This isn’t a cool workflow of mine, but I’m trying to figure one out as I find how I edit my photos is very basic. I have over 10,000 photos from the past decade and I simply use Edit > Crop / Rotate > Auto Enhance > maybe Brighten / Darken and that’s it. Then I share them to family or add them to a local album (e.g. car photos). That’s it.
I do have Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer installed, but exporting and re-importing photos seems a lot of work. But more so, when I learned to use some of Affinity’s advanced features, it was fine for say editing a funny pic to send to friends, or editing out blemishes etc. but for real world, real memories and sentimentally valuable photos… how do you actually use it / make edits that make sense? You know… I’m no expert but would like to know from you guys what I could be doing when editing to make my photos better quality.
What you’re doing is generally all that’s needed with modern cameras and phones. Increasing vibrancy is the other one I like.
I have about 300 really favourite photos out of my 5000 photo library (I delete aggressively).
From that subset, I’d guess I have done further editing on about 80 of them only. I’d use Pixelmator or similar to adjust the black and shadows, shift colours (eg to make the sea more blue or green), remove distracting twigs or people, sharpen eyes, soften/darken backgrounds.
But again, I only bother on the best of my best photos.
I generally do the same as you have specified. When a photo cannot be improved in Photos (no matter what I try it looks bad), I use Pixelmator Pro. I find it has much more advanced tools for improving images and can rescue photos taken in poor conditions. I also use the Affinity applications, but for preparing and creating images for websites rather than touching up photos.
I import all images - phone or camera - to my Mac, and the images stay there. I put cameraphone pics into Photos, and camera images get copied off the SD card and managed and corrected in Lightroom/Photshop.
If I want to edit/share images on iOS I’ll use one of several iOS apps for that, but the serious editing and storage remains on the Mac.
I import from a card or from Photos.app (iPhone synched pictures). Take photos without a gps data into HoudahGeo and geotag, or sometimes correct wrong geotag info. Import into a DAM. Reject obvious failures, then rate each photo. I often need to straighten horizons before I can look at a picture, or sometimes I need to crop before I can decide if I’ll keep it or reject it.
Later passes include selecting photos for more work. First keywording pass is person / thing / type, second is place. Finally keepers get the pithiest of captions or version names, usually as part of a series.
Hoping to migrate to using a program called Photo Mechanic to do the culling and hopefully easier keyword tagging, but so far I don’t have that workflow down yet.
Yes, I use all the apps I mentioned in iOS and MacOS. I prefer using Affinity Designer in particular in iOS because the pencil makes creating new shapes easier, and I love the fact these apps are all equally powerful no matter which platform I’m on.
I’m sure my system is overkill for your needs but I use LightRoom Classic on my desktop iMac. I hardly ever edit any photos anyway and the nondestructive editing in LightRoom is perfect so I don’t mess with my originals. I never leave photos on my phone or camera card and I don’t use Apple photos. I do use PhotoSync as a transport mechanism from devices to my Mac.
Why are you concerned? And what do you consider large? I know folks with LightRoom catalogs that are in the +500K photos range. I am typically taking around 3k photos a year just with my phone. Storage of photos is outside of LR and I do that on our server but also backed up nightly and soon to be archived on Amazon Glacier. I don’t really care how many I have. My LR Catalog is also the repository fo the metadata on all the historical family photos I am digitizing.
Yes, LR is a subscription. But it’s one I pay for gladly due to the power of the program.
For me, library size is not an issue of how much space it will take on disk, but more that having too many photos dilutes the best ones.
I like to keep at least one photo of each person at each event, but I might delete others. Having said that, I might sometimes simply hide photos or put them away somewhere rather than deleting them just in case if it’s a very special occasion.
But the photo library that I keep on my phone and all my devices has only the photos I want to look at in it. In theory!
As for deleting memories being silly, how many photos of Uncle Bob do you need to remember how much he enjoyed birthday parties? One or two choice images per party is more than enough for me, but everyone is different and this is very personal territory really.
Disclaimer: I am not throwing shade here, just presenting a different opinion.
This sounds good but tagging takes time, and tagging well takes significant time, which is the reason I’ve never gotten into tagging anything. I just can’t justify the time required.
Oogie,
How do you tell ahead of time if an app is non-destructive? I do not like to mess are with my originals either. I usually just make duplicates, if I don’t know.
As far as I know the ONLY app that does non-destructive editing of photos is LightRoom. I know that Photoshop, GIMP and Photos all make permanent changes to your pictures when you edit them.
I sit corrected. I thought that once you selected save Photos applied the changes and that was it. OTOH later in that article there is a mention that only a single app or extensions changes are saved so there is still a destructive part of editing in Photos.
Nowadays there are quite a lot of non destructive editors other than Lightroom: ON1 Photo Raw, Exposure X4, Capture One…
Don’t remember if Affinity Photo does it or not.
Anyway they usually tell you in the product page
Thanks, Oogie! I thought there were a lot more. As I am rather compulsive, I usually make duplicates.
Oops, I see otherwise!
I use ios.
If you have copies, is there any way you can determine which photo is the original? Does it even matter any more?
Have you seen the new iPhones? The cameras are astounding! Too bad I don’t have a thousand dollars to devote to one. I’m looking for a digital camera on eBay instead. Any recommendations? I want a telephoto or, better yet, a zoom.
now so I can’t check there.