On the Road Again


This is the first trip i have done with only my iPad. Whenever I come down to France I always bring my full compliment of photography gear as I have the time to get some good shots and try out a few experiments. Something I never get the chance to do during the normal work weeks…

This time, having briefly played around with my iPad and Filterstorm (a great editing app) I thought I mitt be able to augment my workflow with this set up to let me see how I”m doing before I get home and import all the pics into aperture. I do not plan to use this to finally process images, merely as a way to see the potential of images in the field. The plan, as always, will be to process everything when I get back to my desk in aperture.

So, the actual process is very very straight forward, go our and take some awesome photos, then whip out your iPad with the USB photo adapter, plug in the camera and off you go. The iPad will recognise the camera and instantly open up the photos app and show you thumbnails of the photos on your camera and give you the option to import all or just specific photos. Select import and off it goes. Once done you can go to your photo library and the images will be in the ‘last import’ album.

So now you have your pics ready to view, and you can very quickly assess the quality of each pic, including zooming in using the pinch function. This is useful as it gives you a much better impression of the quality of your shots than the LCD on the back of your camera does. This in itself is useful enough, but when you add the app Filterstorm, you start to unlock a useful workflow.\n\n

First you can select a file to load into filterstorm, select one form your imported library (even if it”s a raw) load it in and you’re editing.

Filterstorm let’s you adjust things like colour balance, contrast, saturation, hue, it even let’s you make adjustment to specific areas of the image by painting them on in brush mode, or like a grad filter using the grad mode. The toolset on offer here is pretty powerful even including a curves controller and a clone brush.

By using these tools I was able to quickly get a feel for where this picture could go, and produce a ‘prototype’ version I could then save back to my ipads photo library ready for emailing, tweeting, fb-ing or whatever you fancy.

Once you get back to your desk you can import the original raws and/or your Filterstorm adjusted images. This is a really cool way to use the iPad to augment your photography workflow and improve your in the field feedback, so you know you’ve got the shot you need before you pack up your kit and go home.

All this and it hardly adds any weight or bulk to your kit!

I hope this is useful and you can get some use out of these tools and workflow.


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