On Assignment with my iPad Air

This week's column by Ctein

Those of you who've been following my peripatetic photographic exploits know that my computer of choice has been a 15-inch MacBook Pro, now of advanced age in computer years. It's allowed me to do the same kind of extensive and serious photographic editing, adjustment, and manipulation that I would do at home. With the addition of a first-generation iPad, I could even work on a portable studio quality monitor, which was exceedingly difficult to come by just a few years back. (Today, a retina-screen-equipped MacBook will provide that quality of display.)

What I've discovered, though, is that while it's awfully cool to be able to do fullbore image work on the road, I hardly ever do. Simply put, I don't have enough time when I'm traveling. I barely find time to do a serious edit on the photographs I've made. At most, I'll set up some ACR conversion adjustments for when I get home and am ready to start the seriously-time-consuming work in Photoshop.

While I most definitely needed that studio quality display, 90% of the computing power (and storage and memory and weight, etc.) of my laptop proves to be wasted on my away-from-home photographic work. This has started me pondering how much of this I could accomplish on my iPad. It's one of the reasons I sprang for the 128 GB model this last time around and also bought the SD card reader (a.k.a. Camera Connection Kit).

My trip to Minneapolis in January overlapped one of the Chippawa Valley Roller Girls' matches, of which I have written previously. DDB and I went out to photograph the match. He's been doing this regularly, of course, and has gotten absurdly adept at putting together instant slideshows of the matches for the Girls to see at the after-match party.

Okay, not exactly instant, but it seems that way to me. He has lots of experience very quickly editing event photography on his laptop for posting to websites or creating presentations. He's got 100 times as much experience at this as I do and he's about 1,000 times faster. That's not hyperbole; his turnaround time is measured in minutes to hours; mine is usually months.

Last year I tried putting together a slideshow of my photographs on the MacBook Pro for an after-match party. It was pretty much a fail. My workflow and my machine just weren't up to the task. By the time my laptop could import 500–1000 photographs and bring them up for me to edit, an hour had passed (DDB's laptop is many times faster). I finally punted and just let Preview cycle through the JPEGs from the RAW files on the SD card, unedited and unsorted. The Girls were happy enough, but it wasn't professional and it sure didn't satisfy me.

Now, that's with my normal workflow. If I put some serious thought and effort into the problem, I likely could have worked out a new workflow that would demand substantially less from my computer and from me. But, for something I was doing only once or twice a year, it wasn't high on my list to get around to that.

Come last month, I still hadn't gotten around to that. Three days before the match, though, I started noodling around with the Connection Kit. I wanted to show my Olympus's cold-weather tests to Dave Polaschek, who I was having lunch with less than an hour later. What better way than to load them into the iPad?

  Fig. 1. Photos, an app that's part of iOS, reads the RAW files from my Olympus via the Camera Connection Kit and displays thumbnails for me to select from.

For this first attempt, I went the very dumbest (minimal learning curve) route and used Photos, the app bundled into iOS 7. It took only 0.8 sec per photograph to load the previews from the SD card (figure 1) and just twice that long to import the full RAW file. It was a matter of minutes to get everything from the camera into the iPad. And I started to think, maybe this was the answer to my roller derby slideshow problem.

Fig. 2. Once I've selected the photographs I want to import by tapping on the thumbnails, "Import Selected" pulls the RAW files into the iPad.

Not having the time nor inclination to climb a particularly steep learning curve nor throw money at the problem in the following three days, I continued on the simplest and dumbest path. That Saturday evening, post-match, found DDB and I sitting in the after-party bar, him with his laptop and me with my iPad. I had some 500 photographs to work through. As Photos was loading the thumbnails, I started going through them selecting the ones I wanted to import to the iPad (figure 2). Those one-inch thumbnails weren't clear enough to do a critical edit on, but they were good enough for weeding out the obvious failures. A third of the photographs went away that way.

Fig. 3. The "Photos" screen in the Photos app shows the photographs I've imported, sorted by date. Tapping on one of those photos brings up
the editing screen.

Fig. 4. The editing screen shows me a full-screen rendering that lets me make my final selections. Tapping the trashcan icon (barely visible here in light blue) in the lower right corner deletes the photograph.

