iPhoto. I have Aperture but honestly I like iPhoto more.

 

I organize my photos very well.

 

I would like to be able to do more to the photos.

 

Examples include taking out portions of them. I know I can do this with the other two but the quality is so so. I would like to be able to make color adjustments and adjust items such as contrast to just portions of the photos. I would like to add in items from multiple photos.

 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

I did try the free trial of Lightroom 5.0 as recommended by c230k but it didn't really address these items.

 

Keith

 

What you are looking for seems to be a photo editor that can be used with iPhoto, to do the edits that iPhoto currently cannot do on its own.

 

Photoshop Elements and Pixelmator are available in the OSX App store. [The boxed version of PSE also includes 'Bridge' as a primitive file manager].

 

In use, you select 'edit in external editor', make your changes and simply save the edited picture. iPhoto stores the edited picture alongside the unaltered original picture. This is what makes the process 'nondestructive' - you can always start from the original image and try different editing steps or techniques.

 

If you open your iPhoto library in Aperture, you can brush on some adjustments [like color correction] in selected areas and Aperture does not create a new picture - it just stores your adjustments in its database

[Keith1010]

Thanks TruckerDave and TheOldBear, I will try out some of the complimentary software to see if I see anything that would be better then what I have now.

 

Keith

[Tudy]

Here are my thoughts. I am new to photography, been taking pictures for about 3 years. I shoot in RAW format. I used Aperture for storage, organization and basic editing. Then I used Photoshop to do the fine tuning and use editing plug-ins. (I use Topaz and Protraiture.) I find that the plug-ins work MUCH BETTER via photoshop than Aperture. Aperture tends to crash when using plug-ins. But I love the way Aperture always saves your original picture. If you need a tutorial on anything related to photography and photography software, I highly recommend Lynda dot com. I cannot tell you how very much I have learned from that website!

[Keith1010]

Thank you for your suggestions, Tudy.

 

Keith

[Steviewonder1]

I now only run Mac's for computers. I was a Photoshop person 3 years ago, now using Mac's I am a Light Room person. I have Aperture and am still learning Light Room. I have the plug-in for Canon RAW for it. Jury is still out, but one will win out. PS is Windows and I am now all MAC so different world to learn and operate in.

[Tudy]

I now only run Mac's for computers. I was a Photoshop person 3 years ago, now using Mac's I am a Light Room person. I have Aperture and am still learning Light Room. I have the plug-in for Canon RAW for it. Jury is still out, but one will win out. PS is Windows and I am now all MAC so different world to learn and operate in.

 

PS has a version for Mac. Works like a plug-in. Aperture makes a duplicate version of the picture which is sent to PS. When you are finished with your adjustments, you just save and close the image, which sends the edited version back to Aperture. Works really well!

 

I would be interested in knowing, from your perspective, how lightroom is better than aperture for camera RAW.

[TheOldBear]

Aperture, like iPhoto, relies on OSX's system level raw file support.

 

LR and Photoshop rely on Adobe Camera Raw for their raw file support. Adobe has been faster than Apple in supporting some raw formats [like for Fuji 'xtrans' sensors]

[Jade13]

Aperture.

 

But note that I am having a problem downloading 15 SD memory cards from our recent trip to Africa & Egypt with over a 1,000 photos not downloading to Aperture. I have been to the Apple store several times already and we tried one of their computers and still getting the same error messages so haven't figured out the problem yet. I used two differant Nikon cameras and about 20 differant memory cards but 15 are getting error messages on some of the images. I did update Aperture. I can get all of the photos downloaded by downloading into viewer into a file on my MacBoook and then into Aperture, so we still have not figured out the issue. I am also downloading jpeg and RAW files as separate images to get the correct count. The pictures also do not show up under Finder looking at the memory card.

Edited May 10, 2013 by Jade13

[compulady]

I use LightRoom 4 and PhotoShop CS6 plus a bunch of plugins.

Photoshop elements does much of what PhotoShop does except for some higher end stuff.

 

I do 80% in Lightroom and go to PhotoShop or one of the plugins with the other 20%

 

Just reading through some messages above, there seems to be some confusion. PS - PhotoShop is for both Mac and Windows, just different version are needed for each platform.

Edited May 11, 2013 by compulady
added info

[Keith1010]

Thanks for the additional comments that have been posted on this thread.

 

Decisions and Decisions for me now.

 

Keith

[TruckerDave]

I now only run Mac's for computers. I was a Photoshop person 3 years ago, now using Mac's I am a Light Room person. I have Aperture and am still learning Light Room. I have the plug-in for Canon RAW for it. Jury is still out, but one will win out. PS is Windows and I am now all MAC so different world to learn and operate in.

 

 

Why use aperture when you have lightroom? PS and lightroom are made to work together. they are both made by the same folks. and both operate the same way on a mac or pc. Once you get LR down, depending on how much heavy editing you do you might find LR can do pretty much all you need (pro photographers are a different story) without having to drop the big $$ for photoshop. Plus LR comes with the same raw converter that photoshop uses and they update it with the new cameras as they come out.

[APDMOM]

Reviving this old thread to ask a follow up question... I mainly need something to decrease the grainy look on night shots. Any suggestions? I have iPhoto 8.1.2 (iMac is about 5 years old).

 

I am willing to buy Photoshop but if I can get away with something cheaper, I would prefer that. What I don't want to do is spend $100 on a program that does not really work well & end up still wanting Photoshop...

[TruckerDave]

Photoshop (when you could buy it direct) was about $700 new. They have gone to a subscription service now (not a bad deal really) it is $10 a month and you get both lightroom and photoshop. (They say it is a limited time offer, but they have been saying that for months and keep extending the offer.) I already have lightroom but might pull the trigger next week (when my monthly data allowance resets) and grab it myself.

 

As far as the "grainy" look..that is noise. Your best bet, going forward, is to shoot with the lowest iso and just extend the shutter speed to eliminate most of it. But with shots you already have...you will need something to reduce noise. That comes with its own issues, it usually makes the photos "soft" if you have a bunch of noise. Thus you have a trade off...less noise but soft shots or more noise and sharper photos. If you have the RAW files your might be able to do more with them (depending on how bad the noise really is) than you would if you just have JPEGS. Any of Adobe's big three (Lightroom, Photoshop or Elements) will be able to reduce some of the noise..but.. you need to also keep in mind you system is 5 years old and the newer versions of these programs might not work. Thus being stuck with older versions that are not as good as the current ones. Its a vicious cycle.:(

[TheOldBear]

I think the $100 Photoshop was for the 'Elements' version [available both in retail boxes and from the OSX app store]

 

Some alternatives include Acorn and Pixelmator [both in the app store] or The GIMP [free]. All of these have de-noise / selective blur tools that can reduce the impact of noise by soothing away some of the picture's fine detail.