- PHOTOS FOR MAC EXTENSIONS SOFTWARE
- PHOTOS FOR MAC EXTENSIONS PROFESSIONAL
- PHOTOS FOR MAC EXTENSIONS FREE
PHOTOS FOR MAC EXTENSIONS FREE
I have long used the excellent and free Nik Collection for a large range of filtering and editing tools. Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, and Affinity Photo as standalone programs are capable of using plugins by themselves.
PHOTOS FOR MAC EXTENSIONS SOFTWARE
The most glaring drawback of using an application like Photos with a more serious, capable application by another software maker such as Serif's photo editing application is simply that it's a workaround. When more excessive processing is called for, Photoshop still beckons – or, depending on your needs, Affinity Photo as a standalone program.
PHOTOS FOR MAC EXTENSIONS PROFESSIONAL
Lightroom's (and formerly, Aperture's) mere existence has proved that we want professional software to organize and quickly tweak our images. You wouldn't really expect me to recommend this combination for serious editing work, though. If you're looking to quickly retouch a photo taken on your iPhone that's in Apple's cloud already, it's a near-seamless solution. What I LikedĪpple Photos and Affinity Photo make for a more powerful combination than I first thought. Enter Serif's Affinity Photo and its extensions for Apple Photo.Īffinity Monochrome lets you fine-tune a black-and-white conversion right from the Photos app. Apple's Photos is nowhere near the level of usefulness. Since Aperture was abandoned, I've been casting about for an alternative. All you needed to do was open the library file you were working with in one or the other.
It was also the fact that you could easily switch between having a simple, quick interface that integrated with online image-sharing services, most prominently Apple's own photostream and iCloud, by using iPhoto, and one that let you do most of what I would typically need to do to an image by using Aperture. While Aperture was a good program, this was a bad decision.įor me, the draw of Aperture when it was still current was not only its much lower price point than Lightroom, or its seamless integration with a Mac-based workflow. I loved Lightroom when it first came out in a beta version, but stopped using it in favor of Apple's Aperture a few years later. Although I've worked with some version of the grand master of editing programs – the one that became the default to the point where its name is now a verb – on and off for over a decade and a half, the two of us never clicked. The obvious question regarding this combination is likely some version of "Yes, but… why?" Fair enough.
If you're looking for the path of least resistance from capture to finished product, sometimes saving extra steps in transferring images is worth the trade-off of putting up with a less-than-ideal software solution.Īffinity Develop adds much-needed functionality to Apple Photos's brightness and color editing options. If I use an Eye-Fi card or Apple's camera connection kit for iPads and iPhones, that's also true of photos I've taken on the go with more serious cameras. Photos is not good enough for this yet, but it is the application in which all my iPhone snapshots automatically appear. For some uses, such as quick online postings or Instagram, I need a program that will take my pictures from scans or raw files, apply some corrections in terms of shadows, highlights, exposure, brightness, and tonality, and then let me get on with life. I tend to avoid a lot of post processing. But by integrating Photos with Affinity Photo through extensions, you can restore some functionality to the program.īefore I go further, let me point out that what I'm suggesting here will only work for very specific use cases. As is the case with the premature death of Aperture in favor of Photos. On the other hand, they have discontinued things dear to many, forcing inferior follow-up products on us. On the one hand, the Cupertino-based computer and software maker has given us the iPhone and a host of great hardware and applications for editing and sharing imagery. Apple is a company photographers and videographers follow with a mixture of excitement and dread.