Software to editing photos?

[Texas_Toast]

In a former lifetime I was a serious amateur photographer, but I have been away from that for basically 20 years.

And because I am starting an online business early next year, and because I (unexpectedly) took several hundred photos at our work holiday party, I need some help getting back up to speed ASAP!!!

My first challenge is finding an *easy* and *affordable* way to do basic photo editing. (Things like rotating images, changing the dimensions, and creating thumbnails/smaller images optimized for the web/mobile.)

What do you use for basic photo editing on your Mac?

This past summer, a guy at the local camera shop recommended Adobe Lightroom over Photoshop because he said it is better at doing basic editing (e.g. cropping, rotating, resizing, optimizing) plus you can apparently "batch" large numbers of photos.

That sounds good, but I don't want to put my business/personal photos on anyone's "Cloud", and I'm not crazy about having to pay every month for something I may not use regularly!!

Any suggestions on a solution that I can learn ASAP and use to edit my holiday photos so they are ready on Monday for work, but also something that will grow with my start up business?

 

[MacNut]

Preview will do basic crop/editing.

 

[kallisti]

Apple's Photos program will do all of the things you outlined. Plus it's already on your Mac and thus free. It's more powerful than the old iPhoto but not as powerful as the now defunct Aperture.

Photoshop is not easy or intuitive (though might be worth learning at some point). Lightroom Classic is fairly robust and is an order of magnitude easier to learn than Photoshop. Both Adobe products require a subscription, though neither requires use of the "Cloud".

Confusingly, Adobe does have a Cloud-based version of Lightroom that is not as powerful as Lightroom Classic. It also requires a subscription (though all of these fall into the same subscription--something like "Photography subsciption").

There are many other editing softwares out there (and I expect others will chime in). But I think Adobe's products are the gold standard and used by most photographers.

But Apple Photos sound like it will meet your needs right now and you already have it.

 

[Texas_Toast]

@kallisti & @MacNut,

Thanks for the reply!

Apple's Photos program will do all of the things you outlined. Plus it's already on your Mac and thus free. It's more powerful than the old iPhoto but not as powerful as the now defunct Aperture.

I'm so clueless about consumer things on my Mac! ?

Will Photos do "optimization" on photos to make them ready for the web and mobile? (I know that when I used Photoshop long ago ot had some algoithms that would make photos as small in file size as possible but to where you could easily descern any quality loss online.)


Could I learn how to do what I need tonight? (I'm trying to build a website and get these photos up by Monday morning - what a task?!)

Photoshop is not easy or intuitive (though might be worth learning at some point).

Once my business is online, I want to buy some books and learn modern Photoshop, but I know the learning curve is steep!

Lightroom Classic is fairly robust and is an order of magnitude easier to learn than Photoshop. Both Adobe products require a subscription, though neither requires use of the "Cloud".

Confusingly, Adobe does have a Cloud-based version of Lightroom that is not as powerful as Lightroom Classic. It also requires a subscription (though all of these fall into the same subscription--something like "Photography subsciption").

So there is no way to outright buy Photoshop or Lghtroom?

And with both, is there a way for me to keep all of my photos/work on my local Mac? (It makes me *very* nervous people business/personal photos on someone else's servers or "The Cloud"!!!)

There are many other editing softwares out there (and I expect others will chime in). But I think Adobe's products are the gold standard and used by most photographers.

But Apple Photos sound like it will meet your needs right now and you already have it.

So maybe I can use Apple Photos to get my work photos online by Monday, and then for my business I can look into buying a subscription for Photoshop and or Lightroom?

 

[r.harris1]

Answering a few of the questions above:

