You do know what comes next, right? There’s a little truth to the whole idea but there is also another side to it always.
For example, most people who buy their cameras don’t bother to explore the software that goes with it. When Minolta was still in the DSLR business, before they became Konica-Minolta and the camera business was sold to Sony, the company actually shipped a very good piece of software that could, in many ways, do a good many tasks that people normally do in Photoshop. Now, if you were an honest person who didn’t use pirated software, that was something to be really happy about. You could edit your photos to your heart’s content and still make Honest Abe happy.
As a Canon user, I’ve always benefited from the software the company included in the camera packages. The 10D and 20D shipped with Canon’s Digital Photo Professional (DPP) and Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 but more recent cameras just had DPP and things like EOS Utility and Zoombrowser.
I’ve heard a lot of people sneer upon the first two saying that they weren’t up to the standard of Photoshop but, honestly, you really could do a lot with them. Even now, Photoshop Elements can still do most of what people really need on an everyday basis.Aside from levels, saturation, some dodging and burning, masks and layer control, what else do most people (and that includes some professionals depending on what they shoot) really need? Yes, you do prefer curves once in a while but hey, with some smart use of the levels control, you do get the effect a good number of the time.
What about DPP? One professional has told me that it actually produced much “cleaner” files than if he ran RAW files with Photoshop’s Camera Raw. That, of course, is a matter of debate.
Regardless, what does DPP give you? It gives excellent RAW control with the facility to edit using the usual brightness and contrast, curves (with just brightness or RBG), noise, chromatic aberration, etc. Not bad for something that came in the box.
One problem, and at this point in the digital saga, this is a big problem, is the fact that it seems to choke when you throw folders at it with a large number of files. We’re talking hundreds to more than a thousand files per folder. This may not seem such a big deal to some hobbyists but to a working professional, it’s quite irritating especially since it happens even when you’re using JPEG files. RAW files may be excusable but JPEG?
What do we mean about choking? Let’s say DPP has started showing you the contents of your card or your folder and you delete just one file. The whole system thus needs to move all the files the follow the one you deleted one step to fill the gap. That, especially if you’ve more than a couple of hundred files or more than a thousand, will slow the system down to a crawl. It actually looks like the system has died on you. Even if it didn’t, the time spent just waiting for the program to start responding again is, obviously, time wasted. If you think very fast, whatever it was you wanted to do with one file might have already been forgotten. This is especially bad if you’re faced with a deadline. You can, surely, divide your projects into smaller folders with at most a hundred files per folder but that’s an additional step that you have to do in maybe Windows Explorer or OSX’s Finder.
Is having something like a thousand files outrageous? No, not at all and this is especially true for the really serious amateurs and the pros. With big memory cards so cheap now and with DSLRs or cameras like the Panasonic LX-3 and Canon G11 making more people want to shoot, it’s no wonder companies like Buffalo, Seagate, and Western Digital are dancing the jig. There’re just so many images being shot at higher resolution and bigger sizes that hard drive space is easily made more necessary.
So, the problem we have now is dealing with large numbers of files and being able to edit them according to how you need to and being able to archive all these images so that you can more easily retrieve them at some later time.
We did mention at the beginning that the best things in life are free and, I’ve a confession to make: I did get something free and it had me dancing the jig. One of the best pieces of software around right now for the Mac-using photographer or photo enthusiast is Apple’s Aperture, now on it’s third version. Did I use either the original or the second version? Nope. Everybody was saying it was a resource hog and that you needed a very powerful Mac just to get it to work.
I didn’t have a very powerful Mac at the time and I still don’t up to now. My main Mac used to be a 12-inch Powerbook G4, the last one Apple produced before they went Intel. It’s still working and serving well especially as a writer’s computer and even as an on-field laptop. In fact, most of my stuff for Picture Perfect was written on the Powerbook.
Why not use Aperture then? It was out of budget and various sources argued that while it would run on the rig I had, it wouldn’t run in a way so as to make me productive. So, scratch that idea. See why I love DPP and Elements? I also dabbled in Adobe’s Lightroom, Aperture’s main competitor.
Why are we now discussing Aperture? I was given a copy (yes, it was definitely legal and NOT pirated) and I wanted to make sure that it ran on a rig that many people would either have or would be something so slow for them that they’d buy the more powerful (and expensive) alternatives.
The Powerbook now has a sibling – the Macbook 2.26Ghz. This is a new addition to our family’s computer lineup and I wanted to run Aperture on this because it’s a computer that, being the cheapest among the Apple laptop range, can easily serve as the baseline in Aperture’s performance. Granted, this Macbook had the maximum allotment of RAM (according to Apple) of 4 Gigabytes and that definitely boosted performance. Regardless, this is still the cheapest Macbook around and whatever I report here will simply show just how good the other laptops may perform.
(How’s that for an intro? Tune in. This is going to be quite a discussion.)