Hi, I'm Michael Mistretta, a student passionate about technology, photography, and design. Welcome to my online home where I write about technology, reviews, and my thoughts and opinions on technology-related matters. 
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?
#4: A camera.
Comment by Andre — January 19, 2008 @ 12:03 am
Adobe Photoshop Elements is an extremely viable alternative to CS3. There are really not many features missing from Elements, and it’s over $700 cheaper.
Comment by Adam — January 19, 2008 @ 12:04 am
Nice post Michael. Those tablets you mention look pretty sweet. I might want one.
@Andre Haha, true :b
Comment by David — January 19, 2008 @ 12:19 am
I don’t like workflows. It’s another term for restrictive bullshit.
I take photos. There’s no process or order or direction or any intrusive nonsense.
Pop in the memory card. Sometimes I’ll import all to Lightroom, sometimes I’ll view the images and trash them, sometimes I’ll grab individual photos off the card, edit those, and wipe the card.
I don’t believe in saving shit photos. I keep photos I upload to Flickr or print and that’s it. I don’t care if I’ve taken 200 or 20,000 photos over a course of time, the shit ones are just wasted space.
Workflows don’t work. Interference doesn’t help.
As for the accessories, I find none of them truly necessary or essential. I could easily live without Lightroom and Photoshop. Sure it’s nice to have them, but barely necessary. I’ve never seen the need to use a tablet for photography.
Comment by Alec Feld — January 19, 2008 @ 12:21 am
I feel the same way as Alec. To me, workflows are unnecessary. I take pictures and store them in subfolders of my Images folder. I hate the way Aperture and iPhoto manage pictures, when you have too much stuff in them, they start to become slow and bulky. I prefer Lightroom, it’s fast, beautiful and well integrated with Photoshop, a must have for serious picture editing.
And finally, I don’t really understand the point of having a graphic tablet to edit pictures. Can you explain me how it can be useful?
Comment by Justin — January 19, 2008 @ 1:07 am
I’ve been playing around with qtpfsgui. Nice for playing around with what seem to be random effects, but I need to learn more about this before I can get it to do what I want.
Comment by Fazimoto — January 19, 2008 @ 10:27 am
How do you get your raw files into aperture. Do you use a certain plugin or convert them. I tried importing my first set of photos from my d40 and aperture (2.0) did not import the raw files. I went into image capture and dragged the raw files to my desktop, but they would only open in Bridge, Photoshop, Iris or the app that came on the cd for the d40.
Comment by Michael — May 27, 2008 @ 11:43 am
Michael: You should be able to plug your camera or SD card in, open Aperture, and click the Import button. That will allow you to import from your HD or from an external SD card.
Comment by Michael Mistretta — May 27, 2008 @ 12:04 pm