Now that digital cameras are cheap and ubiquitous, we can snap, snap, snap away—which comes back to haunt us when we end up shooting hundreds of frames over the course of an afternoon. Storage space is cheap, but managing an ever-expanding collection of thousands of images can make you long for the days when you took pictures on film, 24 at a time.
No matter whether you’re rocking a professional-grade DSLR or you shoot your snaps with an iPhone, having a capable method of organizing your collection and editing your photos is essential. iPhoto comes with every new Mac and it does a lot, but it isn’t the be-all-end-all for every user. So we looked at five other applications that can help you corral and edit your photos; then we collected 10 solid tips for making those photos look their best, no matter which app you’re using. You’ll never regret filling up a memory card again.
Many use iPhoto just "because it's there." Alternatives exist, but some are pretty expensive. Before you take the plunge, peruse these pros and cons.
iPhoto ’11 just arrived, bringing better Facebook integration, along with an enhanced full-screen mode, better photo books, and new letterpress cards. (Books and cards must be ordered; you can’t print them yourself.) Beyond these enhancements, iPhoto is still the simple but effective organizer we know and love.
Your photos are imported into a central tamper-proof library, which lives as a single file on your hard disk. Once your photos are in the library, you can organize them into albums; carry out basic image enhancements; upload them to your MobileMe, Flickr, and Facebook accounts; email them to your friends; and create some spectacular-looking slideshows.
iPhoto '11's redesigned Edit screen is on the basic side but still gets the job done.
Like many Apple apps, iPhoto combines simplicity with hidden depths. It’s never going to replace the likes of Aperture and Lightroom, but it gets you farther than you expect. The editing tools might not be advanced, but they do a good job, and the Auto Enhance button can transform average-looking snaps in an instant.
The Faces and Places features work pretty well too, though each requires you to put in a little time and effort to get the best results. The face recognition is good but not infallible, and if you don’t have a GPS-enabled camera, it can be tedious to enter location data for your photos manually.
The bottom line. iPhoto (part of iLife ’11, $49, apple.com) is best for anyone who uses photography socially rather than professionally.
Photoshop is the granddaddy of all photo-editing applications. The name itself has become a byword for photo trickery, and it’s a standard tool for professional photographers, artists, and designers everywhere.
And yet Adobe still finds new ways to improve it. CS5 is now a 64-bit application, though you do need Snow Leopard and lots of RAM to exploit the extra processing power. The new Content-Aware Fill feature can effectively cover up unwanted objects by drawing in detail from their surroundings, and new selection-refinement tools make it easier to extract difficult outlines (like human hair) from a background.
Photoshop stays on top because it's always improving.
Photoshop’s high dynamic range tool has been redesigned to be both easier to use and more powerful, and a new HDR Toner feature lets you create the HDR “look” from a single image, where true HDR uses at least three. The Adobe Camera Raw plug-in uses a new processing system to offer improved definition, and you’ll find more sophisticated noise-reduction tools too.
There isn’t much that Photoshop can’t do, but you will need to know quite a lot about image editing to get the most from it. And photographers will probably have to invest in a separate photo-cataloguing tool (like Lightroom or Aperture)—although Photoshop comes with the Adobe Bridge file browser, it’s soon out of its depth with big photo collections.
The bottom line. Photoshop CS5 ($699, free trial, adobe.com) is best for pro photographers and enthusiasts who have advanced far beyond the basics.
Elements is the amateur version of Photoshop, and it’s designed to offer a lot of Photoshop’s features in a much friendlier format for novices. Version 9 is a dramatic step forward for Mac owners, not only because it has some very useful improvements in its own right, but also because it now comes with a Mac version of the Organizer app, which was previously only available in the Windows version (Mac users got Adobe Bridge instead).
Elements' Guided Edits mode actually teaches you editing tricks as you use it.
The Organizer is like an application in itself, storing all your photos in one centralized library. You can tag your photos with keywords, organize them into albums, and even “stack” related images so that, for example, modified versions are always kept alongside the originals.
