Galleries Updated
Before it was a UI blog, All About Balance was the home of my photography from 2003 to 2006. Those photos are back online (Galleries) and I’m working on several years worth of backlogged images, which I hope to process and upload in the coming weeks.
I was an early adopter of Apple’s Aperture. The idea of eliminating my bubble-gum-and-paper-clips RAW “workflow” (I use the term more loosely than it’s ever been) was, and still is very attractive. As with any version 1 product, there were glitches. The most unfortunate of which was the removal of my PowerMac Dual Core 2.0 GHz from the supported platforms list. Rather, the platform is supported but performance is so poor I opted to stick with the devil I knew. Not to mention RAW conversion quality issues, lagging support for bodies (e.g. Nikon D200) and an extraordinarily high price tag… Aperture 2 has been released, but I just can’t imagine performance has increased to the point where my now 3 year old PowerMac can keep up.
Along came Adobe with Lightroom. Over the course of 3 weeks, I used a beta version of Lightroom to cull 1500 images from my trip to Africa. Performance was terrific. RAW was terrific and already you could see the marked improvement in usability over their other tools.
Two years later, Lightroom is now at 1.4 and I’m working on understanding the ins and outs before importing all of my images, specifically with respect to backup and restore. That process does not seem well understood by many, and it needs to be bulletproof for me to take the plunge. Aperture had it right with their notion of a Vault, and first-class support in the UI as we’ve come to expect from Apple.
Currently on the lookout for good Lightroom books as I start to experiment…