• There's no way to outright purchase Photoshop or Lightroom. They only offer subscription, either monthly or yearly (which you can pay in full or by month).
• Yes, you should be able to get your photos online with Photos by Monday. It doesn't give you anything like the control you would be used to in Photoshop and it's not batch centric, but you can export multiple photos at a time.
• Other options to Photoshop and Lightroom that you can purchase outright include Affinity Photo (for Photoshop) and Capture One or DxO Optics Pro for Lightroom. Pixelmator Pro, Luminar, On1 Photo Raw round this list out and others will chime in with their favorites too. The great thing is that in the last 20 years, there are many other players, and depending on your specific needs, there's no need at all for purchasing an Adobe product. That said, I've found the Adobe subscription to be very useful, if for nothing else other than Photoshop. My own workflow is ingest, rating, culling, renaming, keywording with Photo Mechanic, then usually Capture One for raw processing and most of my other image work. I will occasionally go into Photoshop if I really need to get at the pixels.
• You should be able to use Photos pretty quickly. It's reasonably intuitive and as long as you're not after layers and local brushes and things like that, you should be good to go. It's got the normal exposure and color tools, levels and curves. It does a reasonable job at noise reduction and sharpening. It even does some basic healing and red-eye correction if you need that. It should be noted too that Photos can be much more powerful if you also purchase tools like Luminar and Pixelmator Pro and using the Photos concept of extensions. While editing an image in Photos, you can open an extension for Luminar for example and begin to work with layers and local brushes, albeit only on JPGs at this time.

 

[Texas_Toast]

@r.harris1,

Thanks for the comments!

I should mention that I am doing this on a MacBook Pro Retina with macOS Sierra - I am a s-l-o-w adopter!

Hopefully that is not a problem?

All of these choices sound overwhelming - much like modern photography?!

For my nearly 1,000 work photos, I guess my immediate goals are this...

- Create thumbnails I can put up on a website that I built.
- Thumbnails should be optimized for the web/mobile as far as file-size, photo-dimensions, and resolution.
- Create thumbnails for the movie I took with my iPhone for the website gallery
- Maybe adjust colors and lightness if needed


I have some more questions if you all don't mind the additional questions... ?

 

[kallisti]

@kallisti & @MacNut,

Thanks for the reply!




I'm so clueless about consumer things on my Mac! ?

Will Photos do "optimization" on photos to make them ready for the web and mobile? (I know that when I used Photoshop long ago ot had some algoithms that would make photos as small in file size as possible but to where you could easily descern any quality loss online.)


Could I learn how to do what I need tonight? (I'm trying to build a website and get these photos up by Monday morning - what a task?!)




Once my business is online, I want to buy some books and learn modern Photoshop, but I know the learning curve is steep!




So there is no way to outright buy Photoshop or Lghtroom?

And with both, is there a way for me to keep all of my photos/work on my local Mac? (It makes me *very* nervous people business/personal photos on someone else's servers or "The Cloud"!!!)




So maybe I can use Apple Photos to get my work photos online by Monday, and then for my business I can look into buying a subscription for Photoshop and or Lightroom?

I don't routinely use Photos, so I'm not sure about its export options. You'd have to look through the menus (which shouldn't take much time). Sorry I can't directly answer this question.

Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom Classic (LR Classic or just LR) are different tools though they integrate well. LR tends to be much more intuitive and reflects how a photographer thinks when viewing their images and wanting to make changes. Much of the process involves adjusting sliders and seeing the effects of the adjustments in real time. You can change the white balance easily. Via sliders you can adjust overall exposure, highlight exposure, shadow exposure, white point, black point. You can adjust the color saturation via a slider. You can adjust the contrast. You can straighten a photo. You can adjust the perspective of a photo. You can sharpen a photo. You can remove noise. There are also tools remove spots or even clone out elements. There are tools to create gradients to change the exposure (or other adjustments) along a gradient (often used to darken a sky for example). There are tools to make adjustments to just parts of an image without needing to mask it out. LR is very easy to use on a basic level and also extremely powerful once you get past the basics. All of the edits are non-destructive, meaning nothing you do will screw up your original file. For many images, just hitting the "auto" button in the develop module will get you close to where you want to be without having to fiddle with anything else ("close" being the operative word, depending on how involved you want to be in post-processing).

PS is an entirely different beast. The logic behind it as a tool isn't as intuitive as LR. But it is extremely powerful. For PS it's about creating layers that mask out certain parts of the image and allow you to adjust each layer individually before merging them into a final image. So you can create a layer of text (possibly important for your online business) that you can tweak and move around without affecting anything else in the image.

Or you can mask out certain parts of the image in PS with great precision and then make adjustments to these specific parts. With LR you can something similar but it isn't nearly as precise. PS lets you adjust your image at the pixel level while with LR the local adjustments are more gross.

