[Oakland Rob]

What Pentax software, if any, does a K1 user need with a Mac and iPad? I use LR6 mainly and am a bit uncertain about what all the Pentax software choices would do. There is Tethered Capture Plug-in, Image Transmitter 2, Image Sync (iPad app), Digital Camera Utility, more? I understand that Pixel Shift processing requires use of Digital Camera Utility 5. Anyone have some experience or recommendations? Thanks much.

I find the Pentax software horrible to use. There are some motion control features for pixel shift images, but I use other tools for this (dcraw, Lr and Ps). Lr can show PS images just fine, it just doesn't have the motion control stuff. Lr Mobile can share the images with an iPad, and now does RAW. iPads have always had some RAW capability in that RAW images were stored there, but you were really working with JPEG in all but a couple of apps. The new iOS should make some changes in that, but I'm not sure since it's still in beta.

Haven't tried tethering...too expensive for me.

[PhilRich]

My workflow is a lot different. I use PS Bridge to bring up the photos from the memory card. I find it a waste of time and space to copy all of the files to disk, especially since all of them are 35meg plus raw files. I look at the pictures in bridge and open the promising ones one at a time. If worthy a file gets uploaded into PS for processing. From there it is saved to my file system. I segregate by years and then camera and within in each camera the category of the picture. I don't change the name, just leave it as shot. If I think it will be used in a large print I save in TIFF or PSD, otherwise as a jpg. Later it is easy to review the saved images using file explorer or Bridge. If I want to export a whole series of pictures I use Lightroom to batch them in and export in a smaller jpg size to be copied on a DVD and sent to friends and relatives, etc.

Personally, using Lightroom is like learning a foreign language. I find it frustrating and haven't invested the time to learn its process.

A thing I like about pentax is each shooting session is saved in a folder by date on the memory card. Once I'm finished with that date, that folder is deleted from the memory card. In some cases I will retire a card from general use that contains very special pictures in event that a better interpretation of the images is available later. These are labeled and filed away.

[kadajawi]

Personally, using Lightroom is like learning a foreign language. I find it frustrating and haven't invested the time to learn its process.

That's odd... yes, Lightroom is quite different from other software, but it is very intuitive and well structured.

Also, guys, you do realize that hard drives are cheap? You can get 4 TB for less than 100 Euro sometimes. And that is plenty.

Overall my computer should have around 15 TB of storage at this point. Deleting is unnecessary, though organizing and structure is.

Copying all to the hard drive takes less time than to look a them from the memory card. You just let it copy in the background, and do something else. Or start looking at the photos. Lightroom can take care of the import and renders a 1:1 preview, so you can move through the photos much faster, to sort through them, to find the ones you'd want to process, etc.

[Oakland Rob]

That's odd... yes, Lightroom is quite different from other software, but it is very intuitive and well structured.

Also, guys, you do realize that hard drives are cheap? You can get 4 TB for less than 100 Euro sometimes. And that is plenty.

Overall my computer should have around 15 TB of storage at this point. Deleting is unnecessary, though organizing and structure is.

Copying all to the hard drive takes less time than to look a them from the memory card. You just let it copy in the background, and do something else. Or start looking at the photos. Lightroom can take care of the import and renders a 1:1 preview, so you can move through the photos much faster, to sort through them, to find the ones you'd want to process, etc.

I tend to agree. I expect that since PhilRich's workflow involves organizing by folder and by browser (Bridge) it's necessary to do more culling initially. Lr is designed to deal with tons and tons of images, with all sorts of batch operations and tools for sorting and finding, and hence culling at that point isn't as necessary. Bridge can do some of that but not as efficiently. Just shows that we're all different: I'd find culling and managing like that in Bridge a huge waste of time. Exif already includes date, camera, and lots of other info so I'd find adding that via file or folder names a waste of time too.

Nevertheless, I do find Lr and Bridge both are not as good as FastRawViewer for picking shots to edit by a long shot. Only good for RAW of course, but it much better for choosing worthy keepers than the Adobe software. And fast.

[kadajawi]

I tend to agree. I expect that since PhilRich's workflow involves organizing by folder and by browser (Bridge) it's necessary to do more culling initially. Lr is designed to deal with tons and tons of images, with all sorts of batch operations and tools for sorting and finding, and hence culling at that point isn't as necessary. Bridge can do some of that but not as efficiently. Just shows that we're all different: I'd find culling and managing like that in Bridge a huge waste of time. Exif already includes date, camera, and lots of other info so I'd find adding that via file or folder names a waste of time too.

Nevertheless, I do find Lr and Bridge both are not as good as FastRawViewer for picking shots to edit by a long shot. Only good for RAW of course, but it much better for choosing worthy keepers than the Adobe software. And fast.

Yeah. Also I'd always much rather keep the raw files. They are much smaller than PSDs... for example my last batch of photos had roughly 0.8-1.3 GB per PSD. Madness. Raw files are much more efficient. Plus you can use Lightroom to compress them even further, without losing quality (and much further when sacrificing a tiny bit of quality... you can still process them like any other raw file though).

I do sort by camera and year, because otherwise filenames would duplicate... and I don't always use Lightroom to browse through them.

Oh yeah, and sometimes I'm in the mood for editing, sometimes not. I don't want to be forced to do it.

Besides, I recently looked through old photos, that I already processed. They were processed with an old Lightroom version. I was curious, so I set the processing version to the latest in Lightroom, and suddenly the quality was significantly better. I did have to adjust the settings, but the raw processing has improved a lot. By processing the photos now, and only keeping the PSD or TIFF, you're throwing all that away.

[Oakland Rob]

Yeah. Also I'd always much rather keep the raw files. They are much smaller than PSDs... for example my last batch of photos had roughly 0.8-1.3 GB per PSD. Madness. Raw files are much more efficient. Plus you can use Lightroom to compress them even further, without losing quality (and much further when sacrificing a tiny bit of quality... you can still process them like any other raw file though).

I do sort by camera and year, because otherwise filenames would duplicate... and I don't always use Lightroom to browse through them.

Oh yeah, and sometimes I'm in the mood for editing, sometimes not. I don't want to be forced to do it.

Besides, I recently looked through old photos, that I already processed. They were processed with an old Lightroom version. I was curious, so I set the processing version to the latest in Lightroom, and suddenly the quality was significantly better. I did have to adjust the settings, but the raw processing has improved a lot. By processing the photos now, and only keeping the PSD or TIFF, you're throwing all that away.

I interpreted PhilRich's comment to mean he saved both. I can't imagine tossing a RAW in favor of a TIFF or even a JPEG except for unusual reasons, and thought that perhaps the TIFF was the necessary output of some editing programs. I guess I couldn't see why anyone would use anything but a parametric image editor like Lr or Photos Supreme or C1 for RAW.