Today I set out to find out whether the iPad is a realistic tool for serious photographers. A pair of warbirds, a B17 and a B24 were on display at Palomar Airport. I shot around 85 images with my D300.
When I got home, I uploaded them to the iPad using Apple's photo attachment. Ingesting 80 some raw images worked flawlessly, in about the same amount of time it takes to do it on a computer. Viewing them full screen, I trashed the bad ones. There were four that were salvageable despite exposure problems. To process them, I used Photogene, a $2 processing app. There is a Photoshop Lite available, but Photogene offers real world processing, including white balance, exposure, levels, and curves. It's not Lightroom, but for a quick and dirty look at what basic processing can do for an image, it's fine. And it doesn't affect the original. If you want to save the changes, it saves a copy. But the real processing will be done later in the computer, on Lightroom.
At this point I had edited the shoot down to around 40 images. If I were on the road, I could live with that. But I had read that the iPad down rezzes the images, so to find out, I exported them directly into Lightroom. There they were, in all their raw glory, with all the metadata intact. Don't believe everything you read.
In Lightroom I was able to make side by side comparisons, and do more sophisticated processing. In a pinch, that could wait till I get home.
So my conclusion is that the iPad is a viable photo editing/storage tool, and it won't lose any data, or metadata, on raw images. I'll still be schlepping my laptop along, but along with its other functions, the iPad is now an integral part of my travel kit.