LR is much more intuitive and is often "good enough". PS allows you to do some things that aren't possible in LR. Adding text to an image is the most obvious, but that doesn't come close to exploiting the power of PS. But all of this comes at a cost, namely that it requires time and effort to learn PS. Depending on your requirements, this may or may not be worth it in either the short term or the long term.

For both LR (specifically referring to Classic) and PS, you can store your images locally without the need for the cloud.

Currently there is no way to outright buy either LR or PS. I was initially skeptical of the subscription model, but the photography subscription isn't too expensive (at least for where I'm at) and both programs get frequent updates and bug fixes. I fire them up multiple times during a normal week and it ends up being worth it for me. Obviously can't speak for you.

Working with Apple Photos should give you enough time to get all your photos processed by Monday. I think LR is intuitive enough that it would also work. It is doubtful you could figure out PS in time.

Hope all of this helps

 

[r.harris1]

I don't mind at all and if I'm not lurking, I'm sure others will be able to help. I don't do video so I don't know how well Photos does in that regard, but you should be able to do the things you want. No batch editing in Photos so that's going to be one at a time, unfortunately. But you can export as many images as you want, to whatever size you want (there's a "Custom" size option under the Export dialog). I can't promise that it will be a great experience per se but you can certainly do it, if I understand your requirements correctly.

 

[Texas_Toast]

@kallisti,

Sorry for the delay - the "New message" icon doesn't seem to be working?!

Awesome response!

So, based on the little you know about my immediate and log-term needs, would you consider pulling the trigger on Lightroom tonight, or is that too much too soon?

(On a side-note, I cannot believe that I am sacrificing my entire 4-day weekend to put up photos from the holiday party at work?! But I figure it is a way to impress people, plus I can use a lot of the stuff I learned this weekend for my e-commerce site!)

I still have to finish coding the site I made ad-hoc, but I also want to work smart when it comes to these photos and the ones I'll need for my business.

I tend to not like the "easy" path as you usually get burned later. Then again, I am running out of time to get this ad-hoc project done?!

Considering my long term needs, I should stopbeing a cheap *ss and just pony up for the $10/month. I suppose that isn't much, I just hate the "pay forever and never own what you keep re-buying" model!

I do expect to re-learn Photoshop in 2020, just not sure when. So I suppose getting into the dobe suite has advantages.

For my immediate needs, I need an easy, yet powerful way to take over 1,000 2MB photos shot on my iPhone and resize then down to 200px by whatever and make the file-sizes for the thumbails maybe 50-100k so it doesn't choke my website. (I probably need a more advanced filter/algorithm to do like Photoshop does, but who knows?!)

I agree that Photoshop is out of the question - that will take me 6-12 months to re-learn!

It is good if I can use "Cloud" versions of Adobe software BUT keep all of my photos LOCAL on my machine. (I still prefer having a local copy, but there are advantages to "Software as a Service" (SaaS) as long as you can control your data...)

So what do you all think?

BTW, I can see this forum would be a great resource for me as I re-learn things and try to get my business going in 2020! ?

 

[Texas_Toast]

I don't mind at all and if I'm not lurking, I'm sure others will be able to help. I don't do video so I don't know how well Photos does in that regard, but you should be able to do the things you want. No batch editing in Photos so that's going to be one at a time, unfortunately. But you can export as many images as you want, to whatever size you want (there's a "Custom" size option under the Export dialog). I can't promise that it will be a great experience per se but you can certainly do it, if I understand your requirements correctly.

As far as Apple Photos (on macOS Sierra) goes...

1.) What is stored in "Library Location" under Preferences? Just photo metadata, or my actual photos?

2.) Would it be better to create a dedicated "PHOTOS" work wolder under "Documents" and save all settings there? (I tend to do this for most things so all of my work and settings gets saved in my Home directory where I know things are at and not in some obscure place I might know exists or forget to backup or whatever?!)

3.) Where would I begin? Create a New Album? New Book? Other?


I geuss everyone's answers to my above questions will determine if I go down the Apple Photos path or take the leap and try Lightroom. (Of course, it would hurt to learn the basics of Photos while I have the help!)

