Photo Mechanic
Unless you’re a press photographer or a photo journalist of some other sort, chances are you’ve never heard of this program, because it was made for exactly these people.
If you’ve been taking concert photos for a while, you get to know the usual gang of photographers that’s going to be there. At big venues like Hallenstadion in Zurich, the agency photographers show up, and after our first three songs it’s always a race out to the tables for them. They whip out their laptops and have a race who’s the first to upload a photo onto the net. That’s how their business works: It’s not the best photo that wins, but the first one that a tired newspaper person can get their hands on.
I sat next to them with my laptop downloading my photos with Lightroom and just shaking my head at how much faster they were. It’s not that any of them had a whooping fast Laptop – it really just was the software that was so much faster than mine. So I invested some $$$s into a license and got Photo Mechanic. Ever since then, it’s the only thing I use to download my photos onto disk and for editing the series of photos down to the winners.
Lightroom & Camera RAW
I used Lightroom almost exclusively for editing my photos for a long time, and it does a really good job at converting RAW images and a little bit of retouching. Camera RAW, which ships with Photoshop, is almost like Lightroom, except it’s not.
Adobe seems to have a total chaos in their code base – some of the “same” tools in Lightroom and Camera RAW totally don’t do the same, they have different shortcuts and keys, and unless you know them inside and out, it’s sometimes a bit of a guess on which one does the better job. I don’t really mind which one really, and sometimes switch back and forth between the two. As long as the result is what I want it to be, the tool doesn’t matter to me.
I do use Lightroom exclusively for organizing, indexing, and exporting my photos though. Old habit – maybe. I just like to find my photos where I expect them.
Photoshop
I do believe in getting the photo right in the camera. I hate having to work with photos forever after they’re taken, I prefer them to knock me off my socks right when I download them from the camera. But then, I also hate very cumbersome tinkering and time-consuming setups while shooting. Why do that if you can get the same effect (and probably cheaper) in Photoshop?
I’m by no means at professional Vogue magazine retoucher level yet, but I’m trying my best at finding the best, fastest, cheapest, and easiest way of getting the perfect photo, and knowing at the shooting what I can get fixed or change or add in postproduction frees me up and leaves room for much more free thinking. I won’t go into the whole controversy of To Photoshop or Not To Photoshop purity, I’ll just say: Yes, I admit to using Photoshop, but I’ve vowed to myself to be a photographer capturing real people and not a digital painter creating imaginary perfection.
The Gimp
So, bring out the Gimp
But the Gimp’s sleeping…?
Well I guess you’ll have to go wake him up now, won’t you?
… one of my favorite movie quotes, from Pulp Fiction. You will never think of the photo editing software the same after having seen this scene, promise!
The Gimp is a stunningly great way of editing any photos and graphics – and it’s totally free (and, other than Lightroom and Photoshop, it runs on Linux/Unix, too :-) ). If you’re on a budget and can’t afford Photoshop (like I was for a long time), you should totally try it. It doesn’t have Photoshop CS5′s content aware fill tool, but it does just about any photo retouching you want it to do, including filters and all that other fancy stuff (though it doesn’t have a very good RAW converter IMO). I still use it for some photo editing now, but mostly for other visual art.
Backups
I’ll admit it right away: I once unrecoverably lost half a vacation’s worth of photos to a dying hard drive when I already was working as a software engineer / photographer. You kind of don’t think it would happen to you, right the week where you don’t have a backup and are on vacation taking a lot of photos and stupidly already erased and overwrote the flash card in your camera… Well Murphy’s Law says it does happen – and it did. And it also taught me a lesson: Save early, save often. Save twice.
I have all my data on backup on a second hard drive (those on Mac know how much TimeMachine can save your behind), and other storage media that I keep in a different place. I just want to be able to retrieve any data, photo or not, that I might need, at any time.