Elements is designed with beginners and nonprofessionals in mind, so you can enhance your photos with the easy-to-use Quick Fix tools or the more advanced Guided Edits. In the Full Edit mode, though, it’s a much more powerful program than you might imagine, and many of the things that you may think you need Photoshop for can be done perfectly well in Elements, including layer masks. Best of all, at under $80, it’s a mere fraction of the price of Photoshop CS5.
The bottom line. Photoshop Elements 9 ($79.99, free trial,
adobe.com) is for beginners and enthusiasts who want quick results without complex tools.
Aperture is one of a new generation of “nondestructive” image editor-slash-organizers. This means the enhancements you make to your picture are stored in the Aperture library and not applied directly to the image files, which are kept safe and untouched as “master” images. The advantage of this is that you can always go back and change or undo the edits you’ve made to your photos, but the downside is that you’re relying on a single database for all the hundreds (or even thousands) of image adjustments you’ve made. As of version 3, Aperture is now a very powerful image-editor as well as a cataloguing tool. You can apply both global and localized image adjustments, and while you’ll still need Photoshop for layers and montages, Aperture can do pretty much everything else. It’s easy to set Aperture up to use Photoshop as an external editor, too, and it handles “round-tripping” perfectly, storing Photoshop-edited files alongside the originals in your library.
Aperture's interface reminds us of iPhoto on steroids.
Aperture’s real strength, though, is its cataloguing. It’s quicker and slicker than its main rival Lightroom at both handling and displaying large numbers of images, and its system of projects, folders, and albums gives you great flexibility in the way you organize your photos without forcing you into a particular filing system on your computer.
The bottom line. Aperture ($199, free trial, apple.com) hits the sweet spot for professional photographers and keen enthusiasts looking to upgrade from iPhoto.
Lightroom is Adobe’s answer to Aperture: a photo organizer and editor that stores all your photo data (including image adjustments) in a single database—your photos are stored separately in regular folders on your hard drive. Adobe’s Camera Raw software is built in, so you can browse and edit RAW files just as effectively as JPEGs. In fact, Lightroom’s editing tools are its main strength, allowing you to carry out a whole host of basic adjustments, as well as more sophisticated alterations such as graduated filter effects and localized “painted” adjustments. Because it’s a nondestructive editor, the original image files remain unaltered, and you can go back and experiment with different adjustments at any time.
Lightroom's dark interface lets your photos pop but also feels cluttered at times
Lightroom’s photo-organizing tools aren’t quite as impressive, though. Running on the same hardware, it’s noticeably slower than Aperture at displaying and scrolling through thumbnails, and the dark-toned interface feels more cluttered, too. Frustratingly, the system for organizing Collections (albums, in other words) is entirely separate to that for displaying the folders where the photos are stored on your hard drive. Lightroom’s organizing tools are in some ways more obvious and direct than Aperture’s, but they’re also more limiting.
The bottom line. Lightroom 3 ($299, free trial, adobe.com) will appeal to professional photographers and keen enthusiasts with fast Macs and huge photo collections.
Picasa is to iPhoto what Android smartphones are to the iPhone. It’s Google’s version of an all-in-one photo-cataloguing and editing program, and while it’s been around on the Windows side for a while, it’s only recently arrived on the Mac.
Where iPhoto imports pictures into its own library, Picasa works like a file browser, showing you the contents of your picture folders, and updating them automatically if you change or add to your pictures. Photos are displayed in a single catalog, though, so it’s one step ahead of Adobe Bridge, and Picasa is extremely fast at searching, even when you have tens of thousands of pictures.
If you can get used to its quirks, Picasa packs a lot of functionality into a free application.
The photo-enhancement tools are good, too. They’re not particularly sophisticated, and they certainly don’t rival a proper image-editing program like Photoshop or even Elements, but you can do some clever and useful things such as geotagging, face detection, and graduated filter effects, as well as regular, everyday tone and color enhancements.