When I was finished making my choices, I tapped "Import Selected" and returned to the "photos" screen (figure 3). Importing continued in the background as the selected photos appeared as thumbnails on this screen. I clicked the first thumbnail and a full-screen version popped up (figure 4). Now I could see what the photograph really looked like. If I liked what I saw I swiped sideways with my finger and brought up the next photo. If I didn't I tapped the trashcan icon in the corner and the photograph went away.

Fig. 5. The export screen is where I select which photos will go into the slideshow.

When I was done with that I had about 250 photographs left out of the original 500. I tapped the export icon in the lower left corner of the screen and that brought up figure 5. I tapped each of those 250 photographs to select it, a lot of repetitive tapping. There may very well have been a way to batch-select, but as I said, I didn't do any homework. It didn't really take all that long.

Fig. 6. Tapping the slideshow button on the export screen brings up the slideshow options and the button to start running the slideshow.

Now I had my slideshow. I tapped the slideshow button at lower screen left, kept the "Slideshow Options" at the defaults (figure 6), and tapped "Start Slideshow." There it was! I propped the iPad up on its smart-cover stand and let it run.

The whole job took me just about an hour from start to finish. I actually beat DDB by maybe 15 minutes (of course, when he was done, his edit was more polished and sophisticated than mine).

I'm not remotely suggesting this was the best possible way to create a slideshow on the iPad. In fact, since then I've downloaded iPhoto (now a free program). It's a lot more flexible than Photos with a lot more controls and editing capability, and it gives me more control over the slideshow, e.g., whether or not it runs continuously on a repeat cycle and how long each photograph is up for. There are likely even better tools out there—no doubt readers will suggest some. The important thing, though, is that it worked! Quickly, and with little effort on my part, I was able to learn how to accomplish a (self-imposed) assignment that previously I'd been trying to do much less well on my laptop.

Photos and iPhoto have an important limitation—although they understand RAW files, all they are displaying is the attached JPEG. That's entirely good enough for a slideshow like this and it's sufficient for a first, crude editing pass on my more serious work. It doesn't let me see the full quality or tonal range in the RAW photographs, let alone usefully manipulate it. Two apps that will work on RAW data are PiRAWnha and PhotoRaw. I plan to look into them but haven't tried either out, yet. I solicit comments from any readers who have used either of these as well as suggestions for other RAW-processing apps for the iPad.

There's still too much stuff I do while traveling, like writing and e-mail, that I haven't figured out how to do efficiently on an iPad. Yet. But, depending on how those RAW processing apps work out for me, I may pretty quickly find myself doing almost no photo processing on my laptop while traveling. It's likely I'll wind up buying one more laptop—a MacBook Pro Retina, natch. It won't surprise me if that turns out to be my last one.

Or...maybe it'll turn out that I give up the desktop machine and run solely with a laptop at home. That whole convergence business I wrote about a few columns back. What I do know, though, is that the iPad is continually encouraging me to reevaluate how I do things computerish.

Ctein

Columnist Ctein usually appears on TOP on Wednesdays.

©2014 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ben: "Simple and nice workflow...thanks!

"For writing and email on and iPad, I like the Incase Origami Workstation, which is basically a case for the Apple bluetooth keyboard, but it folds open to support the iPad above the keyboard. I don't mind the Apple keyboard and I much prefer having a case for the keyboard than an iPad keyboard case, as it offers me a lot more flexibility. I've found I can do a lot of email correspondence with this setup. It even works on an airplane by writing emails, saving them as drafts, then just sending when I have an Internet connection again.

"I did give up my desktop; I balked at the new Mac Pro, so I sold my Macbook Air and bought a 15" Macbook Pro with retina display, and I've been very happy with my new setup. I can do a lot on my iPad mini, and everything else on the retina Pro. Perfect!!!"

Huw Morgan: "Sounds pretty painful compared to getting the right tools for the job (e.g. Surface Pro and Lightroom). Kinda like using a hammer and nails to assemble Ikea furniture."

