Working for iMore has gotten me to once again appreciate my good old Canon DSLR. For the last few years, my poor camera often ended up hidden in a corner, making an appearance only when my iPhone wouldn't do or for special vacations. With smartphone cameras so good these days, it's been hard to justify carrying around the extra weight for a non-internet-enabled device.
But DSLRs — especially DSLRs with nice lenses — can take wonderful pictures if you're willing to work with them. For me, this meant figuring out a faster workflow than "taking a bunch of pictures, waiting until I got home to my computer to upload them, then slowly sorting through them via an app like Lightroom."
That solution? The iPad.
How to upload photos from your DSLR to your iPad
I've got two different methods for quickly uploading my DSLR photos: an EyeFi card or Apple's Lightning to SD Card Reader.
The EyeFi card can wirelessly upload images from my camera to my iPad or Mac, which is awesome. Unfortunately, it requires that my DSLR stay on while the upload happens, and I'm sometimes loathe to waste precious battery power, especially if I'm running low without a spare.
The other option is to directly upload images to the iPad with Apple's card reader; all you have to do is insert an SD card into the reader, plug it into your iPad, then open the Photos app and tap the Import tab that appears.
Select the images you like and tap Import, or just go ahead and tap Import All to send everything to your photo library.
Any images you upload to your iPad should also upload to your Photo Stream, which automatically transfers them to your Mac's iPhoto library.
I like uploading images to my iPad for two reasons: easy examination, and backup. On the iPad, it's simple to quickly page through photos and zoom in to make sure my colors, exposure, and focus are good — though I wish there was an easier way to quickly trash photos I knew I didn't want.
In addition, having a card dump on my iPad lets me have a physical repository for my images; currently, I'm not using iPhoto, Aperture, or Lightroom, and having images download to the iPad means I have a space where my originals aren't getting deleted or irrevocably changed. I also have Dropbox set up to automatically upload images I've taken as well, for redundancy.
How to edit DSLR images on your iPad
You can do a fair amount of editing within the native Photos app, but for the edits I end up doing, I prefer Pixelmator — specifically for its quick color correction and repair tools.
Pixelmator's repair-by-painting has become essential for touching up iMore hero photos — eliminating cup stains from tabletops, fixing errant blotches on iPhone screens, removing random wires — and it's so effortless to use on the iPad that I can't help but love it.
Once I've finished my edits, I can send the image over to the Mac in a flash with Pixelmator's support for Handoff, or save it to the Photos app and have it appear in Photo Stream, or upload it directly to whatever service or CMS I'm using. It's just that simple.
What's your workflow?
Do you folks still use a DSLR? If so, let me know what you're currently doing for a storage/editing workflow, and if you've found the iPad useful as an editing and viewing tool.
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