Casual shutterbugs are unlikely to drop $150 on software just for importing and organizing digital photographs. But seasoned pro photographers have long sworn by Photo Mechanic as the fastest importer and previewer, and the most capable tool for organizing thousands of shots. Apple's Aperture 3 ($80, 4 stars) and Adobe's Lightroom 4 ($149, 4.5 stars) can both perform these functions, while adding the ability to actually adjust and edit the images. So why would the pros want to use a separate app, and does it make sense for serious amateurs?
First off, you should be clear that Photo Mechanic not only doesn't let you edit photos, but it's also not meant for processing raw camera files. It does, however, let you organize and rate your images, and then export them to another app for editing, upload them to an online service, or print them. Versions of the software for both Mac OS X and Windows are available, and capabilities are nearly identical on both.
Interface
As you'd expect from a pro-level program, Photo Mechanic's interface is no-nonsense. A left panel shows your computer's disk folder structure. When you insert digital photo media, the app's "Ingest" dialog pops up with choices for source, destination, and whether to only import raw camera files. An optional "IPTC Stationery Pad" offers a wealth of description such as location, licensing, and even detailed information about any model shot. (Most other photo apps use the term "import," while "ingest" is more common in the pro video arena.) You can ingest only new photos or everything on the card. A separate "Job" page adds client info.
The interface doesn't support the two most recent Mac OS X versions' full-screen modes, as Lightroom and Aperture do. Nor does it let you group similar photos into "stacks" to help with selection the way those apps do. Thumbnail view in Photo Mechanic can be enlarged with a slider right at the top of the window, and I could sort images by capture time, modified time, filename, rating, and more.
A view filter dropdown lets you restrict displayed thumbnails to tagged, untagged, or selected images. Photo Mechanic uses the word "tag" in a non-standard way: other apps call this pick or flag, instead using the word tag to mean keyword descriptive tags. A search bar to the right works well, and is surrounded by upload (to FTP, SmugMug, Flickr, and more), burn to disc, and color matching buttons.
Along the bottom edge of the main interface, you'll see basic photo info at the left, and rating (the standard 1 to 5) and color-coding options to the right. Color-coding photos for different uses and subjects is now standard in high-end photo apps. Even CyberLink's $99.99 PhotoDirector has these color labels. As with other pro-level image apps, Photo Mechanic makes good use of keyboard shortcuts: You can use these to zoom, select, rate, and rotate images, as well as to upload them or send them to an external editor such as Photoshop.
Four buttons appear in the corners of an image thumbnail when you hover the mouse over it: rotate left, rotate right, magnifying glass to open preview, and i for information in the form of a large IPTC sheet. The preview interface lets you do side-by-side (or above and below) comparisons. This view shows a histogram for the image, with the ability to highlight blown out or lost dark areas, helpful for selecting images to keep. It also offers the single actual editing option in the program: cropping. The crop tool isn't as sophisticated as Lightroom's and doesn't actually even crop your view of the image; it only takes effect (optionally) if you export the image. Not being able to see the actual result of a crop seems kind of pointless, though you can show the cropped out area darkened.
"Ingesting" Your Photos with Photo Mechanic
The ingest process can open a contact sheet during import, erase source media after import, and automatically unmount the media when done. One thing that I didn't love was that I couldn't select thumbnails of the images for import beforehand, as I could in Lightroom. This meant that if I had a huge SD card full of images, I could only import everything that Photo Mechanic hadn't previously imported. I could, however choose a subfolder, for example, if multiple cameras had recorded to the card and created separate folders.
I performed a couple of ingest speed tests, pitting Photo Mechanic against Aperture and Lightroom. I tested using a Retina MacBook with a 2.3GHz Core i7 processor and 8GB RAM. The first test consisted of 40 mixed raw images from different cameras, each about 20MB, and a larger import of 246 .CR2 files weighing in at about 1GB. Here's a table showing the import performance results:
|
? |
Time to Import 40 mixed raw files (in seconds, lower is better) |
Time to import 246 CR2 files (in seconds, lower is better) |
|
Aperture 3.3 |
33 |
3:26 |
|
Lightroom 4.1 |
39 |
4:12 |
|
Photo Mechanic 5 |
34 |
3:57 |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ePejWP3EYlA/0,2817,2410505,00.asp
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