Look forward to hearing back from you. In the mean time, I am busy trying to get my site done as well! ?

 

[r.harris1]

@Texas_Toast I actually think that Lightroom would be best approach when all is said and done. As @kallisti notes, it's reasonably intuitive and gives you much more exporting capabilities. I won't be able to help a ton with it since I don't use it myself (I use Capture One, but the idea is the same).

There are GAZILLIONS of sites to help you learn Lightroom and obviously, you can start at Adobe:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/tutorials.html


One question I have for you is what made you decide to roll your own website rather than using a service like SmugMug or Zenfolio (or other similar ones) which specialize in hosting images?

If you are going the quick and dirty route with Photos, I wouldn't overthink it too much and do too much beyond the default settings (you can mess around with it later, once you get your Monday deliverable in place). An album should do the trick, but first import if you haven't already and get familiar with the basic editing tools. If your camera is the iPhone, it's likely that everything should automatically show up in Photos on your Mac if everything is set up correctly.

Photos is Library/Catalog based and unless it is referenced (you specifically have to choose this), it stores the images and edits in the catalog. It has the option to back those images up to iCloud if you prefer. Photos, like Lightroom, Capture One, etc, is a "parametric editor", meaning (unlike Photoshop) it's saves the raw image and the operations it does on top of it, displaying those operations in the order you did them when you view the image on the screen. You can always completely undo the work and it never affects the raw image itself.

 

[revmacian]

Unfortunately, "easy" and "affordable" often mean "basic". However, there is an app called GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) which is free of charge. It runs natively on MacOS but it has a bit of a learning curve. I have been using it for almost a decade and it's quite powerful. Being that GIMP is free, it won't hurt to check it out. GIMP has been around long enough to have a community and many people have posted tutorials and videos from which we can learn.

GIMP


There is also Affinity Photo. I have been using this app as a photoshop replacement and it also seems quite powerful, but it isn't free. You might want to read about it and see if it will fit your needs.

Affinity Photo

 

[kallisti]

I *really* don't want to lead you astray.

Since it seems you have experience with PS, you will likely want to go back to using it in the future. There is tight integration between LR and PS (not surprisingly).

I personally love LR. For most of my photos, it alone is adequate. There are times I need PS. There are times I use third-party plugins. But the LR workflow works quite well for my needs.

I think LR is intuitive enough that it would be a wash in comparison to Photos. The benefit of working with it this weekend is that the things you learn along the way will be usable going forward. Learning Photos this weekend likely won't help you in the long-term.

Your specific needs regarding batch processing would also steer you toward LR as I don't think Photos can do that. The problem is that I personally *don't* batch process files in LR, so I won't be able to offer help in that regard. I do know that it is possible to export a group of files with all of the same export settings, that's something I do all the time.

If you decide to do a trial of LR, you will need to import all of the photos into LR (obviously). Save all of them on your desktop (or wherever else) and then import them into LR. Might be possible to plug your iPhone into your Mac and then LR will see it as a source. If you have "copy and save" set on the LR import, it will make copies of the files for your LR library. You can then delete the originals from wherever you stored them.

In LR, you can then quickly review all the images and assign star ratings to them (by pressing the 1-5 buttons when you have an image highlighted). I imagine that there are some images out of the 1000 that are crap and you don't want to share. You can then filter the images by star rating to only see the ones that are good enough to work on more and potentially post.

Again, I'm not sure how to batch process in LR. For any particular image, you can "copy" adjustments you've made in one image (in the development module) and then "paste" them into other images. For my own shooting at events, many adjustments (with the possible exception of white balance and sharpening) don't carry over well to other images.

Once you have culled your images (by using the star ratings) and pasted global adjustments (like WB and sharpening that likely apply to all of the images), then you have to go through each image individually. I would start by hitting the "auto" button in the develop module on one image. Depending on what it looks like, you may want to tweak it a bit by adjusting sliders. You can copy these adjustments and then paste them onto other images, but depending on the lighting this may or may not work well. You may also want to make other adjustments on individual images (a common one being "level" while making sure to click the checkbox to crop the image after the adjustment).

You can obviously go full out by tweaking each image in complex ways, but for an office party that probably isn't necessary. You aren't processing these images for printing on a wall in your home, you are looking for down-and-dirty edits that will make them look pleasing on a web page.