Picasa also integrates with Google’s free web albums, automatically synchronizing any changes you make online or in the Picasa app. Compared to other Mac applications, though, Picasa is pretty odd, both in the way it displays folders and in the design and operation of its image-fixing tools. But hey, it’s free!
The bottom line. Picasa 3 (free, picasa.google.com) will appeal to cheapskates, Google fanatics, and any iPhoto defectors looking for a fast, simple, and free photo-cataloguing tool.
sling74
March 07, 2011 at 8:52pm
FYI, when importing a SET of images into a new iPhoto library, the size of the library is FOUR TIMES the size of the same set of photos imported using the image transfer option. I would assume that Aperture will cause the same increase in "required hard drive space" since both programs are from Apple.
This is NOT to say that Aperture is the wrong choice as there are pros listed in the comments above. However, it is another consideration since an Aperture (or iPhoto) library will take more space on your hard drive or external drive (in my case).
jimweil
December 24, 2010 at 8:59am
How come Gimp (open source free Photoshop clone) was not mentioned?
iwbyte
December 09, 2010 at 4:24pm
Great article! Its nice to know that I made a good decision picking iPhoto :)
I also would be interested in knowing how to organize digital footage.
My specific issue is that i have a digital camera that takes HD footage, as well as an iPhone 4 and possibly a Flip in the future. I've been taking less and less video as I worry about storing and finding it all
middlebass
December 06, 2010 at 6:56pm
Mostly an excellent article, but more than a bit unfair in its comparison of Aperture vs. Lightroom. Lightroom not only handles RAW files, but also allows you to use the RAW interface to enhance JPGs with excellent results. For those of us who shoot only RAW or mostly RAW, it's a no-brainer to use Lightroom.
I haven't found Lightroom to be sluggish even with 800 photos in a collection, and even if it is slightly slower than Aperture that's hardly a big deal.
Stating that "folders and collections don't integrate" and that that is a negative, however, means that the author doesn't understand that this feature is part of the beauty of Lightroom. There is a many-to-many relationship between the two. A folder can have images in many collections, and a collection can have images from many folders. If you have a scanned photo album page with 4 photos, this feature allows you to have the page (image) only once in a folder, but to have 4 individual collection items, each of which is a cropped, rotated and enhanced part of the album page that contains exactly one photo. Then when and if you need to turn the collection into a new folder, you simply export it.
In the past, you would have had to save five different images. Now you have just one until you decide to do something with one of the "virtual" images in a different program.
Bob Forsberg
December 03, 2010 at 1:55pm
Please keep simple, free flowing, instructive, informational articles like these forthcoming.
MacLife seems to have captured what most readers find interesting, while keeping some author's poor attempts at humor and personal ramblings that most of us find boring, in check. Keep up the great work.
leicaman
December 02, 2010 at 8:47am
A major benefit you missed with Aperture over Lightroom is that Aperture has much more comprehensive support for video. If you have a DSLR that shoots video, Aperture clearly supports your camera better than Lightroom, which doesn't seem to know what to do with video other than store it.
Aperture can also combine videos and stills and export them as Quicktime movies.
Of course, if you're a Final Cut Pro user, that's probably not an issue.
Rich364
December 02, 2010 at 5:44am
Excellent article... thanks for taking the time to write such an easy to read and detailed piece. I've been hoping to find something like this.
Now I can only hope that someone will write a similar article about home movie footage. I've been trying to figure out the best way to store footage taken from my iPhone and my HD Camcorder. Should I keep the files in Aperture, iMovie... or switch to Final Cut (or some other program)?
It seems like I should keep the iPhone video footage in the same event folders as the photos I've taken (in Aperture) - and then keep the Camcorder footage in iMovie (since they're usually longer in length). However, I hate having my video footage stored in two different locations and accessed by two different programs (years from now I'd have to figure out where to find the footage). And when I use iMovie's ability to show Aperture files in the Event List, it separates the footage with Aperture Stuff grouped together and iMovie stuff grouped separately (which can be confusing if I've shot footage from the same event with both the iPhone and the Camcorder).
I hope to see a future MacLife article to address this topic... but in the mean time, thanks again.
