Photography Software

I was recently browsing through tips & tricks for Mac OS X and I ran across a trick for inverting colors on a display and a monitor. You can use the ‘inverting colors’ function as a photographer on Mac OS X during editing and post-production. For example, if you have a bright picture or a picture with a big area with bright colors (for example the white color) and you need to locate, edit, heal and clone out dark spots (sensor dust, airplanes, birds, etc.), inverting colors can be very handy, especially when your eyes feel tired in finding these little spots. Inverting colors in post-processing in such situations is just perfect because its much easier to find bright spots on the dark background rather than the opposite.

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It’s official: I’ve switched over to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. I know that some of you followed previously my experience with testing Apple’s Aperture 3 when it came out. Unfortunately, the processing speed of RAW files in Aperture 3 became simply unacceptable for me – waiting for 4 minutes for a program to process some adjustments within an image can be painful and a big time-waster as you can imagine.

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One of the most interesting (and probably unexpected features when Aperture 3 was first released) is the possibility to edit and compile movies from pictures, videos and sound files. I already heard from few people the following question: Ok, but iMovie does the same thing, so why do I need the same feature in Aperture 3? Some of you would react quite right saying that it’s finally possible to manage both pictures and videos from one application (Aperture 3) and compile a nice movie within it. I agree, the video features and the possibility to create slideshows with audio and video from within Aperture 3 makes it quite a powerful tool. But I believe that there is a second and even more important answer to the question: Why video in Aperture 3, which is essentially a photography software and not a movie-making software?

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You might recall that I mentioned in my previous blog article I would be moving away from Aperture 3 and I promised to tell you why. Well, things have changed in the past week and they’ve changed quite dramatically, but in a good sense. Apple released update to Aperture 3 with the number 3.0.2 on 25 March 2010. Although, this update number looks insignificant, it includes many crucial updates and fixes (at least for the most part) what was bothering me the most: extremely low performance of Aperture 3. The detailed description of the fixes in Aperture 3.0.2 update are provided on Apple’s website here.

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I’ve been testing Aperture 3 for a couple of weeks now an my experience with it as a photographer is very mixed. Besides being very positively surprised with new features, there are things that make me switch to alternative programs (next blog article will be on that). But for now, I want to share with you my ‘positive’ conclusion: I don’t need additional plugins while using Aperture 3 except for BorderFX Aperture Plugin.

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