Green Volcano Software makes beautiful UIs. You might have seen their iPhone app Flickit, a slick free flickr uploading tool. Their Mac app Photon is just as slick. Also dealing with photos, but this time round it’s the whole circus. Imagine you’ve been out shooting, and you’ve got photos from multiple days or locations, and you wanna get them all sorted out without breaking a sweat. iPhoto seems like you’re shoving photos in a shoebox?
Streamlined, But Full Of Features
First off, I wanna be clear about who Photon is for. I mean, anyone could find it useful, but the target audience is semi-pro to pro photographers who are taking dozens to thousands of photos over the course of a shoot. It does some really cool processing stuff with RAW data, and produces high-res previews really quickly. Another trick it does is that if you start moving between RAW images before all the processing is finished, Photon will auto-switch to high-res JPEG previews by itself; switching back to RAW if it catches up to your previewing speed. This is all dependent upon your hardware, and Photon scales across multiple processors to give you as much speed as it can. [Ed: I gave the app a spin and I was surprised with the speed as well. Very responsive.]
With Photon, you can import photos and arrange them into stacks. These stacks are meant to work like a light table. You can quickly breakdown all your photos into stacks, and process them more efficiently. Stacks have their own set of preferences, so you can tweak them just the way you want them. You can then file them wherever you like. While I don’t often have pro-photographer shoots with hundreds of photos, I find it really useful for just processing iPhone snapshots, so that I can group them, and create a workflow. The UI is very HUD-like, and it feels very lightweight but powerful at the same time. It never gets in your way. The app has one purpose, and fulfills that purpose well.
What this app isn’t is a replacement for your asset management software. This app should theoretically be used in conjunction with Lightroom or Aperture for best results. From experience, I know that I take a lot of throwaway shots. Where Photon really comes in handy is helping me parse out the keepers from the trashers.
Where Can Photon Go From Here?
I have very few gripes with the app. It lacks a few things that would make my photo workflow even shorter. For example, I’d love to see support for Flickr. It would reduce the need to open up another app when I’m importing photos and know I want to share them. Also, a straight import into iPhoto option would close the loop completely. Lastly, being able to delete photos from the external memory source, like from my iPhone would be great. I currently have to fire up Phoneview so I can batch delete photos after import.
I’m looking forward to future updates adding new features, and the developer has told me that he will be updating the app in the near future. And he’s very open to user feedback. All in all, I really love Photon and would recommend it to any photographer out there. It’s priced at $69 with a free trial available. Give it a whirl.
Giveaway
Lastly, Green Volcano Software has been kind enough to donate three free licenses to SA readers; one for a retweet, and two for commenters with the best feature suggestions for Photon. Voice your requests and you could be rewarded! Standard giveaway rules apply.
Winners of giveaway:
Randy Schwartz and Lucky
