Software for Macro Photography

Many digital camera purchases include software to allow you to preview and perhaps adjust or modify the photos you have taken. Typically, such software has somewhat primitive editing capabilities, and more sophisticated editing requires the use of Adobe Photoshop or equivalent to adjust the images to perfection.

Most of the software out there uses a computerized light-table or slide-sorter paradigm, allowing critical viewing of no more than a single image at a time. Many of the newer slide-sorter programs also include, to varying degrees, image adjustment or touch-up capabilities, reducing the need for a separate image manipulation program for many basic tasks. Software like this is fine for many applications, but doesn't allow close side-by-side comparison of photos to assess, for example, the focus or acuity of critical tiny details - an essential capability for anyone taking large quantities of macro photos, only the best of which will be retained.

In our experience, we've found only one program that truly allows multiple views simultaneously of several images, each independently adjustable. This is possible, of course, in Adobe Photoshop, but it's a huge convenience to be able to do preliminary comparisons with the photos straight from the camera, without having to import them into Photoshop first.

Olympus Camedia Master v1.1 provides good critical comparison capability (looking at only part of several images, each magnified, positioned and sized as appropriate) with minimal image adjustment capabilities. It is speedy and functional, and it's our first choice for selecting the "keepers" from a night's production of a couple of hundred moth photos, which typically includes multiple photos of a single species or specimen only a few of which will be retained. Images in the thumbnail display are large enough to facilitate preliminary sorting and selection of similar or same-species photos for simultaneous comparison at larger sizes. Highly recommended for the macro-photographer dealing with large quantities of images.

Regrettably, later versions of the Camedia software eliminated the capability of simultaneously viewing multiple images, independently sized and magnified, and allow viewing of only one large image at a time, other than multiple thumbnails. We do not recommend later versions than v1.1 for critical macro photography.

Corel Paint Shop Pro version 10.10 includes reasonable image adjustment capabilities, allowing viewing of several magnified images at once. However, it makes large thumbnail database files for no obvious reason, the program runs much too slowly to be useful, and it has cryptic error messages.

For our purposes, however, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo version 10, plus the new version 11, has one major disadvantage: it includes a third-party (Protexis) DRM (digital rights management) spyware worm, which cannot be turned off — nor is it uninstalled when you uninstall Paint Shop Pro. For this reason, Corel Paint Shop Pro is not recommended.

Adobe's new software, Light Room, now at version 1.3, tries hard to be a universal solution for those who need to examine multiple pictures at one time and to crop and adjust images. It does these things very nicely within limits. Everything is done non-destructively — a database keeps track of all your adjustments, custom-generating your corrected images whenever you need to view or export them. Light Room breaks the image workflow into several reasonably logical parts and provides a helpful innovative interface. Although fairly expensive, it does incorporate the most important capabilities of Adobe's Photoshop software providing good value. But then there is that feeling that maybe this is really a Flash program, or something else at odds with the base PC operating environment — its dark gray motif reminds one of the intro to a video game, but does look rather handsome.

For our applications, however, the overwhelming disadvantage of Light Room is that it doesn't allow multiple, perhaps overlapping, images to be displayed AND independently adjusted at the same time. Also, because it seems not to be a program with normal MS Windows functionality, it doesn't have thumbs (the slider things) associated with its images - and we don't think that each image is displayed in a real window. So one can only look at a single large image with magnification at a time - no image overlap or resizing is possible. The program will not install on PCs running operating systems earlier than Windows XP. Moreover, the program seems not able to recognize earlier versions of Photoshop (V6.0 for example), installed on the same computer. This program will be very good for those whose photographic subjects fill essentially the whole picture's frame as it comes from the camera, but it doesn't meet our needs for the initial review of and selection of the best from a large group of photos of macro subjects like moths. A 30-day no-obligation trial can be downloaded from the Adobe web site.

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Page last modified 1 March 2008
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