Photography can quickly grow from a small task, to a profession or a hobby that can require a lot of equipment, time, education, and money. I have already talked about the importance of having a tripod with you whenever you go out shooting. As I spent more time taking photos, and developed a post-processing workflow, I found three essential tools for anyone who takes photography seriously.

Aperture

Currently I am using iPhoto, but as I migrate to shooting in the RAW mode of my camera, I need an application that treats RAW photos as first-class citizens. There are two main applications that do this very well – Aperture and Lightroom. Lightroom is for both the PC and the Mac, while Aperture is only for Macs. Both of these applications are very similar, as they allow you to organize, sort, edit, and share all of your RAW photos. They each take a slightly different approach, and I personally prefer the way Aperture manages my photos. I find it more flexible, and like that it lets me do whatever I want at whatever time I want. I would recommend trying out both application’s 30-day trials, to see which one best fits into your workflow.

Photoshop CS3

The king of photo editing, Photoshop, is the most popular, most powerful, and most expensive piece of photography software. The learning curve may be steep, but after going through some tutorials on the Internet, the concept is much easier to grasp. I was editing some photos in the Photoshop CS3 trial today, and was amazed by the power in this program. It worked very well with large files, and integrated seamlessly with Aperture and Lightroom. While those apps can do many basic adjustments and edits to your photos, when you want to push pixels, Photoshop is the place to go. I’d recommend buying Adobe CS3 Design Standard if you can afford it, as Illustrator and InDesign come in handy when you want to do page-layout and make vector images.

Graphics Tablet

Recently, I have been watching reviews and demos of graphic tablets on the Internet. With the new Wacom Bamboo, it is very easy and inexpensive for someone to invest in a tablet. Tablets are useful for editing, drawing, and painting on your photos. They are a perfect companion to Photoshop, and integrate perfectly. Wacom is the company making the best graphic tablets in the industry. And they work on both OS X and Windows. With the prices now under $100, graphics tablets are becoming more affordable for the masses. I am actually considering picking one of these up this weekend to use for editing my photos

I have only been taking photos with my DSLR for a month now, and I have already learned so much about photography. I really enjoy taking pictures, and even enjoy editing them afterwards. I have already found many tools that I find invaluable in post-processing. What about you? What tools do you use in your photography workflow?