Our Gear: Tech, Photo Software, and Digital Tools

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Hello again! Hope you’re ready for the third and final installment of this series that is all about our gear and equipment. Make sure you read the first two posts that go along with this series here: Our Gear: Camera + Lenses and Our Gear: Lighting + Studio Equipment. For this last part, I’ll actually be diving more into the tech, photo software, and digital tools that we use to shoot, edit, and promote our work. We’ve definitely shared a few of these programs and tools in the past but I figured I would put them all together in this post for easier access. Let’s jump right in!

tech

Both Elle and I use Apple MacBook laptops. I have a 13 inch 2015 MacBook Pro that is currently an adult but I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a grandma soon because she’s starting to slow down a bit. Lol! Elle has the 15 inch 2019 MacBook Pro and it works great for her. We’ve always owned MacBooks and I think it has a lot to do with the simplicity of it, the design, and how it integrates with our phones as well. R

ecently, we purchased the LG 32" Ultrafine 4K UHD LED Monitor for our post production work and I honestly couldn’t be happier about it. Now when I look at my laptop, I honestly question how I edited photos on that small 13 inch screen all my life. I don’t know that life anymore. *shudders*

We also have plenty of external hard drives for all of our files and work. Both of us own several Western Digital hard drives because they’re the most reliable in my opinion. I’ve personally used other brands in the past and they always ended up getting corrupt after a year or so. One other tech item we just recently bought that we’re anxiously awaiting to arrive in the mail is a brand new iPad Pro. This little baby is going to help Elle sketch/design our shoots on the go.

Our concepting process has changed a lot over the past year. Previously, our shoot plan only really included colors, mood boards, and descriptions of what direction the images were taking. Lately, however, Elle has done an amazing job of really fleshing out our shoot plan to include more specifics that would eliminate the opportunity for clients to feel blindsided if the work we produced wasn’t what they were expecting.

By planning out each shot and sharing sketches of our ideas, clients are able to approve or make changes to the plan which makes our entire process easier. Speaking of, have you checked out our shoot plan that we put up for purchase in our online shop? If you haven’t, you might want to head on over there to snag yours now.

photo software

For all of our post-production work, I use a combination of Photoshop and Lightroom Classic from the Adobe Creative Cloud. If you’ve seen our Edit With Me videos on our Youtube channel or our streams on Adobe Live, you might know that I love to start my editing process in Lightroom to make basic adjustments for all of my images and then move over to Photoshop for more intricate work. I have not tried to use any other editing software because I’m forever married to Adobe and that is just simply what I know best. Elle also uses Adobe, specifically Illustrator, to create all of our mood boards, shoot plans, proposals, social + web graphics, and more.

For shooting tethered, we religiously use Capture One. We have an entire blog post on why we can’t work without it here if you’d like to check that out. Basically, it’s the most seamless way for us to shoot our product photography because of its tethering capabilities and Live View feature that allows us to see what we are capturing in real time.

One other random editing tool that I discovered earlier this year is Retouching Academy’s editing panels including the Beauty Retouch and Pixel Juggler. Both of these editing panels allow you to access certain tools that otherwise are hidden in certain menus. They’re both actually really neat and I personally love the Dodge & Burn options in the Beauty Retouch. All you do is click the button and it’ll create all of the layers for you which is really efficient for my workflow.

digital tools

Ok, so let’s break down some of the digital tools that we use. A few of these might be better suited to go into a post that’s specific to business tools but I think they’re still appropriate to include because they deal with imagery. First and foremost, Dropbox is our preferred method of delivering images to clients. In the past we used Pixieset because we liked the design and how the images were presented. However, we quickly realized we didn’t have as much flexibility when it came to the image formats that we were able to upload. For some time, we had a client that asked for PSDs because they needed the background color of the shot to be able to change and that wasn’t something we could upload on Pixieset. So, all of our work gets sent out through Dropbox and although it isn’t really that cute, it works, and it’s very straightforward.

We use Google Drive as our main organizer for all of our final edited work. All images have been exported for web to be able to use for mood boards, proposals, social media, and our website. We use Snug to help plan our Instagram feed and Hootsuite to schedule all social media. To share and promote our work, we use all of the classic social media networks including Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. We’re also big fans of Tailwind to schedule all of our work and blogs on Pinterest. We’re actually hoping to create some type of guide or course in the future about using Tailwind and Pinterest for your creative business. Keep on the lookout for that one! :)

Well, that concludes our series on all of our gear and equipment. Thank you for taking the time to read all of these posts! We hope you found them helpful if you’re just getting started out. Or maybe you had some questions about what gear and equipment we use and hopefully we answered them with these posts. If you’re interested in seeing what our usual set ups look like, you can follow our studio IG page here. Until next time!

Is it the weekend yet?
Arabela