Take 5: Apps for Mac

This is the first in a series of blog posts I’m going to be running over the next few months focusing on kit, gear, equipment, or whatever you like to call the stuff designed to make a photographer’s life easier and wallet lighter.  Each post in this (unoriginally named) “Take 5″ series will briefly introduce (or perhaps re-introduce) you to five of my personal picks of different types of photography gear, from cameras to lenses to flashes to accessories to printers to websites, to name a few.  For this first post, I’m focusing on quite a niche area of software – that which is designed specifically for Apple Mac users.  Don’t worry, Windows people, your time will come too.  By the way, I should point out two things. Firstly, the opinions below are my own and secondly, these lists aren’t intended to be reviews – in many cases I haven’t tried the items I’m listing.  They are just things that catch my eye and suggest to me that they might be useful. So buyer beware.  With that made clear, keep reading for 5 apps for Mac that I think are worth a closer look.

I was prompted to kick off with this particular list because last week Apple launched a new App Store for Mac computers.  To date iPods, iPhones and iPads have had their own App Store, and the same is now true for iMacs, Macbooks and Mac Minis in a move that could change the way software for desktops and laptops is delivered to consumers in the future.

What’s notable about the concept of an App Store for proper computers is that it brings a world of small, lightweight, single-function applications to your desktop in a controlled environment and through a easy-to-use interface that helps allay fears about viruses and malicious code that tend to come to mind when you download executable files from the internet.  Everything on the App Store has to go through an approval process by Apple. And some of the apps are free too.

So, with my photographer’s hat on, what appeals in the Mac App Store that might be worth further investigation?

---

Aperture, €62.99 – If you know anything at all about my post-processing you’ll know that 99.99% of it is done using one single piece of software, and it’s not Photoshop – it’s Aperture.  I’ve used Aperture, Apple’s own RAW-capable image editing software, since version 1.5.  It’s now at version 3.3 and it gets better and better.

I paid just shy of €200 for it when I first bought it, and as far as I can recall the most recent upgrade to version 3 cost me just under €100.

The first thing I noticed when I saw the Mac App Store was that Apple are now selling Aperture through the store for a mere €62.99.  That’s less than a third of what it cost last week.  And it makes it the single best thing, in my opinion, in the store.

The software is Apple’s answer to Adobe Lightroom, and at the new price, if you own a Mac, and especially if you shoot RAW and you don’t own Lightroom, you should at least download the trial of Aperture from the Apple website and see what you’ll get for €62.99.  It is a powerful piece of software, and at that price, fantastic value.  Rather than be miffed about having paid way more than the current price to get my version, I’m just excited about the prospect of upgrading to Aperture 4 at some point in the future at a very reasonable price indeed.

---

Pixelmator, €23.99 – As good as Aperture is, there are some things it doesn’t do, and one of those is image creation.  It’s all well and good to take a photo and post-process it, but there are times when you might want to create a new image from other images, or perhaps a new logo or watermark for your photos.  My choice for these kinds of tasks is Photoshop Elements, which is a more wallet-friendly version of Photoshop, but my eye was drawn to Pixelmator in the App Store as an even cheaper alternative.

I haven’t purchased or used this software, but I do think that it looks good value for its price, at least on paper.  It supports layers, gradients, selections and text – four things that Aperture doesn’t support – and it looks like it plays nicely with Aperture too via a Photo Browser utility that can navigate the Aperture library.  It does fun stuff too with filters to turn photos into watercolours, mosaics, kaleidoscopes and so on, and has a nifty (if potentially useless) ability to capture an image from the iSight camera on the mac and drop it seamlessly into your creation as a new layer.

---

Image Tricks Lite, Free – Perhaps you don’t want to pay anything for your image editing software, and perhaps all you want is something that will do fairly basic adjustments to colour, contrast, brightness and so on.  Global adjustments, in other words, to make your photos look a bit better, but without going to town on the image editing.  If so, it might be worth taking a look at Image Tricks Lite, a free app, which offers just such capabilities.  It also offers range of filters to “stylize” your photos, something that is rarely of much interest to established photographers but a look at beginner photographers do tend to enjoy experimenting with, and there’s no harm in that either.

There is a “Pro” version available for €15.99, but in all honesty the biggest selling point of this Lite version is its price, and if I were looking to spend €15.99 I’d probably raid a piggy bank for the other €8 and go for Pixelmator instead.  Again I haven’t tried it myself (yet), but the fact that its free means it deserves a mention, and sure there’s nothing to lose in giving it a try for yourself.

---

Light Compressor, 79c – The thing that appeals to me most about the Mac App Store is its potential to bring a world of small, cheap, single-function apps to my computer – apps that do one thing and one thing only, but do it well, and do it quickly.  Off all the photography apps in the store at launch, therefore, this is the one I’m most excited about.  It’s a HDR tool, designed to allow you to combine multiple exposures into a single High Dynamic Range image.  Of the 4 apps listed here that I don’t already own, this is the one I’ll be trying out first, and the beauty of it is that at 79c, if it doesn’t live up to my expectations, I won’t be too much out of pocket.  If it does meet my expectations, at that price it’ll prove to be a great purchase.

The potential catch with it is that it requires the source images to be aligned – it can’t do the aligning for you, so handheld HDR shots are out.  But tripod-based captures, or multiple exposures from a single RAW file, should work just fine.  I’ll be putting this to the test in the next few weeks, most likely revisiting a psuedo-HDR image from a single RAW file that I previously processed using the Photomatix plug-in in Aperture, and hope to report back with the results, but in the meantime it should be noted that it has a 4 star rating in the App Store, which suggests good things.

---

TiltShift, €19.99 – Previously available as a plug-in for Aperture, the launch of the Mac App Store has seen this little bit of software become available to photographers who use a Mac but don’t use Aperture, and who want to experiment with a fake tilt-shift effect to create a miniaturized look to their images.

At €19.99 it’s different to the HDR utility mentioned above in that it’s a bit too expensive to take a punt on, but there is a free download available as a demo (presumably one that puts some restrictions or watermarks on the images it produces, but should still give you an indication as to whether this tool is for you or not.  A bit like HDR, the effect this software achieves is loved by some, hated by others, but you might find that you like it, and that this is a quick and easy way to fake the look without spending lots of money on very expensive Tilt-Shift lenses.  Another that I haven’t tried myself, but I’ll likely give the demo a go at least in the next few weeks.

---

So there you have it – for Mac-using photographers, a list of things to take a look at the next time you’re browsing the App Store. For the rest of you, probably an annoying irrelevant blog post, but as they say, you can please some of the people some of the time…