The Digital Capture of Light

First, This is neither a product review nor a tutorial. You can find them elsewhere online - just google. This is a piece on how Aperture has drastically changed my workflow.

The new millennium brought about a major change in photography world as digital media started making major inroads in the business. One of the biggest question for professional photographers was how to adapt their workflow to the new situation.

Let me explain the predominant workflow in the film era. Slide film was the medium of choice for most of the professional photographers. On getting the processed slides back, they would be culled to discard the bad slides and then entered into a database, giving it a unique number and some keywords to reference it. Then the slides were put in a sleeve and in a file. The better slides were scanned into a tiff file that could be used for printing or web publishing. When the client wanted some specific pictures, a search of the database using the keywords would lead to the required photos.

When digital first arrived, photographers were ecstatic - no more slide sleeves and hanging files. Everything was on their hard-drives in neat little folders. But the problem was keeping the different versions of the file together. The original raw file being the digital negative, had to be stored carefully and backed up. Tiff files were then created and all required digital corrections performed on a software like photoshop. Most adjustments were done using layers to be able to go back and revert if necessary, but some changes like cropping were permanent. So if one decides to try cropping a different way, the original raw file has to be opened again and converted. Finally the tiffs were saved as a jpeg for printing or web publishing purposes.

Sensing the need for a more streamlined photographer's software Apple came with Aperture, followed soon by Adobe with Lightroom. Both software perform a similar task. The raw file is first imported in. This file always stays as is. Any manipulations done on it are stored in a separate file and applied whenever the raw file is opened. Different versions of manipulations can be saved together. Finally a jpeg can be exported whenever needed.

Aperture also has a strong database to keep track of images. Further keywords can be used to create smartalbums automatically. Also the preview images are saved as high quality jpegs that can be used for anything from a client slideshow to an attachment to an email or a picture in a word document....

There is a lot more to Aperture that I'm still learning! One thing or sure, it makes it a lot more fun to work on the digital photos after the photoshoot.