Once you are happy with the pics you plan to share, change the star rating to one higher for all of these images. Then change the display star rating in the lower right so it only shows these pics.

Then highlight all of these pics (click on the first and then shift-click on the last to highlight them all). Now right-click on one of them (I think it's control-click but it could be command-click) and scroll down the options to export.

In the export dialog you can make all of your export decisions for the group of pics (including where to export them to, file type to export them as, file size, export sharpening, etc.). I think there is an option to export for web, but I'm not certain.

You can also save the highlighted pics as a collection which will make it easy to access in the future and will also let you add other pics to the collection that weren't taken on the same day.

This is very much a crash-course to get you started. There might be some things you want to do that I can't help you with because it isn't a part of my workflow. Luckily the internet exists and google is a thing .

If you are seriously thinking about using Adobe products, I would suggest biting the bullet and signing up for an Adobe photography 20GB subscription tonight. Then downloading Lightroom Classic. I'm not sure Photos would be any more intuitive and some quick internet searching could automate some of your workflow in a way that Photos isn't capable of. But I'm not overly facile with Photos, so I could be wrong.

Best of luck!!

 

[Texas_Toast]

@Texas_Toast I actually think that Lightroom would be best approach when all is said and done. As @kallisti notes, it's reasonably intuitive and gives you much more exporting capabilities. I won't be able to help a ton with it since I don't use it myself (I use Capture One, but the idea is the same).

There are GAZILLIONS of sites to help you learn Lightroom and obviously, you can start at Adobe:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/tutorials.html

I'm cooking supper now and in between all that I will start checking out Adobe's website and reading up on Lightroom.

One question I have for you is what made you decide to roll your own website rather than using a service like SmugMug or Zenfolio (or other similar ones) which specialize in hosting images?

I work in IT. I have no clue about computers when it comes to consumer stuff. Social media virgin. (Proud of it.) Never owned a cell phone, except for my $800 iPhone which has no SIM card and I use as a camera. And so on and so forth. I also go against the grain...

Another reason, I suppose, is that a lot of what I have learned to do in the last 4 days I can use to finish up my e-commerce site (e.g. Lightroom).

If you are going the quick and dirty route with Photos, I wouldn't overthink it too much and do too much beyond the default settings (you can mess around with it later, once you get your Monday deliverable in place). An album should do the trick, but first import if you haven't already and get familiar with the basic editing tools. If your camera is the iPhone, it's likely that everything should automatically show up in Photos on your Mac if everything is set up correctly.

I do have a digitial SLR, but I never thought to bring it to the holiday party - bummer!

All of the photos are in my "PHOTOGRAHY" folder in my main personal folder.

Photos is Library/Catalog based and unless it is referenced (you specifically have to choose this), it stores the images and edits in the catalog. It has the option to back those images up to iCloud if you prefer. Photos, like Lightroom, Capture One, etc, is a "parametric editor", meaning (unlike Photoshop) it's saves the raw image and the operations it does on top of it, displaying those operations in the order you did them when you view the image on the screen. You can always completely undo the work and it never affects the raw image itself.

So can I store Photos/Lightroom settings in a folder of my choosing? (I prefer to not store preferences/settings/metadata/actual data in operating system zones, but in my personal folder structure. OS in default spot and my data in my data area.)

Thanks for all of the help so far, everyone!

Making good progress!

@r.harris1, if you have time, I have another question in this forum about oddly rotating photos from my iPhone! ;-)
[automerge]1575158707[/automerge]

Unfortunately, "easy" and "affordable" often mean "basic". However, there is an app called GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) which is free of charge. It runs natively on MacOS but it has a bit of a learning curve. I have been using it for almost a decade and it's quite powerful. Being that GIMP is free, it won't hurt to check it out. GIMP has been around long enough to have a community and many people have posted tutorials and videos from which we can learn.

GIMP


There is also Affinity Photo. I have been using this app as a photoshop replacement and it also seems quite powerful, but it isn't free. You might want to read about it and see if it will fit your needs.

Affinity Photo

Actually I have/had GIMP on one of Macs.

