See earlier post for the beginning of this review

The third step, adding the metadata, proved to be not so speedy, and at times frustrating. Before going on assignment, I had entered custom default values in the Settings section, in hopes of saving some time. That aspect worked perfectly, so when I opened up the screen to enter the metadata, my copyright info, generic caption, keywords, city, state, etc. were all there, filled out automatically. I figured it would be a snap to just add that image’s specific info — like a person’s name — to the caption.

Here’s where I thought I was really clever and cutting edge, but I was wrong. While doing the shoot, I typed subjects’ names, titles, etc on the iPad, in the included Notes app. My plan was to just copy and paste this information into the metadata and be a productive paperless photojournalist.

But alas, when you go back and forth between filterstorm and notes, filterstorm forgets what you were working on, so you have to start all over. That is, I cropped and toned a photo, then I went to Notes to copy-paste subjects’s names. Going back to Filterstorm, my edited photo was gone, and I had to start over on the photo. Makes for a clunky workflow.

Once I came up with a workflow — the workflow took perhaps a bit more than twice as long as using Photomechanic on a laptop, for a low-volume photoshoot– I was able to process a half dozen selects and FTP them successfully. The first photo I sent was corrupted, but that may have been pilot error. The rest of the photos transmitted just fine, custom filenames, metadata and all.

Another downside is that Filterstorm doesn’t save the metadata with the photo — once it’s sent the metadata vaporizes from the iPad. That’ll add lots of steps to my archiving workflow. It will also make it harder to answer editor’s questions about images, should they arise.

Bottom line: Filterstorm did perform as advertised. I’d recommend using it, but only in a pinch. The tedious workflow, which may be a limitation of the iPad as much as the app, will keep me toting my laptop on my on-location assignments. But I’m glad to have Filterstorm for those jobs that require me to travel light, and won’t have too many files to process, or just to have a backup transmission method.

Earlier this week, I promised a report on how Filterstorm2 performed in the field, so here goes. I used this substantially updated iPad app to edit, caption, and transmit files from on location on a freelance newspaper assignment. Keep in mind that the app has been available only a few days, so this is an early look.

Bottom line:
It’s not nearly as elegant or speedy as using a laptop with industry standard Photomechanic, but It works! If you need to lighten your load and don’t mind adding steps to your workflow, Filterstorm is a viable option.

The deets:

Ingest
This is really a feature of the iPad itself, not Filterstorm, since you don’t use Filterstorm to ingest. But since it’s a critical step in the workflow, I’ve included it here. I use CF cards in my Nikon D300, so I can’t put them directly in the SD slot in Apple’s camera connection kit. Instead I used the USB connector that also comes standard with the kit. The iPad wouldn’t recognize my old Belkin multiple card reader, but quickly displayed my images when I plugged my camera in directly to the camera connector kit’s USB port. It’s really no trouble to carry along that extra cable and connector kit.

This is where I got my first indication, though, that the workflow might be a bit cumbersome. The iPad did not know which files I had tagged in-camera, the way Photomechanic does, so I had to locate them manually. The task was harder since the iPad doesn’t show the filenames, and the thumbnails are fairly small.

Again, this is a weakness of the iPad, not Filterstorm, but it is something you’ll have to contend with. I was lucky in that my assignment had been pretty straightforward and I hadn’t taken a lot of frames, so finding the selects again was just a minor annoyance. I’d think it’d be a real nightmare to locate selects from, say, a lacrosse game, where I take a whole lot of images whose thumbnails are rather similar-looking. It would add time onto my workflow, because I always use timeouts at sporting events to tag my photos, and that’d have to be redone with an iPad workflow.

I opted to ingest just a few selects, which was speedy.

Image editing

Launching Filterstorm and loading an image, I found editing was quick and easy.

I followed what would likely be a fairly typical newspaper assignment workflow, skipping options not germane to the task at hand. First, under the Canvas tab: crop and scale (where I could indicate a custom pixel dimension). Second, under the filter tab: luminance (similar to curves in Photoshop), then sharpen. Up to this point, it took maybe a minute to edit the photo. Super! (For those who are wondering, you can apply filters with a mask, so, for example, you could just darken a bright sky or lighten a dark foreground, but my photos didn’t need that.)

Coming Soon: adding metadata and ftp’ing images — a different kind of workflow