The Mac seems to have been the creative guy’s choice for quite some time. Now, don’t get us wrong. There are so many things that creative people do on PCs (Does anyone still remember that that term really means “Personal Computer” and thus is not an exclusive Microsoft or Windows moniker and that, technically, you can refer to a Mac as a PC?) and almost all software on the Mac is available on the PC. What PC and Mac users do concede is that there is more software available on the PC side. If you or someone you know is very handy with computer components, you can easily come up with a rig that handles creative tasks well without having to pawn most of your family’s heirlooms. Heck, you can actually come up with a complete rig handling Internet, office, music, video, and image editing tasks for just the price of the hardware. There’s Linux and so many good software packages handling these things. It’s just that it seems a bit scary sometimes.

Many people argue that the Macs are just too expensive and the PC gets you into creative tasks much more cheaply. Mac fans counter that if you don’t rely on piracy as many PC users do, things do really come out almost even especially if you count the fact that you seldom even bother with viruses and such. You can go straight to work and be more content knowing that things “just work.”

That aside, there are some Mac-specific programs that have steered some people over to the Mac-side regardless of their aversion to the nigh religion-like devotion given by fanboys to Steve Jobs and anything made in Cupertino, CA. Final Cut Pro is the undoubted favorite on the Mac platform for video editing and expertise in it has already become part of job requirements in a multitude of video production houses.

In photography, there is Aperture. Perhaps one of the most exciting things about Apple software now is that it’s been made really affordable. Everyone knows that Photoshop, being the professional tool that it is, is quite expensive. That’s just as well considering what it can do. No wonder that it’s been the creative software of choice for quite some time. But photographers, professional and enthusiasts, do need something that’s really made for their needs and this is where even the combo of Adobe’s Photoshop and Bridge seems to suffer a bit and that’s why Adobe came up with it’s own software – Lightroom.

Aperture 3 was recently released and it had a very interesting price tag of less than ten grand. For something this powerful, that was very enticing to people who wanted to crawl out of the shadows of piracy. (Most people who are into piracy want everything to be almost free. The only real cost they want is the hardware and very little else. For people who’d rather not pay, there’s always Linux and everything that goes with the platform. That isn’t at all a bad option.) Not only that, the limitation of the software bundled with cameras like Canon DSLRs of not being able to handle hordes of files is dealt with quite comfortably.

The main difference here is that the program actually saves your files, referred to as “Masters” and generates views of them. What you really see, therefore, is a set of representations and not the original itself. When you start manipulating an image, your changes are tracked and that’s what gets saved. In the end, your original is left untouched and what you have are versions of that original.

We’ve talked a lot about saving originals. Some say you consider these files as your negatives and that they should always be kept safe. (For more discussion on this, please refer to installments in the past weeks.)

The advantages of this approach are significant. For one thing, since the representations are not as large as the originals, they are more easily handled by the software and hardware. More importantly, your “digital negatives” are relatively safe. Safe from what? If you always handle the originals, the images will suffer from some sort of image degradation. For example, if you load an original, edit it using something like Photoshop or the open-source (and excellent) alternative, GIMP, then save to JPEG for printing purposes your edited version would have already suffered from a loss in quality that will only be apparent if you zoom in really close. This is really something quite important for people who shoot in JPEG primarily. Once quality is lost and lost permanently by means of saving the edited file, there is no going back unless your original is safely tucked away somewhere.

An old hobbyist once bragged about scratching negatives as a means to edit photos before they are printed. Yes, this may be one’s way of getting the job done but if you do that, that negative is forever like that and if you get the urge to do something to the same image at some future time, your creative options are limited by that scratch you made. The same is true for digital stuff. This is the digital age and we really should take advantage of the fact that it isn’t at all difficult to come up with digital backups that are of the same quality as the originals.

It’s really a mindset that we’re talking about here, one that doesn’t just say dive in to work immediately but gives a person some way to go back to a more manageable state just in cast things go wrong and mind you, they do and more often that you’d imagine.

Okay, that’s old hat at this point. This is an old Aperture trick that other software also does but it really is a basic point that should be considered by some people who haven’t had anything else but image editing software that will deal with originals from the outset.

Next week: Diving In