if you take digital photos, you’ll want to be able to edit them. even if you are a novice (like me) simple things like cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast and levels can make a lot of difference. there are lots of software tools out there whether they come with your camera free or with your computer or the likes of photoshop that enable you to edit photos. the important thing is finding something that works for you.

a new development over the last year or so that seems to be aimed at pro photographers is the advent of two programmes – aperture and lightroom – that add a whole bunch of different features beyond editing. aperture is an apple product and lightroom is adobe’s equivalent. the kinds of thing they do is enable you to catalogue your photos in a library, tag them with keywords so that they are easily findable via that and other search tools, compare and quickly sort through photos to select what ones you want to keep, edit them with very powerful tools, arrange them in collections/folders, create slideshows and web albums and export the photos for web or print as contact sheets or whatever. the way the editing works which is neat is that your original file is kept in tact and all of your edits and so on are a separate data file so you can edit and revert to the original.

i am not going to attempt to do an in depth review of either piece of software. you can google and find those elsewhere but i’ll attempt a pleb’s view. when
i was in the apple store waiting to meet someone recently in birmingham
i tried aperture on one of the macs in the store. i was hooked
immediately. it was intuitive, typical apple and i could immediately see the use of it. i didn’t realise it at the time but you can download a 30 day trial of the latest version – you will need a powerful mac to run it by all accounts. intrigued i picked up a few computer mags waiting for the train and read up on aperture which was when i read about lightroom in compare and contrast sort of articles. the wisdom i gleaned was that whilst this version of aperture is much much better than earlier versions lightroom has the edge. so… i then looked for lightroom and found that it is a free public beta. what a beta is is a version of software that is being developed. the idea is that users can road test it and give feedback that will help shape the full release at a later date. and here’s the good bit – it’s free… so i downloaded it and tried it out this weekend.

i am not a pro photographer – i just love taking pictures and looking at them and other peoples. but this weekend would be a good example for me of how i might want to work with some photos – i was at a wedding and took a bunch of photos (40 or so) and was at grace on sunday night and took a bunch more (12 or so). typically i want to get the photos on the computer, flick through them easily, delete immediately any that i don’t want (i may have done this with some on the camera in advance), then go through and edit where required, i’ll also have a few similar ones to look at and decide which are the best, before uploading them to flickr or whatever. if you take photos i guess you’ll do something similar. using lightroom was probably slower than normal for me editing the photos because i was  learning a new piece of software (with no help files) but it is a very powerful tool. i really like the ease of adjusting tones, white balance and all those kind of things. if you are familar with photoshop you’ll love it. i also love the way you can flip from seeing a selection of your photos to just one at whatever scale and so on. i hope i am not hooked (as i guess the beta will run out?). if you take quite a few photos you might want to give it or aperture a try. my guess is that they will both end up being pretty powerful similar kinds of tools. don’t be put off by the pro tag on the software – definitely good for enthusiatic amateurs like me.

if you are interested the wedding photos from the weekend were edited in lightroom and just because i could i created a pretty slideshow of them here . i went for the flash version so you’ll need version 8 of the flash plugin i think. computers, technology – clever stuff ain’t it and it just seems to get smarter…