November the 14th of 2019 has been the day of the official launch for Futura Photo 1.0. The company behind this software if Camera Futura Sàrl, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
The software aims at streamlining the pre-process steps needed after a photo session. Indeed, over the last years, I have had the feelings I was wasting my time at culling images after a photo session (1) and (2) I was not always very efficient.
Of course, professional photographers who are always shooting the same kind of images have learned how to cull efficiently their thousands of images every week. But for amateurs shooting 10’000-20’000 images per year or for people who like to try and experiment, I concluded a tool was not only needed to fasten the culling itself and to do it in a more efficient way, but also to propose a “quality gate”. Many images should indeed not even pass this gate as they just not fulfil some requirements when it comes to acutance, exposure. Furthermore, duplicates have always been a struggle for a photographer. Similarly, managing hundreds or even thousands of time lapse members can be time consuming. Panorama members can easily be missed when you start to build panoramas of 10 plus images.
I could add much more examples where we would need a software to help us, photographers, even before starting the post-process work: aligning time lapse members when our camera has been shaken by wind, choosing either JPG or RAW when both shot altogether, and much more.
I have noted that over the last year, I have done a good job at keeping only the best images – only 5% maximum of what I am shooting but because I am investing time after each photo session. And these tasks are not funny. They are boring, time consuming… and from my perspective very important. I don’t keep the useless images which would “pollute” my images library, or which would require several terabytes. From these years, the need to automate these tasks have become more and more obvious. Last and maybe not least, this is important for our future in a sustainable world!
That’s Futura Photo goal and being a complement to the existing many software which are helpful to photographers, helping them spending more time doing what they like and less time at what is needed but not exactly exciting.