I finally settled on a photo-management software. Now I shoot in RAW, upload my pictures to my computer and edit using Lightroom. What I like about it is that:
- the software is not that expensive
- it’s easy to use
- can upload to flickr, facebook, smugmug, pretty easily and sync between them.
There are some downsides. It won’t handle videos, and the connection to facebook is not great. I shoot with a Canon T2i. It takes great pictures with little need for post processing, but all pictures look a bit better with a little work. Also Picasa does a standout job on tagging faces. I hope the newer version of Lightroom will deal with videos and tagging… I have yet to try v.4. I bought the software three months before the update.
Here is the basic workflow
- Put memory card into computer
- Import photos to Lightroom
- Lightroom downloads them to my hard drive and files them in an orderly way
- I look through the images, and use the very handy shortcuts to reject, pick, rank, the images
- Select all rejected and delete them
- Tag all photos as needed
- Adjust photos that need adjusting, usually I crop, adjust brightness, contrast, blacks, and change some to black/white
- Sync them to my online facebook and smugmug accounts
- Delete the images from my computer.
Occasionally, I bring the pictures into Photoshop in order to fix blemishes, such as milk mustaches, etc.
