The crop tool in Capture One Pro works very well, but does not make it easy to see what crop ratio has been applied. I usually crop for standard frame sizes; 11x17, 10x8 (4x5), and 5x7 mostly. When I go back to look at an image later, I can’t always tell which frame size I cropped it for.

When you choose the crop tool while viewing an image that has been cropped, the crop dimensions, in pixels, is shown. But not the aspect ratio.

One very popular sharpening approach for digital images is the three pass sharpening technique described by Bruce Frazer and Jeff Schewe in their book Real Word Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom. Those phases are Capture Sharpening, Creative Sharpening, and Output Sharpening.

Capture Sharpening attempts to correct for the inevitable blurring that occurs in any digital capture. If there is a desire to bring attention to a particular area of the image, Creative Sharpening might be used to achieve it. Every output medium has its own particular requirements for sharpening, be that to a computer screen, or to paper. Output Sharpening optimizes the image for the media requirements and expected viewing distance.

Phase One Capture One allows for that same approach, in its own way. That way differs a bit from Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), but will achieve much the same results. If I discuss Lightroom’s sharpening, it is for all practical purposed the same as ACR’s.

It seems to me as if developers are just naturally curious about other developers’ toolsets and workflows. I’m like that. And photographers seem to be that way, too. Maybe we all just want to be sure we’re not missing out on anything.

So I’ll write up mine. Not because I have a toolset or workflow demanding to be copied, but just to tell people what I’m doing. Maybe I’ll have one thing that fits in your workflow. Or maybe you’ll have a tip for me in the comments.

Because Grav is the CMS behind this blog, I’m always looking for tools that work well with it. Grav’s Admin plug-in has a more-than-passable plain-text editor and my web IDE, PhpStorm, has a not-so-good Markdown editor. So, if I wanted a first-class Markdown writing experience, what would be the “best” Mac tool for the job?

It turns out that there are a whole bunch of Markdown editing apps for the Mac, many with iOS versions as well. They share a number of features in common, most notably live previews of the rendered HTML. But Typora has a little something extra — it shows Markdown as WYSIWIG.