Let’s be honest: We live in the age where mobile photography cannot be ignored. Smart and progressive professional photographers will acknowledge anyone can take great photographs using easily accessible cameras and softwares including the ones that are found and available in a cell phone today. So what is left for professionals and artists to create, inspire and make a living out of photography today? I’ll save that debate for another day. This post is all about my basic stable and sustainable workflow for semi-serious work when using the phone cameras. Like my previous posts about workflows and peek into behind the scenes, I will use an example.
Until a few weeks ago, my primary post processing app was Snapseed. I love it’s simplicity although I used only about 5% of all its features. The new iPhone 12 Pro Max with native RAW capabilities made me quickly switch (back) to Lightroom mobile. I am going to explain in a bit why.
Snapseed worked great for quick edits especially on jpeg files (or HEIC if you’re into it) however I found RAW editing somewhat cumbersome and not as user-friendly as Lightroom, and this was even before Apple introduced native RAW formats. Selective editing to my knowledge is possible only after initial adjustments done to the RAW image, and exported into a compressed format therefore, you loose all the benefits of shooting in RAW if you are editing portions of the image. Finally, all edits in Snapseed are destructive, i.e. you cannot go back and re-adjust an edit (although you have the option to undo actions). Lightroom mobile wins in all these limitations.
Most (if not all) photographers are familiar with Adobe softwares, more specifically Lightroom. The UX is quite different from Snapseed however, it didn’t take time to get used to it, the learning curve wasn’t very high.
In addition to exiting, Lightroom brings auxiliary functions such as viewing EXIF data, watermarking and bulk export - features that aren’t available in Snapseed.
Snapseed worked great for exporting into Instagram or Facebook but would I print any of the images? I’d probably not. I have not printed many from the LR pipeline but I’ll post here once I have something shareable.
Here is the final export of the example image (exported from the LR workflow):