now that i have a mac, there are so many tools that i have available to me that i have not had before. this is both exciting and overwhelming.

i imported my first HD video from the camcorder today. looks like video editing could become quite complicated if i let it. for now, i think i’m ok with simple editing and my aspirations of using premiere or final cut pro may just be left as aspirations. iMovie is a whole lot less intimidating…

but the biggest issue i had was trying to figure out my photo processing workflow. let me tell you, this is critically important to me. i was really disappointed with what my options were.

what i really wanted was some way to browse my RAW photos, take the ones that i am interested into photoshop for processing and then save them out. i was really hoping that iphoto would be the tool for this. what i didn’t realize was that iphoto does not handle RAW files directly. instead, it imports the RAW photos and makes jpeg thumbnails. this is awful for me because then when i drag a photo from iphoto to photoshop, it drags the iphoto-processed jpg, not the RAW image.

if i am doing something wrong here, let me know, but this makes iphoto unusable for me. this sucks because i love, love, love the features that iphoto has to offer.

then i started looking at other options like aperture, but i just don’t get what all the hype around aperture is. it feels a little bloated to me and i’m not convinced that it really will improve my workflow.

coming from my windows workflow of using ACDSee as my image browser, i was desperate and googled “ACDSee mac” to see what other people were doing. well, guess what? ACDSee for mac is in beta and let me tell you it is fantastic. FANTASTIC. my workflow from windows can be directly moved over to the mac and all is well in the world again.