Chris Exum: "Your article has changed my workflow. I just successfully imported my X-Pro1 raw file into iPhoto, which did not work the last time I tried. I am now able to import a Fuji RAW file into the Photosmith app (I previously had to shoot RAW + JPEG for this to work) from the iPhoto album. I use Photosmith to tag and rate my photos. Photosmith then syncs my photos to Lightroom along with my tags, ratings, and IPTC info.

"The above workflow is my 'on the road' workflow. Then when I get home, I use LR/PS for editing, using my rating system to identify the photos that I actually want to edit. If I want to do any editing on the iPad, I have been using Snapseed. It's easy, fast, and does a respectable job. Not up to pro standards, but makes a decent image to upload to facebook or email to friends/family. Thanks for making me rethink my workflow!"

Alun J. Carr: "n addition to iPhoto, you really should install Snapseed. This was developed by Nik Software (the Viveza and Silver FX plugin, and Nikon's Capture NX people), who also made desktop (Mac and Windows) versions. Nik was swallowed by Google who killed the desktop versions, and made the iOS and Android versions free. Snapseed is an amazing piece of software, using Nik's U-Point technology for localised adjustments in an incredibly tactile fashion on the iPad; in fact, there are aspects of U-Point in Snapseed that are far superior to the implementation in the plugins for Aperture/Photoshop/Lightroom. Working with Snapseed on an iPad is such an immersive, tactile experience that it feels like an artist working in oil or acrylics (I have experience of acrylics, but not oils).

"Anyhow, it won't break the bank to try it."

Comments

[Moose]

A dirt cheap bluetooth keyboard completely transforms the experience of email and other writing on iPads and other tablets and phones.

Moose

[Andre Y]

I've also experimented with RAW processing (PhotoRAW) on an iPad 3 (the first Retina model, but without the Lightning port) for some Olympus OM-D E-M5 images, because my 2008 Macbook Pro was too big and heavy to take with me on vacation. It turned out to be pretty unsatisfactory.

1. It was slow. Maybe a later iPad will be faster, but this was slow --- much slower than the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo in my Macbook.

2. Image quality was lacking compared to Adobe, which is my usual RAW developer. Things weren't as detailed, which is the only thing I couldn't fix in post, and not as colorful, or contrasty, both of which I could fix in post. Maybe I'm just used to the Adobe look. With some effort, I could get the images to be how I wanted to look, but that leads the the 3rd point.

3. Post-processing was a PITA: the touch interface is not great for precision movements, so dodging and burning were kind of rough and approximate. Tone curve controls were also pretty limited. Compared to Lightroom's recovery controls, the iPad tools were downright primitive and limited.

Anyway, it doesn't matter now because I've discovered the Macbook Air! Along with the small Intuous tablet, a 13-inch MBA is almost as packable and far, far more powerful than an iPad system, and I get to use the regular Adobe tools.

Merging back the Lightroom catalog once I'm home is painless, so I don't have to try to replicate the edits I've done. And the MBA's high-speed ports (USB 3 or Thunderbolt) means you can also add a very fast external drive, like one of those tiny SSDs from OWC, and edit well on that drive.

The only downside is cost.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I read, from allegedly reliable sources, that Olympic photographers were expected to turn in selected and edited results 14 minutes after the end of their event this year.

That seems...difficult.

Apparently the main trick is to use down time during the event to do in-camera rating settings (which my camera doesn't do; though I can mark files as "protected", which may be good enough).

[John Krumm]

I bought my daughter a 13 inch Macbook Air last spring, the base model with 4 gigs of ram and a 128 gig ssd. I took it on a one week fall color trip through Alaska with several photo-club friends and in the evenings I would have my EM5 and E5 images loaded and be editing raws in Lightroom while everyone else was still waiting for Windows to load (they all had regular hard drives, which makes all the difference).

It sounds like the ipad is getting closer. Certainly it has some impressive power now. What I would likely do in your case (for a slideshow) is shoot good quality jpegs with conservative settings (low contrast, low saturation, low NR, low sharpening) and then edit them to taste in any number of ipad friendly editors. Keep the raws on the card for later at home.

[Bron]

I was impressed at how quickly photos are imported on the iPad, even RAW. Disappointed that neither Photos, nor iPhoto can resize photos. Fortunately Photogene deals with RAW, and can resize, and is only $.99, for a fairly complete editor.

