Using Aphera has made me enthusiastic to shoot raw photos for the first time in quite a while. It’s lightweight and makes it easy to get looks that I really like, without the heaviness of Lightroom’s interface or the deep analysis paralysis of the this-or-that among the dozens and dozens of filmy presets I had stashed away over nearly twenty years of using LR. The Aphera blog has a nice writeup in response to the common question “Is Aphera a Lightroom Replacement?”
I’ve landed on a couple of go-to straight out of camera jpg settings that I quite like on my X100VI, but adding raw back into my workflow has given me some great flexibility that I’m having fun with.
Iris continues to move me with its “On this Day” feature. Now that my multiple decades of different catalogs are accessible in one place, I have this photo roll of personal history that changes every day. I find myself struck by the passage of time, recalling moments that I haven’t thought of for twenty years or more — and plenty of more recent memories, too. Every day I’m surprised and sometimes have to outright catch my breath. It’s quite a thing.
