iPad Photo Editor Cage Fight: Lightroom vs Pixelmator Photo
Which RAW photo editor is best for the serious photographer’s workflow?
The iPad has a beautiful screen and serious processing power, which should make it a natural for processing photos. Can it replace a MacBook as part of a photo workflow? Which apps deliver?
I take two photos from recent shoots and put them through my standard Getty stock photography workflow. My standard workflow:
- Assess the overall lighting — is it flat, harsh, white-outs, black-outs?
- Make spot adjustments to lighting
- Look for hot sensor spots and dirt
- Remove objects to improve composition
- Correct lens distortions
- Crop and scale
The goal of the workflow is to create a clean, solid image, not create art. Someone else turns stock photographs into art!
Each of the images has issues. I took both on bright sunny days, which means dealing with a wide dynamic range. The sun was behind both images just to make them even more challenging!
I’m going to see if Lightroom or Pixelmator Photo can fix them. Both apps were running on an iPad Pro 12.9”, and I was using an Apple Pencil…