I too, am incresing the actual "work" that I can do on the ios devices, though they are still not a replacement for a desk or laptop. Close.

[Gato]

Interesting ideas. I bought an inexpensive bluetooth keyboard for my Nexus tablet and find it now meets my travel needs.

Like you, I never seem to have the time for serious photo editing (or even writing) on the road, but with the tablet and a couple of simple photo programs I can do some culling and sorting and post a few "snapshots" from the road. The keyboard works well enough for email and social sites. With the right software it might do for small amounts of more serious writing.

For photos I sometimes use an Eye-Fi card and sebd JPEGs to the tablet as I shoot. Full-size JPEGs go to the tablet almost as fast as I shoot, about 6 seconds each, so the full shoot is available only a couple of minutes after I put down the camera.

As to the future, a laptop has been my main computer for the last year but I'm going back back to a desktop. I no longer need the laptop on the road and I never liked carrying around all the files and data. Too much risk of loss or theft. If it's going to stay home anyhow I can get more computing power for the money in a desktop.

For the road, I'm very interested in the "phablet" large-screen phones coming on the market. A phone with a 5 or 6 inch screen could meet all my needs on the road. Whether I'd want to deal with something that large on a daily basis could be another matter, though.

[Tim Allen]

I'm so glad somebody mentioned Photogene, it's a fabulous app but Snapseed always seems to get the publicity.

[Ade]

On Android, I've edited raw images using a Nexus 7, USB-OTG cable with SD card reader (which costs a few pounds - how much is the Apple CCK? ;) and apps such as Nexus Media Importer, PhotoMate and Snapseed. E.g.: http://goo.gl/uLZhR0

The results never quite compare to even basic adjustments in a desktop package, but if you can't immediately make that comparison then they're certainly decent enough to throw up on Flickr while travelling.

[Ben]

Have you tried out the Fotopedia app? It helps create photo stories, right from the iPad.
It has a great reportage look. You should try it.

[Robert Roaldi]

I use Aperture on an iMac and it does everything I need, but I wonder about configuring a portable set-up for myself now and then, just in case I ever need one. Friends have iPads, I think they may be useful generally, but it seems like Aperture doesn't run on them. Now I read about these other Apps I might need to get if I had an iPad. I thought the idea was that computer solutions were supposed to make life easier for us.

[toto]

Just curious, have you tried the Wacom pressure-sensitive stylus for the iPad?

[David]

iPhoto for iOS isn't free. It's $4.99.

And it's still $14.99 for OS X unless it already came with your Mac.

[David Kieltyka]

I too like the Photogene app. It's kinda Lightroom-ish...all your edits are non-destructive and are applied to a rendered version of each photo, leaving the original intact. More than worth the tiny cost. Snapseed, Leonardo, etc. don't work for me...they try to do too much. For RAW conversion I like PhotoRAW. Even on my old iPad 2 PhotoRAW can process Sony A7r RAWs (with some care), and on the new Air it zips along nicely. I also like that it doesn't auto-maximize tonal range by default...it assumes you know what you're doing. I wouldn't mind having white balance presets and clipping indicators, though.

Something that annoys me about tablet apps in general, and image editing apps in particular, is the utter lack of inertial characteristics in slider controls. It drives me up the wall when I lift a finger from a slider only to see the value jump way up or down from my desired target. My guess is this is OS-level stuff...but it should've been there in v1.0 and its continued absence is inexcusable.

[William]

I suppose if you are in an expedition or traveling in circumstances (long bicycle trek?) where every gram of weight and cubic cm of space must be conserved, then using an iPad for image processing would be useful.

Otherwise, tablets are for viewing content and laptops are for creating content. I have Adobe CC photography package on a 2013 13" MacBook Air. This is the smallest and slowest I'd want to go.

ps I know CC phones home occasionally to validate the license.

According to Adobe, "The desktop apps will attempt to validate your software licenses every 30 days, but for annual members, you can use the apps for up to 99 days in offline mode. Month-to-month members can use the software for up to 30 days in offline mode."

