*** From the Archives ***

This article is from June 4, 2007, and is no longer current.

Do You Need Pricey Photo Software?

When I mention photographic workflow and the software quandaries that go with it to old-school photographers, I’m often met with a blank stare and then asked, “What’s a workflow?”
Workflow is not a traditional photography concept. The idea came into the photography world alongside Photoshop’s rubber stamp tools, the Raw format, and the practice of shooting more pictures in an afternoon than film photographers used to shoot in a month.
Film photographers do have workflows, of course; they just don’t describe them as such. But making contact sheets, circling selects with a grease pencil, choosing to process some images by hand and send others to a lab, developing elaborate notations for describing processing instructions — they all constitute a workflow.
In the digital realm, workflow is a bit more complicated because of the higher volume of images and our higher expectations when shooting digital. When it’s possible to keep, search, and sort everything, we think that we should keep everything, and have it all accessible. Since we can create a perfect, lossless image backups, we demand the ability to do so. (In the film world, backup was costly, time-intensive, and impossible to do without a quality hit.) All of these expectations, along with all of the vagaries of digital image editing, mean that photography workflows are now often more complicated than they were in the film world.
Until the 2005 release of Apple’s Aperture (Figure 1), professional photography workflow required separate applications for file browsing, image editing, image cataloging, backup, and archiving.

