Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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Two Featured Products
Women are generally considered to be much better at multitasking than men, so it was
probably a man who invented the term “workflow” to describe a succession of activities
that has to be performed in order to complete a given job. In digital photography there
are several essential tasks and quite a few more optional ones that need to be completed
in a particular order, otherwise the photographer simply cannot complete high-quality
work consistently on time.
For all its abilities as an image editor, Photoshop has never been a workflow tool, even
though recent versions have improved this aspect of it. The two general functions most
required by photographers—fast handling of multiple images and meticulous attention
to single images—are diametrically opposed. For this reason, developers have turned
their attention to improving workflow by designing new products from scratch, incorporating
original features to sort, stack, compare, and select images, with completely
non-destructive processing facilities constantly available for adjusting color, tone, and
other aspects of image quality.
The result has been Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture. Do they live up to the hype
surrounding their introduction, now that thousands of users have had a chance to use
them in their work?