One of the biggest benefits of the new generation of photo workflow apps such as Aperture and LightRoom is the speed of turnaround. Where we might, before, have been using half a dozen different applications in our workflows, these days we can use one or two to do most tasks.

This increased speed was really bought home to me a couple of months ago when I photographed a close relative’s wedding, a type of photography that I don’t normally do.

Having shot from 10am through to about 4:30pm, I grabbed half an hour away from the guests, zipped through 480 photos - rating, cropping, making adjustments etc. and had a slideshow of the best hundred shots looping on the MBP screen by the time food was being served, with guests oohing and aahing over things they hadn’t seen, or the formal portraits on the beach before the wedding etc.

Some of this speed comes from the ability to work with RAW files as readily as we can JPEGs or TIFFs, but a lot of it comes from the integration of what were previously separate tasks. We might have used Photo Mechanic for fast browsing, rating and editing of metadata, dropped into Photoshop for cropping and adjustments, converted everything into screen-resolution JPEGs and finally bought those JPEGs into a slideshow app such as Keynote or Fotomagico.

All of a sudden, all those steps are taking place in the same interface, without the conversion stages, and the ability to swap between tasks at any stage - for instance spotting a mistake during the slideshow, dropping out of the show, making an edit and starting the show again.

I suspect that a lot of us have become so used to these new ways of working that it doesn’t feel special anymore, but this experience bought back a bit of the ‘magic’ of photography by letting me concentrate on the images and not on the post-processing...