Figure 1. In Aperture 1.5’s Focus on Cursor mode, you can leave the centered loupe wherever you want and see a magnified view of the area beneath the cursor. Click on the image for a larger view.
Adobe further legitimized the concept of a workflow tool by releasing its own app, Photoshop Lightroom, in 2006 (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Adobe’s Lightroom is a dedicated photo workflow application. Click on the image for a larger view.
However, Adobe first made nods to workflow problems in 2003 when it integrated a file browser into Photoshop CS. Recognizing that one of the most difficult image-editing problems is finding the right image, the File Browser made it easier to whip through a folder full of images by providing large previews, metadata views, and more.
In 2005, Adobe’s Creative Suite 2 improved on the File Browser by making it a separate application, called Bridge, that included more ways to view images and the abilities to add and edit metadata and rename files.
Now, with 2007’s CS3, Bridge has even more workflow management power, with the new loupe, stacks, improved keywording and metadata tagging, and — most importantly — the ability to view images side-by-side (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Bridge CS3 can help you sort, select, and manage your photos. Click on the image for a larger version.
All of this may lead you to wonder whether, if you just spent big money on Photoshop (which comes with Bridge), you really need to spend another couple hundred dollars on Aperture or Lightroom. The answer depends largely on how you shoot and your workflow demands.
What You Get With Bridge
“Image editing” used to mean the process of narrowing an entire shoot’s worth of images to a few select images you wanted to work into final prints. Nowadays, “image editing” typically refers to the process of adjusting, correcting, and retouching your images. However, editing in its original sense is still necessary, and Bridge facilitates it very well.
With Bridge, you can easily browse through a folder full of images, rename them, rate them, add keywords, and, with CS3, group them into stacks and view close-up, 100% crops. Using the label and rating tools, you can easily mark your select images and then filter your view to see only those selects. From there, it’s an easy process to launch your images into Camera Raw or Photoshop for additional editing and, ultimately, output.
Photoshop has long had good batch processing, and you can trigger these operations from within Bridge, meaning you can use Bridge as the control center for complex automated workflows.
One of my favorite features in Bridge CS3 is the ability to create metadata presets within Bridge — you used to have to do this in Photoshop. This makes it much easier to quickly assign predefined batches of metadata to images within Bridge.
Bridge can even replace your operating system’s file manager, thanks to Bridge’s ability to move and copy files, delete files, and make new folders.
It’s a very capable workflow tool, especially if you tend to move most of your images through Photoshop for editing.
What You Don’t Get With Bridge
But when it comes to long-term archive management, Bridge falls down (insert rim shot here). It’s a browser, not an archiving program, so it can only show you the contents of currently online folders. If you’ve taken images off your drive and stored them on optical disks or other hard drives, you can no longer view those images in Bridge.
For long-term archiving, cataloging, and searching, you’ll have to turn to a cataloging program, such as Extensis Portfolio, Canto Cumulus, or Microsoft Expression Media (the replacement for iView MediaPro).
Bridge’s single-folder viewing can also be a limitation when you want to compare images side by side, since you can’t select images in separate folders. This limitation can also hamper batch-processing operations, as it’s impossible to build a batch containing images from more than one folder.
With a Bridge-centered workflow, you’ll also be restricted to your operating system’s folder structure and file naming for all of your organizational chores. By comparison, Aperture and Lightroom offer more flexible project organization and management, especially Aperture.
Bridge lacks the compare features of Aperture and Lightroom. While it’s possible to view two images side-by-side in Bridge, Lightroom and Aperture go further by providing special interfaces designed specifically for easily sorting and comparing an entire group of images to find the one you like best.
Finally, Bridge has no Web- or book-authoring features of its own, nor does it have any backup capabilities. While you can trigger Photoshop’s Web gallery plug-ins from Bridge, they’re no substitute for Aperture’s and Lightroom’s Web features.
How to Choose
To find the right app, go beyond comparing features and take a close look at how you shoot and output your images.
If you already have Photoshop (and with it, Bridge), you obviously have some inclination toward image editing. While the editing tools in Lightroom and Aperture are good, they lack Photoshop’s wealth of features and don’t include selective editing or painting tools. However, it’s easy to round-trip images from Aperture or Lightroom into Photoshop for editing and then back to the management applications.
Volume is also a factor. If you’re the type of shooter who works large jobs, or shoots personal projects that involve hundreds of images, you’ll appreciate Lightroom’s and Aperture’s stronger tools for sorting, comparing, and selecting among those images. What’s more, both applications’ library features let you create and manage a long-term archive of all of your images.
If you tend to shoot smaller batches of images — a few dozen — with the idea of pulling out five or six for editing, Bridge can serve you very well and save you from learning Lightroom’s and Aperture’s library and organizational schemes.
But one of the biggest deciding factors is whether you need the additional features in Aperture and Lightroom. To fully compete against the two dedicated applications, you’d have to augment Photoshop/Bridge with a library program, possibly a CD-burning application, and a simple Web editor. Rather than juggle that assortment of helper apps, you’d be better off switching to Lightroom or Aperture.
If long-term library management and searching doesn’t interest you, and you have no plans to output Web galleries (or books, in the case of Aperture), I suggest that you save your money and use Bridge.
In the end, no piece of software will make you a better photographer. If you don’t need the extra functionality of a dedicated workflow tool, don’t spend the time trying to learn one of these new programs. Instead, go out and shoot!
 

  • anonymous says:

    I must be missing something. What do the dedicated cataloging programs offer that Lightroom (LR) does not? I can (and do) maintain my catalogs of images spread across several hard drives and many more DVDs easily with LR and its keywording capabilities. What would I gain by adding one of these programs?

  • anonymous says:

    If a workflow consists of three steps (acquiriing & sorting; finishing; archiving & logging), this article mostly covers the middle step.

    Pshop/Bridge and Lightroom/Aperture overlap quite a bit; the latter two are better for huge batches, like events, when shots aren’t finished individually.

    For the third step, catalog software might be overkill for a one-man shop. Deeper search engines like Spotlight make images quick to find no matter where they are if they’ve been keyed right.

    What’s missing is attention to the crucial first step — acquiring, editing, naming, sorting. All programs mentioned are lousy at this, very slow and cumbersome.

    The fastest workflow for me, by far, is to handle first step with PhotoMechanic. No matter what you throw at it, PM lets you see images in real time. Then I send the job to Pshop/Bridge or sometimes Lightroom — and walk away for a real long time while those programs chew and chew and chew.

  • >