Apple iPad workflow (or iPad vs Lightroom, sofa vs desk)

Alf

Top Veteran
Hi everyone.
Winter here means longer hours working and bad weather, hence my little shooting activity.
Add to this my home PC processor (or motherboard) going dead, and the coincident raining on our little home of a lovely present in the form of an iPad and the switching to new smartphones for both of us (two LG E-900 windows phone 7), together with choice and assembly of the new PC components, and you get the image.
My time after work was spent happily configuring and installing into oblivion.

But it seems I start to reconnect with human life, and happily I can report a nice weekend with temperatures reaching into the 20s (°C) for a few minutes today, and probably going to last for a while before February storms hit and cold comes back.

So the home PC sees less direct use, it almost has become our little server that could - and here is the undecided part.

Up to this moment I usually shot Jpeg+RAW, used the jpegs as a guide and did all postprocessing in LightRoom. Working on my Ethiopia trip pics took weeks because of this choice, even when I liked the result.
Receiving the iPad was great for immediate photographic satisfaction, as it has great color calibration. But it also showed me how great are Olympus Jpegs, and how little fiddling they need - apart from dark moments.

The iPad has plenty of photo apps, and at least a few of them are good (especially photogene,photo fx ultra, and filterstorm. PS Express is nice, but limited and slow. And piRAWnha is interesting, at least in concept. a RAW developer on iPad!) and maybe they could be sufficient.

So at this moment I am undecided, if going for the sofa route and shoot jpeg only, with minimal cropping and pp on iPad, or going on shooting jpeg+RAW and firing up Lightroom - which screams on my new rig and could extract that more juice from my pics?

Please see exibit A, iPad vs Lightroom

5421898428_9ebff82f7d_b.jpg

Jpeg, cropped in PhotoGene and upped as-is from iPad

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ORF developed and exported from LR

5421195141_97bb5cd667_b.jpg

Denoised using dfine 2 from LR

5421196015_b8979fe86a_b.jpg

Jpeg, retouched on iPad to make it a little colder and exported from there

What do you think?
 
Well, if i could go the "sofa" route with your results, I surely would!

I cast my vote for your final photo the Jpeg retouched on iPad made a little colder. It looks excellent here via my MacBook Pro...as I sit on my counter stool, the comfy couch behind me as I look through my kitchen out the window across the room.;)
 
JPEGS are fine if you have a properly exposed file, it is when you need to push/pull exposure that the extra data in the RAW file helps. One thing I used to do was to shoot in JPEG most of the time and then just click over to RAW in tricky light.

Another thing you can always do if you just have a JPEG file but need to do heavy edits is to convert the file over to a 16bit tiff file and then edit in lightroom. The extra bit depth and lack of compression in TIFF files can really help
 
Interesting. I prefer the first and last because they look much more natural and convey a certain atmosphere. On balance I would have to go for the original ooc jpeg (first pic) because I prefer the warmer look it gives. I don't expect bitingly sharp detail in this sort of light, it's more about conveying a "feeling" so to speak :)
 
Since I upload my pictures to my smugmug site and since smugmug uses flash and since apple won't allow flash on their precious products, ipad is useless for me.

More importantly, I reached a point where I couldn't do without RAW and Lightroom.
 
I feel that way, too, about RAW and Lightroom. I'm thinking of using the iPad more as more portable, lightweight way of getting online and accessing information... I'm not in the market for anything except a camera right now, but apparently many people do use these iPads and still end up using Lightroom, etc., eventually.
 
Update

> Wait.
Time passes.

Still undecided. The gorgeous olympus jpegs work great most of the time, especially during bright days. The Rome set of last weekend was only resized for upload, using iPad only for choosing which pics to upload. Didn't even crop them.
This evening i parsed a few RAW with LR3 and uploaded them on flickr to compare.

5462775347_8800def45c_b.jpg

OOC

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LR3


5463357476_09e4a31008_b.jpg

OOC

5469564790_02d12feea9_b.jpg

LR3

My opinion is that sometimes, only sometimes, RAW and LR can be of good use - but most of my time is better spent on finding some good subject, light and composition which is where I need to learn.

So I'll happily go on shooting jpeg + RAW for the happiness of storage vendors, but only some of those RAW will be used most of the time.

About iPad and LightRoom: it is a great great great combination using both of them and having the iPad almost-calibrated screen as secondary display (I used AirDisplay on my PC as suggested by the mighty Ctein). If you are into heavy LR use this is probably good for you too.
 
In this case, Alf, from my point of view via my computer screen it's the OCC that wins the evening for this portrait. Yes, there is a yellow tone but it appears more realistic to my eyes, again via my computer screen.

Which do you prefer, Alf?
 
Would you say that your printed version reflects the same colder color that you see on your screen in the print version?

No, my English isn't what it should. I only meant that the colder image would be beautiful to look at if printed, while the warmer colors are best on screen for me.
 
Your second has, again, a different white balance but this time I like your second version better - the details are much better, as well. Are you using RAW or DNG in Lightroom?
 
The contrast difference is remarkable -- I like aspects of both, but I prefer the shadow detail in the first picture. I'd like less than is in the first (as it distracts some) and more than is in the second.
 
With the fountain picture... you did not process in LR to reveal the shadow detail, your chosen settings darkened shadow detail... did you want to do that? The RAW image could be processed in LR to reveal as much or more beautiful shadow detail than the OOC image displays. I feel that colorful detail in the shadow areas enhances the image and if brought out as much or more than the OOC image, would make it very nice.
 
Yes, I was playing with effects instead of extracting more from the raw file. But I agree that the squeezing can only be done in a raw developer - I am only happy that this raw pp is often not necessary if good conditions help the Oly Jpeg engine.

Thank you all for your input!
 
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