The Tools I Use as a Photographer: Apps, Software & Services
An overview of the software tools and apps I use on a day-to-day basis: from industry-standard to personal favourites.
Dear friends,
Arguably the essential tool you can use is your imagination, creativity, and curiosity. But we, as photographers and filmmakers, rely on a set of soft- and hardware to bring our vision to life…or to reduce the friction of our day-to-day tasks.
From today, I’m going to open up what’s in my bag and on my desktop. This is a series of newsletters revealing the tools I use to get the technical aspects out of the way and focus on the one thing that matters the most: your work.
Let’s start with the software and apps that I use. As you can see in the list below, I mostly use proven and industry-standard tools. And I usually stick to what fits my workflow the best, most of the time staying true to the product, hopefully for many years. Let me know what tools you use regularly; I’m curious. And make sure to subscribe to this newsletter if you haven’t already by using the link below.
Enjoy, and talk to you soon!
Ramon
Adobe Lightroom / Photoshop / Exposure X7 - Image Postprocessing
This is quite a no-brainer. I chose Lightroom as my tool to edit and organize my images. Although Capture One is somehow still the industry standard, Lightroom is catching up fast, introducing new great tools like AI-masking that make life a lot easier and the roundtrip to Photoshop and back less and less necessary.
I’m working fast in Lightroom, and my preset set makes it easy to get the look I want. My only and most significant gripe with Lightroom is the lack of Luma Control. There is no way to treat the saturation of lows / mids / highs separately. For this reason, I’m using either Photoshop or, if I need it to be done quickly, I still hold an AlienSkin Exposure X7 license. It is a bit excessive to use a full-blown editing software only for this feature, but it’s still necessary for my workflow, and I genuinely wish that Adobe would include this simple feature in Lightroom.
As explained in-depth in the last issue of this Newsletter, Lightroom also serves as my archive and backup system.
Capture One Pro 22 - On-set Tethering
I use Capture One exclusively on set for Tethering. Although version 23 is out already, I’m sticking to 22 as I bought the single-seat license, and it just works for me, so there is no need to upgrade, especially as I don’t use the new tools and I don’t like the pricing policy at all. It’s just that it’s the only working tether tool out there, and Lightroom isn’t an alternative for Capture. Sad.
DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 - Editing, Color Grading, and Sound Design
It’s truly astonishing to witness how DaVinci evolved from Hollywood’s industry-standard color grading tool to a great, do-it-all editing suite. Super rich in features for all your moving-image needs. I use it for serious motion projects, grading, and sound design. And my editor is using DaVinci, so it’s easy to collaborate on projects remotely and on set.
And the best thing is that the basic version of DaVinci is free, but if you decide to go for the full studio version, it’s only 375€, including free updates forever. No subscription.
Dehancer - Color Grading
I use Dehancer as my grading base in DaVinci, which is hands down the best tool to get the warmth of film onto digital video files. It’s the only plugin I use, and it rendered every LUT workflow obsolete, but it’s pretty expensive, and I wouldn’t say I like the company’s pricing policy to charge big money for updates. But in this case, it’s worth it, giving me the proper look almost from the start, with additional tweaks inside the color tab and local adjustments.
Splice - Sound Design and FX
Finding a fitting soundtrack and FX for your motion projects can be a huge pain, but I recently discovered Splice by recommendation from a friend. Splice’s target audience is more on the music production side, but it’s also great for video. Instead of offering full tracks that rarely fit the mood of your project or sound too cheesy to be true (looking at you, Artlist!), Splice provides a vast range of split-up tracks, loops, FX, and more. It takes a bit of musical and basic production knowledge, but it’s worth the effort. The desktop app is excellent, and it’s a straightforward copy-and-paste process that works very well with my workflow in DaVinci.
Splice starts at $9,99 a month, and you can find it here.
Milanote - Project Planning and Notes
Milanote is the latest tool in my arsenal, and I genuinely like it. And trust me, I’ve tried all the alternative apps from Evernote, Notion, Up Note, Obsidian, and back. They were either too complex or didn’t fit my needs at all.
Milanote is quite a unique tool for notes, project planning, and collaboration. What I like about Milanote: It combines note-taking and project planning - in a very visual way. And it’s very close to how I work, constantly shifting things around and rearranging. It might not be the structure you need, but it fits my way of thinking and structuring very much. I’m currently using the free version. The subscription includes unlimited boards, notes, and uploads. And, of course, there is a desktop app, as well as an iPhone and iPad version. Available for Android too.
Google Slides - Treatments and Presentation
I use Google Slides as my go-to tool for treatments and presentations nowadays. First and foremost, because it’s straightforward to share, it somehow became the industry standard for presentations and treatments. It has some basic but excellent collaboration features and simply works.
I used to work on my Treatments in Adobe InDesign, but Google slides made the process much easier. And almost every agency is using it, which makes it much more accessible to include your treatments and presentation in their bigger client production files.
ChronoSync Express - Synchronize Files
This is a recommendation from my Digi Tech. I use ChronoSync to back up projects to multiple hard drives on set and at the office. ChronoSync is pretty self-explanatory and has a wide range of features. ChronoSync Express offers me enough features for my needs.
Eagle - Reference Library
I’ve featured Eagle before, but the tool is too good and has become one of the central pieces of software I use daily.
Eagle is a powerful digital asset manager, and I’m using it primarily for moods, casting, styling, and light references. But the best feature is the extension for Safari / Chrome, which lets you save images in a breeze. And it’s not limited to images either; you can save entire websites and videos and batch save multiple images. One of the best features is the “Find similar color items” feature, where you can pick a specific color in an image, and Eagle suggests similar colored pictures.
Eagle doesn’t store your files in the cloud; it has its own local database, but I connected it to Dropbox to back up the library at all times, making it easier in case of a system change.
Eagle is one of the last pieces of software that doesn’t come with a subscription. Pay once, and it’s forever yours, including updates.
Buy it here for $29,95
Sun Seeker
Sun Seeker is one of THE essential apps for photographers and filmmakers alike. It lets you trace the path the sun will take throughout the day and even on specific dates in the future, all tied to the location you are shooting or planning to shoot. Sun Seeker makes it very easy to pre-plan the direction of the natural light in a specific area, which makes it an essential tool for pre-production.
Get Sun Seeker here for iPhone (available for Android here)
1SE - Video Diary
This is my favorite iPhone app ever. And it’s a very personal one. I’ve been using 1SE for over two years to document my life and my family's life in tiny snippets every day. It helps me to remember the essential things in life, the progress I’ve made, and the little everyday moments. I’m genuinely addicted, and I rarely miss a day.
Get 1SE here
Dirty Little Helpers
And here’s an additional list of tiny little helpers I constantly use on my Laptop.
Magnet - Great little window manager tool to keep your workspace organized once you internalize the keyboard shortcuts...
Grammarly - Grammarly helps me a lot with my writing and works magically, period.
Amphetamine - It keeps my MacBook awake when I’m uploading something, and it’s easy to schedule sleep times.
Backblaze - Mass cloud storage backup (as mentioned here!) for peace of mind
CleanMyMac X - As the name says: It keeps my Mac clean from junk.
Been really enjoying Milanote to lay out the narrative of a film, whilst having the mood boards right next to it.
Do you not use Premiere for editing at all? I find when working with multiple editors the ability to share project files and proxies (maybe you can do that on DV) so we can work a film simultaneously super helpful.
The sun seeker tools seems like an important one. Thank you!