Darkrooms in a box help organize digital images

There’s no shortage of cameras in our lives. Many mobile devices are capable of capturing still images, and most of these can record video. The most basic point-and-shoot digital cameras are so cheap and ubiquitous that many amateur photographers are upgrading to digital single-lens reflex cameras, once carried only by professionals.

Having all these cameras around has turned us into documentarians. And because we can document everything, all the time, we do.

That fact, coupled with my belief that to get one good photograph you need to take at least 50, is the reason I’ve accumulated about 20,000 digital photographs in the past five years. In the first six months of my first child’s life, for example, more than 6,000 digital photographs were shot and saved on my family’s main computer. And I’m not even a frequent shooter. Most of my pictures are taken at special events and while on vacation.

With one-terabyte hard drives-which can store the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes, or about 500,000 high-resolution two-megabyte images-available for less than $200, we can archive all our digital photos, good and bad.

Organizing that many images, though, is a daunting task. Thankfully, there is a wide range of software to help you organize your growing photo library. All of these programs provide at least basic editing tools. Photo-management software packages fall into one of two categories: consumer and professional.

Consumer packages are akin to basic darkrooms in a box, permitting users to import photos from cameras, organize them into albums or by event, and tag them with keywords for easy searching. Examples include ACDSee Photo Manager (PC only), Apple’s iPhoto (Mac only), and Adobe Photoshop Elements (Mac and PC). iPhoto and Photoshop Elements also include a full suite of editing tools. For example, darker photos can be brightened, images can be cropped and rotated, and colours can be adjusted. There are also presets for giving your photos the old-time sepia look if you want. These tools are available from the Victoria-based ACD Systems through its ACDSee Photo Editor package, which also offers design templates for easy “scrapbooking” .

Professional photographers, most of whom have switched to digital methods, often cobble together a number of programs to do their jobs. Some programs are linked to a particular type of camera. Canon, Hasselblad, and Nikon, for example, all make software—Digital Photo Professional, Phocus, and Capture NX, respectively—that enables photographers to import photos onto a computer and manage them.

Among the programs that are used by pro shooters—and advanced amateurs—to manage workflow are ACDSee Pro (PC only), Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Mac and PC), Apple’s Aperture (Mac only), and Phase One’s Capture One (Mac and PC). For professionals, who don’t typically have to worry about things like red eye, being able to manage a huge number of images is more important than making quick-and-dirty edits to photos. So the programs they use are designed to make it simple to quickly import, sort, tag, file, and export countless images.

These programs also make it easy for professional photographers to archive their images in raw-unprocessed-form. These raw images are, essentially, digital negatives. Such software packages do allow for some postproduction, including manipulation of brightness, contrast, and colour shifting, but when pros need to make adjustments or edits to their images, the industry standard and category leader is Adobe Photoshop (Mac and PC).

Photoshop offers a full digital darkroom: virtually any tweak that can be made to a photo in a real darkroom can be replicated with this software. And it works seamlessly with Adobe’s professional design programs—Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver—which are also leading software packages in their categories.

Some people use software designed for professionals because it allows greater control over the adjustments that can be made. The drawback is that professional software tends to be more difficult to use and more expensive. I’ve been using Photoshop for 15 years, but I wouldn’t advise a new photo hobbyist to take it on. ACDSee Photo Editor, iPhoto, and Photoshop Elements were designed for these users, and provide all the features most enthusiasts need to make photos look their best.

For those who want hard copies of their photographs, most printer manufacturers sell machines that, when used with photographic paper, produce prints that are nearly as good as the ones you used to get from the photo lab down the street. Polaroid’s new PoGo printer (US$99.95, Amazon.com) is a mobile device that will take images directly from a digital camera or camera phone—using a USB cable or by transferring wirelessly with Bluetooth—and print them in under 60 seconds on sticky-back paper. It’s a reinvention of the instant photograph that made Polaroid a household name.

Which means not only can you document your best friend tripping while approaching that cutie, you can make sure everyone leaves the party with proof.