When I was writing the main copy for this project I was surprised’ by how many people were using (or wanting to use) some of the higher end editing tools. So, this section looks at some these in a little more depth. But first, a word of warning. This stuff is expensive. If it doesn’t seem to relevant to you then just ignore it! As I’ve said before there are budget options and many, many people are happy with these! But moving on.

Adobe Photoshop

This has been the king of photo processing software for a long time, and I think it still is. I’ve been using Photoshop for about fifteen years and treat it as my main image processing software. What makes it so useful is its ability to work with all kinds of masks, layers to support selective and fine tuning work and a group of very flexible retouching tools. There is very little that Photoshop cannot do. For creative retouching of photographs it is unbeatable. It is almost the most perfect tool for working in back and white. That being said, Photoshop is more than a photo tool.

Photoshop is really an image processing tool that can be used to create and to process all kinds of graphic images. For many photographers it will be overkill, but there’s no doubt that it can be a joy to work with.

The real deal killer with Photoshop is probably its price. A new copy of the current CS4 edition will set you back around £550. Student editions will cost about £155 which is certainly more affordable. Look at Amazon and you’ll also find that you can still purchase old editions which still contain most of the tools you will be using. On Amazon, currently, Photoshop 6.00 will cost £99.00 and Photoshop 7.00 about £170.

Adobe adopts a very sensible upgrade policy which means that you can often buy an legacy version and then upgrade at some point in the future. But, if you think this might be a route for you just make sure you look around carefully and be sure the upgrade route exists.

These upgrade routes do make it easier to spread the costs of purchasing over a longer period. For example, I’ve just upgraded from CS2 direct to CS4 without bothering with CS3.

Photoshop is available as a demo download which should give you time to explore it reasonably thoroughly. (Available from the downloads page).

As befits such a long lasting program Photoshop also benefits from many third-party extensions and plug-ins. Some of these may be worth the cost of buying Photoshop alone. For example, some of the plugins for processing black and white images are really worth looking at if that is the area in which you are really interested.

A final consideration with Photoshop is the age of your machine. It probably wouldn’t make much sense to run the most recent version on an old machine — one of the old legacy versions should be better.

So, Photoshop is very expensive. It is the ultimate processing tool. But many, or even most, Photographers will be happy working with something such as Photoshop Elements, the cut down version of Photoshop. Elements will cost about £75 and will be money well spent.

New Kids on the Block

Photoshop may well be overkill. Helpfully, the last few years have seen the development of a new type of product, image software that is dedicated to Photography and which mirrors the traditional workflow of the Photographer. This certainly makes sense to me, as someone who grew up in a darkroom. Whether they are quite as intuitive to those of you who have only recently come to photography I’m not so sure. But they are easy to use.

The two leading applications here are Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom 2.

I’ve only recently stepped up to using these mainly because my old computers were simply not powerful enough to use them easily. I could run both of them on my old Power Macs but they were so slow as to be completely frustrating. Whether you’re using Windows or Mac machines you should find the new dual core processors cope with both of these programs quite nicely.

Both of these programs have their fans. Aperture is only available for Mac machines. Other than that the choice really comes down to personal preference. Both products do more or less the same things — and they both look very similar in action.

Lightroom 2

Lightroom is available for both Windows and Mac OSX. A 30 day period download of Lightroom is available and I think this is a fully featured download. Here is a screenshot of the main window (click on link to take you to Flickr where you can study a bigger version of the photo)

The main window features an image selected from the browser images below. On the top there’s a very easy menu which deals with Library cataloguing, developing, printing and publishing to the web.

On the right hand pane you can see some of the retouching tools. Most of those you want are here, including clone and healing tools. A clone simply allows you to copy part of the image and over-right another (say to deal with camera glare). Clones can also copy ‘texture’ which is sometimes very useful in producing very accurate corrections. Healing tools are handy in helping to deal with image errors in a very subtle and sensitive way.

Lightroom also has tools for most of the things you will need. You can easily change values for exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation and colour tint or hue.

A 30 day trial can be downloaded here.

Aperture

Aperture from Apple is, in truth pretty similar to Lightroom as you can see from the screenshot (click for links to large sizes).

The tools here are all in the left pane with tabs for categorising projects, tagging images with metadata and for adjusting the image. A similar set of controls exist in Aperture than in Lightroom.

Aperture scores over Lightroom in the way that it has many plug-ins available for it. Many third parties have now ported their Photoshop plugins over to Aperture. A number of them allow you to purchase the separately, or buy both Aperture and Photoshop versions together.

A trial version of Aperture is available here (30 days).

It’s Your Choice

Both of these are wonderful products that really have been thoughtfully designed to meet the needs of photographers. Get hold of the trial versions and have a good play with them.

Aperture is only available for Apple so if you’re a PC user the choice is made for you. There is a price difference though. Lightroom will set you back around £215 – £235. Aperture is slightly cheaper at £126.

Integration in your workflow

I’m now using Aperture for cataloguing and processing images. I reckon that a good 80% of my images can be easily edited in Aperture. It is only when I need to deal with tricky images that I go to Photoshop — those that need carefully correcting or require fine tuning to images with a great dynamic range. I also tend to prefer Photoshop for black and white work, although I’ll always try Aperture first.

My Workflow

These days my own workflow uses a mixture of Adobe and Apple software and works a little like this.

1. Photos are imported into a folder for that particular event/time.

2. The RAW files are then archived to DVD for ultimate backup purposes.

3. The images are converted to Adobe DNG format using the free convertor that is available from Adobe. DNG is an attempt to establish a common digital negative format. It certainly seems logical for me to keep everything in one format.

4. The folder can be browsed in Bridge, a catalogue program that comes with Photoshop. This can be used to keep basic catalogues of all of the images in the folder.

5. I work with images in Aperture, saving the ones I want to work with as Aperture project. Current projects are then saved by Aperture as backup ‘vaults’. Each time you log in to Aperture the start up screen quietly lets you know which photos are not yet in a vault. This is an under-stated reminder that I find to be very helpful.

6. When I’m working with an image that is tricky Aperture gives me option to edit it in Photoshop and automatically takes the image into that application. On saving the image Aperture automatically adds it to its own image catalogue. Lightroom (and indeed Expression Media) work in a similar way.

So, there we go — I hope that i useful. Aperture and Lightroom certainly make life a lot easier for Photographers. They are well worth exploring, especially if you do take a lot of photographs.