The photography tasks don’t stop once you’ve snapped the pictures and filled up the memory card. The next step – post-processing – is quite a bit more complicated, but it is where all the elements come together. In order to keep things organized and prepared for display and output you’re going to need a software package to help manage all the photos you’ve taken. Let’s take a quick look at some of the more popular packages available to you:
iPhoto '11
Apple’s iPhoto 11 is the easy-to-use photo library software package that is basically the bare-bones version of Aperture. Insanely easy to use for photo organization and basic manipulation, iPhoto has many of the same features as Aperture (although the user interface is vastly and thematically different). This is evident in features such as “Faces” (the face auto-detect algorithm). iPhoto’s main strength is digital photo organization (with the ability to tag/label the where, when and who of your photos) and like Aperture, there are numerous ways to arrange the presentation of your photos (via the web, creating photo books and cards), plus a strong level of basic photo manipulation tools. iPhoto is designed for the casual user all the way up to the intense enthusiast who isn’t looking for the robust power-set of features offered by Aperture.
Aperture 3
Aperture 3 is Apple’s photo management software, and it is a robust, flexible and intuitive software package that makes organizing, managing, and even manipulating your photos a snap. With the current version, you can retouch and enhance photos with a comprehensive and powerful set of tools, optimize, and share your photos on various websites like MobileMe and Flickr, or create your own slideshows. Aperture’s main advantage is in managing and organizing photo libraries, and it does so with an easy-to-understand, hierarchical structure. There are even facial recognition algorithms built in, which enables Aperture to scan through your entire uploaded library of images and find & tag recurring people. Importing photos into Aperture is a snap, and there are controllable presets, which cut down on the need for repetitive actions.
Lightroom 3
Adobe’s Lightroom aims for the same market as Aperture, in that it is a photo management software system. Lightroom 3 is packed with easy to use and understand photo manipulation tools (which are non-destructive), and which enable you to edit. Editing features include the ability to adjust contrast, color saturation, sharpness, noise reduction, or lens defects. You can also manage and display your photos using a series of customizable formats and templates for photo books, slide shows, web galleries, and various other ways to print or display your stunning photos. Hundreds of third party plug-ins (add-ons) have been developed for Lightroom which extend and expand its performance, flexibility and capabilities. This version of Lightroom handles HD video files (the current rage in DSLRs), and has more presets for the importing photos from the latest DSLRs. Lightroom, also, seamlessly integrates with Adobe’s Photoshop.
Photoshop CS5
Photoshop isn’t so much a photo management tool as it is a dynamic digital darkroom of unbelievable proportions and scope. Photoshop excels in providing comprehensive photo manipulation, adjustment and retouching. Photoshop is THE reference standard for designing, combining and revising your photos. Photoshop gives you the tools to go in and adjust various color layers, combine HDR (high dynamic range) photo sets, adjust the contrast, correct chromatic aberration, fix flaws in a lens you shot with, adjust the perspective of an photo, change the gamma, etc. The latest version, CS5, offers several new features that allow for even greater manipulation of photos, even in 3D! Like Lightroom 3, Photoshop has hundreds of third party plug-ins, which dramatically expand the creative possibilities of Photoshop.
Conclusion
It’s hard to narrow the list down to just one software package, and many professionals and high-end enthusiasts choose more than one software tool, because they are designed to be complimentary to each other. In this way, you can use Photoshop to revise you photos and print them, but you also can use Lightroom or Aperture to manage and organize the large volume of photos. The programs you select are a matter of preference as well as matter of need and desired uses.
