I’ll tell you what I don’t get.
You take a photo, you do your best, looking for good framing, good light, juxtapositions, correct focal lengths, great depth of field. You do so in RAW
You post edit the photo, maybe you change the crop, the white balance, the colour matrix. You’ve made it perfect, you export it to JPEG you print it, you’ve captured perfectly that moment in time. Fine!
THEN YOU GO AND SPEND A FORTUNE ON STORAGE FOR ALL THOSE RAW FILES THAT YOU WILL NEVER EDIT AGAIN.
That’s the bit that confuses me. And I know it’s not just you, my dad used to do it, he was so taken with the idea that he could, he never stopped to think whether he really would.
However, I think that is a luxury you have to pay for!!! If you want continual access to edit a photo you took and edited 30 years ago you will have to keep up to date with that software.
I get that you are not a photographer. This is a hobby, it's for fun and doesn't have to have any meaning except for the person taking the photo. Prior to digital photography, which start about 30 years ago for the masses, taking photos with a film camera, there was a lot of thought and planning (composition, lighting, exposure, etc.) that went into the image because you only had one opportunity because film was expensive. With digital photography, anyone can be a photographer because they shoot hundreds of images at a time and not worry about the composition or anything else because the phone takes care of everything - except for composition. And it shows because when I see most people's photos, there is no composition. From a classic perspective, they don't take good photos, but they take it for evidence of them being somewhere, etc. I would not call these people photographers. In the 1950s, there were two photographers that took photos of everyday life, like many camera phone operators today, but they created art of daily routine. They were Vivian Maier and Fred Herzog.
For most of the classic photographers, they can tell you exactly where and when they were and what was happening at the time of that photo because of the planning involved. I still think this way when taking a photo with my phone and remember the circumstances around the photos. It think most of these photos taken with a camera phone, the operator, cannot tell you where a photo was taken last week and the circumstance around that. For action photographers they take a lot of photos that don't pan out because the subject is moving. However, sometimes a bad image at the time can be used for a specific purpose in the future. OP is a hobby photographer but it is always nice to be recognized for their photos.
For over twenty years, I've done photoshoots on request as well as sell images from my library. If someone has a request for a certain image, but they aren't sure what they want, I can provide samples images and if one fits, it usually requires reprocessing and maybe cropping. Otherwise, it has to be created which takes time and more money. I imagine AI could do some of this today.
As for the software, I've been using the same editing software, for over twenty years, Adobe Photoshop and Apple Aperture. I think I paid for Photoshop once and have never paid for Aperture because I got it through my job at the time. I use this on vintage Apple hardware, a 2012 MacBook Pro and a 2017 iMac, which cost me less than $1000 for both. Hard drive are cheap to store images, maybe it cost more than my computers, but less than my camera gear. The camera equipment is the expensive bit although, most of the photography is fine on a 15 year old SLR because I like it the most. I have newer ones that I don't use that much as well but still do occasionally.
www.digikam.org
