Digital photography has really messed up my photo skills. Back in the days of Kodachrome, I was careful about composition, lighting, and exposure.
It’s a new year and a new age but with an expensive digital SLR, most of my photos have become wide angle, point and shoot, multiple shots. The photo taking skill has moved from the camera to the computer. For me, iPhoto isn’t enough, but these days I’m very much a point and click photographer.
Point. Click. Fix It In Post.
My photo collection from the 30 years prior to digital photography numbers around 10,000 photos. Those are just the photos I kept. Do the math. That was a lot of film and photo developing; one carefully composed shot at a time.
Today, my digital collection exceeds 20,000 photos, most of them stuffed into iPhoto.
To be fair, Apple’s free photo management and manipulation app is a good value. It’s fast, simple, holds plenty of photos, and is easy enough that nearly any Mac user can get good results from a modest digital camera.
What if you want more? Photoshop is far too expensive and complex for most of us who dabble in digital photography. What we want is simply more of iPhoto. More filters, more effects, more options, all wrapped in a stack of point and click tools.
Styling Photos On A Mac With PhotoStyler
If you’re content to avoid the expense and complexity of photoshop, and don’t care to venture into Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, take a look at PhotoStyler.
It’s not that I mind the complexity and workflow options of Aperture or Lightroom, it’s that I’m impatient. What I want is simple. I want to drag a photo into an app, click on a few preset options, tweak, save, rinse, repeat.
The end results need to be a notable improvement over what I’d get in iPhoto, but have a similar workflow. Easy. PhotoStyler starts with easy. Drag and drop. Check out the tools in the image below. Tools are in the right column (click image to view larger, pop up version).
The drag and drop function is contagious. Drag a photo to the PhotoStyler Dock icon or drop it into the photo area. Drag and drop any one of the presets to change the photo.
If there’s a filter or effect you don’t want in a preset, just drag it out. All the effects you would spend hours working on in Photoshop and simply can’t do in iPhoto, are available with a click, including sepia tone, scratches, ragged corners, convert to black and white, add effects, masks, adjust filters and much more.
The PhotoStyler Library is loaded with all the effects you can apply to your photo with just a drag and drop (though each can be tweaked).
For example, adding backgrounds, frames, textures is simple with the PhotoStyler Library. Dirt, fabric, paper, scratches, wood, and many others can be instantly applied to each photo, and the parameters of each changed or adjusted to match your tastes.
Even better, the precision of most effects and filters are handled by a simple slider, but numeric values can be entered for even more precision.
PhotoStyler lets you zoom into any portion of the photo to apply presets or make adjustments. Changes are rendered almost instantly. All the filters and effects can be dragged and dropped into the chain—those adjustments you want to apply to a photo—mixed and matched, and saved for future use on a different photo.
Even if you don’t have much experience with all the photographic terms, a little trial and error results in superb results.
For example, adding a frame to an image is drag and drop, but each preset in the chain can be adjusted with simple sliders. Add a glow to the photo the same way—drag, drop, adjust. Filters and effects make up the chain, and the chain can be saved as a preset.
PhotoStyler works in a similar manner to two other Mac photo imaging apps, though with a different approach. Funtastic Photos is playful, artful. LightZone is more serious, more complex.
About Ron McElfresh
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