One reason I am inquiring about Adober Lightroom is that I am starting to see that sometimes it makes sense to go over to the dark side (i.e. proprietary) because the support is so superior to open-source.

Good idea though!
[automerge]1575159002[/automerge]
Getting ready to eat some food - here is hoping you all will be around later tonight or tomorrow?!

Thanks for all of the help so far!!

 

[r.harris1]

I write software for a living and can certainly build websites. But I have neither the interest nor the time to write something like a SmugMug when others who know what they are doing have taken care of it for me ?. I’d rather do photography in my spare time.

As for why the image gets rotated on your website, I don’t know, unfortunately, as I have never had that happen on the sites I use.

On your question of storing settings, not sure exactly what you mean - can you clarify? I don’t specifically store settings in what I do, maybe with the exception sidecars, which I store with images. I do store my images and associated metadata (sidecars) in a directory or directories of my choosing and also on a series of directories and backup locations, but that’s for my own non-Photos workflow.

 

[kallisti]

@r.harris1, if you have time, I have another question in this forum about oddly rotating photos from my iPhone! ;-)

Hope dinner turns out well .

You've piqued my interest. I'm actually curious about your question. Not sure what you mean by "oddly rotating photos from my iPhone". Fixing photo rotation in post? Your iPhone is oddly rotating images?

[Edit: ah, after reading the reply from @r.harris1 it seems I missed part of the conversation. Mea culpa.]

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Darktable is a LR alternative. Not As simple as Lr to use, but it does a lot and it’s totally free.

 

[Texas_Toast]

I *really* don't want to lead you astray.

You guys are doing great so far of helping me out! ?

Since it seems you have experience with PS, you will likely want to go back to using it in the future. There is tight integration between LR and PS (not surprisingly).

Well, I haven't used it in 20 years, so it's like I have never used it.

I think LR is intuitive enough that it would be a wash in comparison to Photos. The benefit of working with it this weekend is that the things you learn along the way will be usable going forward. Learning Photos this weekend likely won't help you in the long-term.

That was my thinking as well.

Your specific needs regarding batch processing would also steer you toward LR as I don't think Photos can do that. The problem is that I personally *don't* batch process files in LR, so I won't be able to offer help in that regard. I do know that it is possible to export a group of files with all of the same export settings, that's something I do all the time.

A guy at the local camera shop this summer mentioned the batch-processing feature and recommended it as part of my workflow.

If you decide to do a trial of LR, you will need to import all of the photos into LR...

This is very much a crash-course to get you started. There might be some things you want to do that I can't help you with because it isn't a part of my workflow.

Thanks for the tips!

If you are seriously thinking about using Adobe products, I would suggest biting the bullet and signing up for an Adobe photography 20GB subscription tonight. Then downloading Lightroom Classic. I'm not sure Photos would be any more intuitive and some quick internet searching could automate some of your workflow in a way that Photos isn't capable of. But I'm not overly facile with Photos, so I could be wrong.

Best of luck!!

I'll check things out after supper...

 

[Texas_Toast]

I write software for a living and can certainly build websites. But I have neither the interest nor the time to write something like a SmugMug when others who know what they are doing have taken care of it for me ?. I’d rather do photography in my spare time.

I never stopped to think that there were services out tehre already. Since I am trying to start my own online business, and am not a web developer by role, I figured it would be a fun side project.

As for why the image gets rotated on your website, I don’t know, unfortunately, as I have never had that happen on the sites I use.

Okay.

On your question of storing settings, not sure exactly what you mean - can you clarify? I don’t specifically store settings in what I do, maybe with the exception sidecars, which I store with images. I do store my images and associated metadata (sidecars) in a directory or directories of my choosing and also on a series of directories and backup locations, but that’s for my own non-Photos workflow.

Let me clarify...

On any computer I have owned, I always create a master directory that is mine. Or, I create a seriees of folders: 10-PERSONAL, 20-MY_BUSINESS, and so on.

My casual users let their computers and software store data where the program wants to, and most Windows' users do things like putting their lives under "My Documents". Not me.

If the application I use (e.g. Photos, Lightroom) stores application preferences or metadata related to, say photos that I am editing, then I would prefer to store that in my directory structure and not nested away in some hidden/semi-hidden "Library" directory.

