I posted information about a new version of Photo Mechanic a couple days ago and I don't think people really understood what the program does. So, I thought I'd give a brief review here.
One thing to get clarified right off the bat is that Photo Mechanic is a photo editor, as in a tool for an Editor or Photojournalist. It is not a photo retouching tool or a drawing tool.... like most people think of when they say photo editor. It is more similar to image viewers like BreezeBrowser than Photoshop or PrintShopPro.
Here is a description of the product from the
Camera Bits website.
Quote:
Fast Sort – Photo Mechanic helps you quickly find your best shots. The multithreaded architecture works in the background to keep ahead of you. Images appear blazingly fast. You can view your originals full screen, compare similar shots side by side, delete the bad shots, tag photos while watching a slide show, and sort your keepers into multiple folders.
Fast Workflow – Read the images from the card, flatten the file hierarchy, apply IPTC stationery (city, state, photographer's name, copyright, etc.), create a backup on a separate disk, open a contact sheet – all in one step. Work with batches of photos to: rename; assign captions & keywords; print contact sheets and proofs; create web pages; resize & email photos.
Configure it your way – Put image meta-data to work to customize your results. Do you want to include shutter speed, aperture and caption information with your prints or web page (and sometimes the date and city, but never the time)? Rename files by photographer & state? Sort photos by city? Automatically convert the color profile for web photos so they look their best and stay small? You choose. Configure your own preferences or stay with the friendly defaults.
New in Version 4:- Scalable contact sheets – zoom in to see the details or zoom out to see a lot of photos.
- Compare the photos side by side – easily find the best of similar shots.
- Multi-prococessor support – if you've got them, we use them to go faster.
- Smart color management – chooses and sets the correct profile for supported cameras. You see colors correctly and Photoshop® doesn't have to ask questions.
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Review
Now to my review. Photo Mechanic organizes your photos in Contact Sheets. This is a term that would be familiar to photojournalists, but maybe not portrait or hobbiest photographers. Basically, a contact sheet is a project file with thumbnails of all the images in that project. The great thing is that you just point to a folder on your drive and open it, and PM will deal with it. You can set up project data for the Contact Sheet such as client, location, photographer, etc., that can then be pulled into many other areas of PM.
When you open a Contact Sheet (or folder) for the first time, you see the screen below. One of the first things you'll notice is how fast PM will populate the thumbnails the first time in. In comparison with many other photo browsers and organizing tools, PM is the fastest I've used. Key elements here are the slider to size the thumbnails. Did I say it was fast? Also, you have the ability to do the basics like rotating and ranking the images. Remember that a photojournalist or news editor needs to rapidly sift through images, and organize them.
Once you've made a quick pass through and deleted the obvious bad shots, you then go into the Preview screen by selecting your first image. Again, this is incredibly fast as you go from image to image and manipulate them. Faster than any other tool I've used. As you go through the images now, you have some basic tools, information about the images, and a filmstrip type viewer at the bottom. You are also shown a histogram of the image, even revealing the RGB histograms.
You can quickly rotate and crop the images in preview. The cool part is that nothing is actually done, it is just saving what you want to do as data about each image. You can set a standard crop size, like 4x6, or go with whatever aspect ratio you drag. If you go with a standard size it is one click to flip the crop from portrait to landscape. By setting up keys, you can also rank the images in this step, important for later processing and sorting. If you decide that you need to retouch an image, you can jump directly into Photoshop from here with a menu selection.
Once you've gone through all the images and selected the ones you want to keep, ranked them, cropped them, and sorted them, you now can output them to where they need to go. And, since nothing was changed in the initial process, you can easily use what you've done to output images in a variety of formats. This dialog shows the Save As choice. You see here that you can setup how you want the images to be output, the format, quality level, size, resolution, and more. You can also manipulate the meta data and / or EXIF at this time too. Finally, you can control how the images will be named and where they will be saved. If you want, you can pull variables from the project data to add to the file names.
Here you see how much control you have over manipulating the IPTC (meta data) information. You can insert all sorts of information including who took the image, where it was taken, what the copyright info is, and more. This is part of the Save As process, as well as any other batch process in PM. You get great control, and you can set these batches up so that you can rapidly process a lot of images.
Once you have completed the setup of the IPTC stationary, you can start the process of saving the files. It will do them all in one batch, and again very quickly. You can save one batch for printing, another sized differently for web output. You never effect the originals.
You can also use a similar batch process to email the images. The choices are slightly different, but you will see in the screenshot below that you have great control over how they are handled. Say you wanted to take the best of the best, size them down to a smaller size, and email them to the client. You already ranked the images above, so you could simply pick a different group from the sorted and color coded images and change the size information, fill in the email text and address, hit a button, and the whole batch will be processed. If you had a laptop and wireless card, this could be done from a shoot. Again, for the photojournalist this is a great tool.
In the next screenshot, we see that you can also do an ftp process directly from within Photo Mechanic. Between SaveAs, Email, and FTP, the possibilities are nearly limitless in how you batch and process the images.
One process I didn't provide a screenshot of is the process that PM calls Ingest. Sounds like something you'd do with a steak and potatoes, but this is what PM calls the process of pulling images in from a flash card. Once you install PM, if you insert a flash card into a reader, you will be prompted to start the Ingest process. Once you do, you get a dialog that allows you to batch process the images and follow the preset PM folder and file naming instructions. This greatly speeds the process of loading and organizing images from a shoot.
Summary
Not everyone is going to be willing to pay the $150 price tag for a tool such as this. However, if you deal with and manipulate large batches of images this is one tool that can greatly speed of the process and save you lots of time. I highly recommend PM if it fits your needs. In terms of speed and responsiveness, it is one of the best programs I've used. You can download a fully functional trial at the Camera Bits
website.
If you decide to try it, please post feedback in this thread.
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