Top of the South Island

The Lonely Planet guided us to a fantastic morning coffee stop en route from Motueka to Nelson, the Jester House Café. Despite being a popular tourist spot, the car park was not large and I was very glad we were the only camper van attempting to use it! In addition to three varieties of dairy-free cake they had excellent coffee and some impressively large native eels in the stream outside.

Our stop in Picton was only long enough to enjoy its relaxed ambience and take a short hike around the awesomely beautiful harbour. Our early morning sail out of the harbour was also blessed with fine weather and the crossing to Wellington allowed for some more fine views.

A macOS Photo Editing Workflow

This is part of a series of posts describing my move from Apple’s Aperture to Photos.app for managing and editing digital photographs. Previous entries include a feature comparison, third party applications and extensions.

Although Aperture has not received a significant update in three years, I did not feel it was deficient in any way. Having now used a number of recently released other applications 1 in the last few months I have now become aware that Aperture does lag behind the state of the art and it is time to update my toolbox. Another consequence of using different tools is that I now recognise that Aperture is in fact three products in one: RAW converter, photo manager and editor. Given the convenience and advantages of using Apple’s built-in image management, including the iCloud library for device synchronisation, it seems obvious that Apple’s Photos.app should be the starting point for a replacement solution.

When editing, for many photographs I found I could produce the same or better results in Photos.app compared to Aperture, unless I needed to tweak the RAW conversion. Photos’ superior plugin implementation also means that when it cannot get the job done alone it only takes one click to call out to another application. Consequently while Aperture has more built-in tools than Photos.app, the high quality of external applications means that Photos.app plus plugins can get better overall results with no loss of efficiency.

Photos.app handles RAW files but offers no editing abilities above and beyond what is offered for JPEGs. Given the additional time and bandwidth required to upload them to iCloud, along with the greater space consumption on iCloud storage, there seems to be no benefit to offset those costs and I have decided not to store RAW files in Photos.app. Storing my RAW files in a standard folder hierarchy without the obfuscation of a management application also makes it very easy to move these files between tools 2 and platforms in the future.

I have been using Nikon’s Capture NX-D software to convert the RAW files into JPEGs. This is free from Nikon and produces lovely JPEGs which match what is shown on the camera screen, but I found too slow and too difficult to use to make even the most basic edits. I tried a 30 day demo of DxO Optics Pro 10 which produced reasonable JPEGs and was very good at improving certain aspects of a photo (noise removal and some lighting scenarios) but for the average photo is no improvement on the built-in Apple RAW conversion, and not as aesthetically pleasing as Capture NX-D.

In light of these findings, on recent shoots when SD card space has not been an issue, I have set my camera to store RAW+JPEG rather than RAW-only. I have then imported the camera JPEGs directly into Photos.app and reserved RAW edits for only those where the in-camera JPEG is not good enough. In that situation I do then import the RAW into Photos.app and use the excellent DxO Optics Pro for Photos plugin if I think that will solve the problem, or resign myself to fiddle with Capture NX-D if necessary. 3

  1. Nikon’s Capture NX-D, On1 Photo 10, Polarr and DxO Optics Pro.[]
  2. Such as the recently announced On1 Photo RAW.[]
  3. I have on occasion also loaded the RAW into Aperture to compare the results with the other two, and in four out of five cases found Aperture could not do a better job.[]

Photographs from the Abel Tasman

We had a fantastic day in the Abel Tasman National Park. I took a lot of photos, so here is a selection of the most interesting.