Follow me?

 

[watakoola]

A great alternative to the overpriced software/subscription models is GraphicConverter. I’ve used it for many years and love it. Frequent updates and a very responsive developer. It’s been around for 27 years!

You can also test it for free.

https://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/

 

[Texas_Toast]

Hope dinner turns out well .

Just soup and veggies... But what has turned out to be "dessert" is this special in CC I stumbled across called "Three Identical Strangers"

OMG! So incredible! Three identical twins (boys) separated at birth, who through a miracle ended up being reunited in college, and who found out later in their (20's?) that they were separated at birth at the adoption agency ON PURPOSE by some - in today's terms - very UNETHICAL researcher!! Now, in hour two, the sad part comes...

?

You've piqued my interest. I'm actually curious about your question. Not sure what you mean by "oddly rotating photos from my iPhone". Fixing photo rotation in post? Your iPhone is oddly rotating images?

These work party photos were taken with my iPhone - never planned to take more than a few snapshots, and 700 pictures later, well... (I'm new to using my iPhone for pictures - that is all I use it for - as I would normally use my digital SLR.)

Anyways, I am building this website to show people at work their pictures. I have a gallery which shows thumbnails - not true thumbnails yet as they are small but mega big file-sizes!

Some of the pictures I took - like the skyscraper I work in were taken with with my iPhone upright, and of course a skyscraper is upright. When I view said photo in Finder it is portrait orientation, yet when it is displayed in my photo gallery on my site it is rotated 90 degrees.

Why?

Funky metadata?

A lot of my photos have this issue and will need to be fixed in Lightroom or whatever. Of course, how do you fix a problem that is a problem yet is not?

Follow me?

 

[tizeye]

While I annually try to "dump adobe" and almost did this year with the combination of On 1 and Affinity Photo. On 1 comes the closest to Lightroom with some Photoshop capabilities with layering. Affinity is more single photo at a time like Photoshop and "cataloging" is "coming". The related program, Affinity Publisher, was "coming" for three or four years so not playing that game. Ultimately went back to Lightroom/Photoshop $9.99/mo bundle. On 1 has some nice features but their export is a noted shortcoming. Star system has major oversight where can sort but not hide. If you want to work on 5 stars, after sorting 1 through 4 stars are still visible (Lightroom can specify "=5 stars" where On 1 is sort only). After sorting you have to advance to the first 5 star. Really awkward. Then when ready to print selecting the 5 stars and a weird file naming it prints them in random order unless you re-sort the selected back to chronological. Flat out drove me crazy. Also, I routinely do panoramic and never got one to fully stitch, typically leaving off the last photo where had no problem stitching the photos in a dedicated panorama program (PT Gui and Hugin). And a minor inconvenience as I export to subfolders - typically full size and 2500px subfolders - their sidecar text file is first so there is no first shot thumbnail on the subfolder which I find annoying.

Ruled out Capture One from the start after the inexpensive Sony only version. First disappointment is there are no true layers of two different files. Rather, what they refer to a layers are adjustment layers of a single file. Hint - check any for "sky replacement" which would require two files and Capture One does not have a tutorial other than one involving a single file applying adjustment layers modifying the existing sky. The other thing that turned me off on Capture One were their absurd annual up grades, with price increasing each year if you elect to upgrade and now the abbreviated Sony version cost even more than the Adobe subscription. Actually, $9.99 isn't that bad as most other programs - Affinity being an exception - have annual upgrades which cost close to the Adobe renewal and it is nice having both Lightroom and Photoshop included at that price.

 

[Texas_Toast]

@tizeye,

Thanks for your insight!

 

[lexdiamonnyc]

I went from Aperture to Lightroom, and now I'm moving over DXO Photo Lab. LR is great but I hate the subscription model they've moved to.

 

[AZhappyjack]

So there is no way to outright buy Photoshop or Lghtroom?

Adobe does sell a "consumer version" of Photoshop - Photoshop Elements... it does layers and includes many of the same tools in Photoshop... and it comes with a DAM of sorts (Elements Organizer)... the list price is around $100, but can be had for less if you shop around... street price is more in the $60 range (or less if you can catch it on sale).

It's more than adequate for day to day graphics work.