Building a New Photography Workflow with the iPad Pro
As I consider my own call to create and attempt to embrace artistic challenges and creative acts in general, I’ve begun to think about the components of each medium that give me life, as well as the ones that drain me.
In writing, it’s the, well, writing that I love, and the fiddling about with settings and blog features that tires me out. That’s why you’re reading this on Medium, because I realized I would be happier in this environment, and the switch has personally been a tremendous success. In the same way, I realized that in photography, it’s (and I know this should have been obvious) the shooting that I love, and the importing, loading, and editing of the photos that I find monotonous, making me reluctant to pick up a camera again. In video, I realized that I enjoy both the shooting and the editing, but it’s the horrendous load times and rendering processes that wear me out.
If you’ve noticed a pattern in the above paragraph, so have I. Perhaps it should have been obvious to me — and maybe it’s always been obvious to you — but I’m just now realizing that the more and more I embrace each creative process, the less time I want to give to anything but the act of creating. Over time I begin to build negative associations with each creative act, mentally, but it’s not because of the ‘art’ itself; it’s because of all the work I put into a thing after the component I love most is over and done with.
These realizations have led me to try and create ‘less workflow’ in my life, not just in writing, but across the board. For photography, that means if I innately desire more than anything else to just shoot, then I need to learn more about composing and ‘editing’ in camera, and being happy with the result.
So, I’ve begun building a new way of processing photos using only the device I love — the iPad Pro — but it’s been a challenge.
Though the iPad Pro enables me to be more creative, that doesn’t mean there’s a solution for every creative task I want to accomplish — and in photography in particular, using the device as a primary machine forces me to make some interesting choices.
On the Mac, a typical photography workflow for me might look something like this: I plug an SD card in and import dozens of photos into Lightroom. I go through the photos, quickly ‘discarding’ photos I don’t like or missed focus in, whittling down the number of photos dramatically. Then I go through all the photos, making global edits (and typically copy/pasting the majority of edits from the previous photo), and flag the photos I love the most. Then I look at only the photos I flagged, make the additional tweak or two, and batch export the photos.
On iOS, things have to change a bit. You can only export off the SD card into Apple’s owns Photos app, so I’ve been plugging the SD Card into the new (USB 3.0-enabled!) Lighting to SD Card Camera Reader and passing everything into Photos. Then I go through each shot and (instead of discarding) select the photos I want to keep by adding them to an Album.
From this point, what to do is unclear — but I certainly have options. Lightroom and VSCO are both wonderful iPad Pro apps that allow me to bulk import into their apps, but the way they work are so different from what I’m used to (yes, especially Lightroom for iOS vs. Lightroom for Mac) that I’m hesitant to commit to one or the other. Lightroom feels close to right, but is missing a few things.
Though both apps allow for bulk import, bulk export is not as easy. One the photos are in the apps, getting them out is tricky — and both have the unfortunate quality of saving a ‘copy’ instead of modifying (and effectively overwriting) the original file, breaking down my ability to retain everything I love in a particular iOS Photo Album.
Snapseed has no gallery inside of its own app, only allowing edits of a single photo at a time — but it does allow me to overwrite the original photo, retaining it’s place in an Album. Pixelmator also allows to overwrite the original photo, but again, doesn’t allow for a bulk import of any kind, and seems more geared to editing a single photo. In addition, both of these apps have a UI so different from what I’m used to, that I can never seem to learn them.
Of course, there are plenty of other apps, many of which I have little experience with. Enlight stands out, allowing unique features like ‘lossless’ TIFF export, but providing it’s own set of challenges.
Curious, I asked a few people who have been trying to edit on iOS how they’ve been going for them, and got some interesting responses.
Carlos says that he starts by putting each photo into Snapseed, then (if necessary) passing it to Pixelmator and Photoshop Fix. He’s frustrated by the lack of RAW editing, and as such is reluctant to try and edit with an iPad as the main device. Jeremy also uses a bevy of apps — Pixelmator included — and is happy with how quickly the app allows him to get to work editing. Matt simply edits all of his photos with VSCO. Finding stories like these, it’s clear that though there may not be any one perfect solution, there are many apps that might work well for many people.
After all of this, I’ve settled on using a totally different app — Polarr — for the time being. It allows me to view an entire Album, seeing my selected photos as soon as I open the app, as well as modify the original file, overwriting it. It has some incredibly powerful features (including color masks and dehazing!), as well as — quite uniquely — filters built by prominent Unsplash artists. I like it so much that it’s become my defacto editing app, and I’ve installed in on my iPhone as well.
I’m going to continue experimenting with finding the workflow that fits me most, but it’s also been an exercise in reminding myself that I don’t want to create another draining experience. Though I might be yearning for Lightroom for the Mac to come to iOS, perhaps it’s better for me to learn a new way. If anyone has been building their own photography workflow on iOS, please tell me how it’s been going for you, and if you’ve tried anything I haven’t. Regardless, I’ll be shooting.
