Think of Mac

Jul 02

Mac Setup for Photographers

iPhoto – The basic photo program shipped with OS X, iPhoto packs a wide range of features and integrates brilliantly with all the other software on your Mac.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom – A professional photo organization tool, complete with powerful editing features. You can quickly import, process, manage, and showcase your images — from one shot to an entire shoot.
Aperture – Having improved a great deal in recent versions, Aperture now offers a good way to cull through shoots, enhance images, manage massive libraries, and deliver stunning photos.
Capture One Pro – The choice of seasoned professionals, Capture One works well for tethered shooting and offers a solid tool for a RAW workflow.
Picasa – Google’s free photo management application, Picasa is friendly and simple to use. It lacks the innovative features found in recent versions of iPhoto.
Bibble – Another RAW workflow tool, useful for organizing photos with a wide range of editing functionality.
Shoebox – A solid solution for organizing all of your photos by content, with an interface well suited to widescreen displays.
JetPhoto Studio – An easy-to-use photo management app with a range of publishing features (including the automatic creation of Flash web galleries)
Photoshop Elements – Step-by-step editing, compositing tools, and it’s built on the solid foundation of Adobe Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop – The de-facto photo editing application, Photoshop has been an industry leader for many years. It’s incredibly powerful, but comes at a price.
Pixelmator – An incredibly fast photo editing tool for OS X, which uses various speed-enhancing features of Leopard. Definitely worth taking a look at.
Seashore – A native application built upon the core of GIMP, offering a well-rounded, free photo editing solution.
Corel Painter X – Taking a slightly different angle, this app tries to simulate as accurately as possible the appearance of traditional media associated with drawing and painting.
Acorn – A remarkably uncluttered and simple photo editor for OS X, with a great in-built brush designer.
Picturesque – Useful for adding the finishing touches to a photo, such as borders, shadows, perspective, reflections etc.
PhotoComplete – Similar to Acorn, PhotoComplete is a basic image editor which excels on account of a simple and easy-to-understand interface.
Prizmo – This app allows you to easily change the perspective of a photograph, and essentially “scan” using a digital camera. Fascinating stuff.

Automator – The built-in automation app from Apple, which can perform a range of photo manipulation actions and be easily extended with a range of plugins.
iMagine Photo – Another tool for automating your image processing workflow. You can scale, crop, blend images, apply filters and rotate.
EasyBatchPhoto – Allows you to process hundreds (or thousands) of images with a single drag-and-drop, with a simple looking interface.
PhotoDrop – A simple utility that allows you to create small, customized droplets that turn the tedious task of modifying a folder of images into a simple drag-and-drop operation.

Photomatix – A widely popular HDR app with tone mapping and exposure fusion. It works as a standalone app, or as a plugin for Photoshop or Aperture.
Qtpfsgui – Despite the horrendous name, this tool is completely open source and offers a free way to start a HDR workflow.
Hydra – A user-friendly interface, automatic matching of images and an Aperture plug-in make Hydra definitely worth a look.
Silverfast – Whilst starting to look at little dated, Silverfast seems to offer a fairly large set of advanced features. Not too user-friendly.
Bracketeer – A front-end GUI for Enfuse, which offers an auto-align feature and can supposedly create far better looking images than Photoshop. You can be the judge!
FDRTools – Another similar tool for combining images, tone mapping, and exporting in a variety of different formats.

Panorama Tools – A page crammed with technical information seems to suggest that this is a very proficient set of tools for stitching and viewing panoramas. Also available as a Photoshop plugin.
Double Take – A very simple, user-friendly interface make this a good choice for when you can’t get far enough away to fit everything in the viewfinder.
PhotoWarp – Capable of producing some fascinating circular warps and panoramas, PhotoWarp is something a little different.
Flexify – Allows you to bend and stretch a photo into seemingly any shape, creating some really impressive effects.
Panorama2Flash – Support for batch conversion and Flash export make this app a full-featured alternative to those previously mentioned.

Flickr Uploadr – A fantastically simple app for uploading your photos to Flickr and ensuring they remain organized as you’d like.
Facebook iPhoto Plugin – A simple plugin for uploading images straight to Facebook, supporting tagging and organization within the app itself. Far better than the web based tools.
iStockPhoto Aperture Plugin – If you sell images through iStockPhoto, this plugin can be a real time-saver. If you use another stock site, check around to see if a different plugin has been created (you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised).
iWeb – Apple’s basic website design app can be very useful for creating quick, good looking photo galleries and slideshows from images already contained in iPhoto or Aperture.
PictureSync – Offering a central app for tagging and organizing photos for upload to a wide range of different online services.
Smilebox – A fun and friendly service for scrap-booking, creating cards, and quickly sharing photos.

Geophoto – See your pictures from a new perspective and start tagging by location. It can import photos directly from iPhoto or Aperture and share them on Flickr.
PhotoLinker – A professional solution than can integrate with GPS tracks, attempting to automatically put your photos in precisely the right location.
GeoTagger – A droplet for inserting GPS coordinates into your photos that integrates with Google Earth.
HoudahGeo – Catering for both geotagging for archival purposes, and for publishing to Google Earth, Flickr or locr. Also capable of matching photos to a GPS track.
PhotoGPSEditor – An easy to use meta-data editor for photo files, plus it can match data from GPS (gpx or NMEA) files. Completely free.
Trails for iPhone – If you have an iPhone, Trails is a fantastic way to track exactly where you’ve been for later geotagging. It doesn’t require an internet connection – great for when traveling.

CameraSalvage – Retrieve your photos from corrupt or formatted flash cards or other digital camera media. It can recover data from digital camera media cards, hard drives, CD-ROM, external devices, Apple iPods, and much more.
Salvage – Salvage is a tool for recovering digital camera pictures from corrupt removable media.
ImageRecall – And another. ImageRecall will do it’s best to recover any photos from a corrupt or accidentally deleted card.
Time Machine – The OS X Leopard backup solution. All that you require is an external hard drive, and to keep a copy of your website locally.
Dropbox – I use Dropbox as a means of keeping an off-site backup of important website documents and files (though it’s also great at keeping multiple computers in sync!)
SuperDuper – If you’d like to keep a bootable backup of your Mac hard drive, SuperDuper is an excellent solution.