According to John Nack at Adobe, Infotrends recently surveyed 1,026 professional photographers in North America and found that more than four times more photographers use Lightroom to process RAW images than Aperture. Even on the Mac, Lightroom users outnumbered Aperture users by a factor of almost 2:1.
Why is Lightroom so much more popular than Aperture? I don’t know for sure, but I see four reasons:
- Many photographers already use Photoshop. Photographers might have given the initial nod to Lightroom simply due to familiarity with Photoshop and the Adobe brand.
- At its heart, Apple is a hardware company. While it has had a pretty good track record with its pro applications, Apple might be perceived as more likely to abandon them than Adobe, given that Adobe is purely a software company. Of course, Apple has deeper pockets than Adobe, but software is playing a second fiddle there. Maybe even a third fiddle these days given the success of the iPhone.
- Adobe is the custodian of many de-facto public domain photo formats, including TIFF and DNG. There is simply trust in Adobe to keep continuing this role and thus keep continuing to be focused laser-sharp on the photography market.
- Adobe has many existing relationships with camera manufacturers, thus they are able to provide support for new camera models very quickly. Of course, a number of the camera manufacturers are afraid of Adobe’s market power, but then, so are they of Apple’s, let alone Apple’s track record of not really caring that much about its ecosystem.
Personally, I’m not a professional photographer, but there were two more reasons why I ended up in the Lightroom camp: I got my Lightroom 1.0 license for free as part of Adobe’s acquisition of Pixmantec, the developer of Raw Shooter Pro, which I used before. Plus, I keep continuing to travel with a Windows laptop, thus I need Lightroom on both the PC and the Mac. And that rules out Aperture.
Why do you use Lightroom or Aperture?
GetGoing released its newest set of training videos, in this case for Adobe Photoshop. It will be available for purchase as a QuickTime download, DVD-ROM or iPhone / iPod video version.
By no means is this the only training offering that photographers could utilize on their iPhones. There’s quite a range of video podcasts for Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture and others that you can access for free on iTunes. Simply subscribe to them and start learning. And by the nature of iTunes, they are all downloadable to the iPhone.
Here’s my problem with this approach – I don’t watch training videos on the iPhone. For starters, most of these videos or video podcasts include screen captures taken from the Mac or a PC at full resolution, so it is hard to see the action or the mouse on the small iPhone screen. Even more importantly, while watching them I also like to have access to Photoshop, so I can practice while I learn. No such luck on the iPhone – there’s no Photoshop for the iPhone.
So while I watch many of the terrific video podcasts for photographers on my Mac, I do not watch them on the iPhone. Do you?
If you are a DSLR photographer like us, you use your iPhone not just for its ability to snap quick pictures, but also as a support device whenever you are out there with your big bag full of heavy and expensive gear.
Recently, I purchased PhotoCalc from iTunes and am happy to report that it found a permanent place on my iPhone. PhotoCalc contains 4 major components:
Its Depth of Field calculator enables you to perform your typical DOF calculation and is very comparable to Bitwerks’ DOF calculator (see our review), although not as easy to use. But it does the work and thus allowed me to free up one app slot on my iPhone. Just remember to pick your camera from the database in the options menu before using the calculator.
Its Flash Exposure module allows you to do quick flash exposure calculations which come in very handy while being out and about. The only issue I had was finding the guide number for my flash, which I had to look up on the Internet. Having a Flash guide number database, similar to their camera database, would have made this much easier.
The Solar Calculator allows you to display sunrise and moon information for your current location or for any number of cities from their database. This is very helpful while in the Field as well as for planning purposes.
Photocalc also comes with a Reference module, which contains a Glossary of photo terms, an explanation of the Zone system, a Sunny 16 Rule overview as well as details on various films and filters. This section is probably most useful for beginners or for people like me who occasionally need a quick refresh on a certain topic.
Lastly, you can compute Exposure reciprocation between ISO, aperture and shutter speed. This could be helpful for manual shooters like me.
Overall, Photocalc offers an impressive range of features for just $2.99 and so far, I’m very happy with it!
That’s not to say that PhotoCalc does not have its quirks. One little quirk that threw me off initially is that they use the similar looking icons in different context. For example, you use a red icon to lock either ISO, Aperture or Shutter Speed on the Exposure Reciprocation screen, whereas for Flash Exposure you use a similar looking red icon to indicate which value should be calculated. A different colored icon would be much more intuitive – it took me a while to understand that I should not automatically associate the color red with locking something. Similarly, the program lets you select cities all over the world in its solar calculator, but it displays all times not in local time, but for the timezone my iPhone is set to. So while I’m in California, if I want to find out when the sun rises during my planned trip to Berlin in 2 months, I displays sunrise at 7:50 pm and sunset at 12:20 pm, so I have to translate the time to the local timezone myself. I hope that Adair Systems puts a setting into Photocalc’s options that will do the time conversion for me.
Overall, PhotoCalc is one of these companion apps that I’m glad to have with me when I’m out there in the field taking pictures.
Verdict: Highly Recommended!
Price: $2.99 from iTunes.
Would you like to geotag your photos that you shoot with your DSLR or point & shoot camera, even if the camera itself does not allow you to do so. Or do you shy away from geotagging because the manufacturers’ solutions are too pricey? There is an alternative, if you have an iPhone!
Simply install GeoTag from Salt & Pepper on your iPhone. When in the field shooting pictures, turn on GeoTag, so it records your GPS coordinates. Once back home, download your GeoTag information into the free Geotag desktop companion software and then merge them with your images inside the Geotag desktop. From there, you can import your images into Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, iPhoto or your favorite photo editor.
This does not only work for JPGs, but also a variety of RAW formats, including Canon’s CR2, Nikon’s NEF, Olympus’ and Panasonic’s RAW formats and with a variety of other image formats (TIF, PNG, others).
A flow-chart with more details can be found at Salt&Pepper’s Geotag website.
There are two downsides to this process:
First, Geotag Desktop is Mac only at this time. No luck for Windows folks who have iPhones.
Secondly, there is an extra step required to merge the geotags before you can import the images into your photo editing or management software. You cannot do it there directly. But then, given the low price of Geotag, it’s worth the extra step to many of us!
Price: $3.99 from iTunes.