So if you travel for extended periods of time where internet connectivity is impossible, my approach in not practical.

[ctein]

Dear Huw,

So, an app that had essentially zero learning curve for me and let me put together a 250 photo slideshow in an hour the second time I used it seems “painful” to you? I thought I was a fanatic about usability, but I bow to you, Sir.

I've never been a Lightroom user. I've had Lightroom for, like, forever, but it doesn't seem to think the way I think and I haven't had any particular incentive to learn to think like it does.

I've been trying to figure out PhotoSmith, and probably I haven't got it sussed out yet, but so far I haven't found much in the way of image manipulation tools in it. It seems to be for asset management. Which is important to many people, but mostly not to me.

I could just be using it wrong; no doubt readers will put me on the right path if I am off.

~~~~

Dear David,

Um, you're partially right… And I'm partially wrong. IPhoto is free if your device was purchased after September 1 of last year, which my iPad are obviously was. Which is why I didn't notice that it is NOT free on older devices. Thanks for catching that!

~~~~

Dear Toto,

No I haven't. I'm interested in it, but it's quite expensive ($100) and only works with a limited number of apps. I don't think it works with any of the ones I'm using. I could be wrong about that, though…

~~~~

Dear John,

I tried photographing RAW plus JPEG last time I did this and it messed up my workflow something awful. It would take too long to explain, and it likely wouldn't matter to anyone else anyway. But, I decided that R+J was not for me.

Fortunately the JPEG's that are embedded as previews in the RAW files are very decent; good enough, anyway, for presenting on the limited resolution screen of an iPad. Or, for that matter an HDTV.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
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[Dennis Ng]

Used Lightroom for this near real time event and it seems fine. iPad is too slow (mine is the -1 generation not the Air).

BTW, I found it is nearly impossible to use macbook of 15" as the font of a lot of the system is too small. How can you get away with that? (In apps only the content can be enlarged but not the menu or other system level character).

[els]

Interesting desktop/laptop vs tablet discussion.

Ever since I bought my first iPad, I have been using more photo apps ( Camera+, Snapseed, Afterlight, Luminance, Photo fx Ultra) and less Photoshop. Now, with the iPad Air and the just acquired 'Leonardo' app (best replacement for photoshop on the iPad, ever!), I think I can end my relationship with Adobe. For the desktop I use Pixelmator.
Writing can be done on Pages. Very pretty!

[Fazal Majid]

I have an iPad AIr and the camera connection kits, but I never use it for photo editing. I found iPhoto crashy in the past when importing larges number of RAW images, and in any case the lack of color calibration in iOS or Android basically renders it useless to me for editing purposes since white balance correction is a critical step in my workflow. I could edit on my Retina MacBook Pro, but I seldom do that either, and just wait until I return home to edit in Lightroom on my 30" + 27" dual monitor setup.

The part I find more strange is the dearth of good iOS photo sharing apps that are not tied to a social network. I host my photos on my own website, in a password-protected section, and refuse to upload them to Facebook, Google, Flickr, Adobe Revel et al due to their well-demonstrated record of privacy violations (or in the case of Adobe, sheer incompetence at protecting credit-card data).

Older iOS versions supported photocasts, where you could subscribe to a RSS feed with enclosures, i.e. the photo equivalent of a podcast, but that must have been too open for Apple because they changed it to tie it firmly into their proprietary iCloud photostream misfeature (and given Apple's track record of incompetence at running cloud infrastructure, I wouldn't trust them not to screw it up).

I would love to see an app where I can send a secure URL to my parents or in-laws, they import it into their photo app, and then they can browse photos of their granddaughter whenever they want, including when they don't have connectivity (unlike me, they don't have the 4G iPad).

[Fazal Majid]

The real solution to your workflow problem would be to use wireless tethered mode, using either a WiFi-enabled camera like the E-M1, or using an Eye-Fi card on your E-M5. Unfortunately there are no standards whatsoever for wireless camera protocols today, and camera makers couldn't design software to save their life (which in fact they need to if they are to survive the smartphone onslaught). I don't know how well the various tethered apps work with buffering for fast sports action shooting, but it certainly works well enough in the studio.