Editing on an iPad instead of Mac Pro

daymouse

Im after some advice and people thoughts on editing RAW photos on ipad inparticular with the Apple Pencil

At the monent i have a 13" Macbook Pro (2016) and used to use Lightroom but i refuse to pay for an adobe subscription so been looking for alternatives.

This got me thinking and i literally dont use my Mac for anything else other that some light editing (when i have time) and browsing the net.

So now im thinking an iPad and Apple Pencil might be a better option and will get more use but wondering other than Lightroom what other apps are there for Image managment and RAW processing

Also is an ipad a good alternative to a Mac? I'm trying On1 a t the moment and its pretty laggy!

snerkler

Overall I still prefer editing on MacBook Pro rather than the iPad Pro. Maybe it's familiarity but I still find that I can get better results on the Mac, plus there are a couple of features missing off the mobile version. That being said, using it on the iPad (with pencil) is still very good and maybe if I spent more time on it I could get it to look as good as the Mac. One thing I've not figured out how to do yet (even though I've googled it) is how to get presets from the Mac to the iPad and vice versa. Now that I have presets set up my processing is now minimal as I just import the photos with the relevant preset, crop and adjust exposure if necessary and then I'm done. It would be nice to have said presets on my iPad.

The other reason I like using the MacBook is that if I do want to do the odd edit in photoshop (pretty rare) I can just transfer it across with a click.

The last thing to consider is storage, RAWs are large and you soon can fill 100GB. The big frustration with iPads (which I still can't believe hasn't been addressed) is that you can't connect an external hard drive to export stuff to, so with iPad only you've got nowhere to offload your used RAW files to.

techquest

Take a look at this

Get Google's Nik Collection Photo Editing Software Free ($150)

snerkler

AFAIK it’s not free anymore as it’s no longer owned by google. If you can still find a free link that works then that’s a huge bonus

techquest

Yes I can see now and was an old link

daymouse

is that for mac or ipad?

wysinawyg

snerkler - external HDDs are coming in the new iPadOS / iOS 13.

How to use external storage on iPad and iPhone with iOS 13

Also direct import to Lightroom rather than having to take everything through Photos first.

I haven't come across a decent library management alternative though, I think Photos and Lightroom are the only real options.

I think once iPadOS is out of Beta I will finally be giving Lightroom on my iPad a go.  I love using Affinity for doing proper Photoshop style stuff on the iPad with the pen, but Photos just feels a bit limited and it isn't practical to round trip stuff through Affinity en masse.

snerkler

Ooh, finally

I tend to use an old school way of storing photos, ie I set up my own folders. I import from the card to the hard drive and then from there into LR. I could import directly into LR and have it navigate to a folder on my hard drive but I'm too lazy to change my methodology

daymouse

Can even access wireless drives!

How to use a Kindle with the iOS 13 files app - 9to5Mac

Johnmcl7

This is the method I use as well as I want to keep a process that I have full control over and is completely independent of Lightroom to make it easier to move to different software.

I feel I'm old fashioned as I still prefer using a desktop PC for my photo editing with a nice keyboard, mouse and large monitor plus a PC with a lot of performance and storage.