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Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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Local time
7:53 PM
Joined
Sep 26, 2007
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Tomorrow we will have an extended power and communications and road traffic outage in my neighborhood while they work on the lines - so, no internet. Thought I would start a topic before my enforced silence. I know that most of my companion digital darkroom junkies use Lightroom/Photoshop or Capture One. I bounce between those two choices, never able to make up my mind which is best. But there are an awful lot of other programs out there. I use one in addition to my main program of the moment, be it Lightroom or Capture One, simply because it presents a genuinely different appearance to the initial conversion and sometimes I like that look better than my mainstream programs. This is true in both color and black-and-white, but especially in black-and-white. The program is Photo Ninja. There are a large number of other excellent image processing programs outside of LR/PS/C1. For those folk who do use one of those “outsider programs,” would you pass on to the rest of us what advantages it provides you?
 
Mostly I use Photoshop Elements as I do very little manipulation. But color (negatives and E-6) give me trouble so I now use ColorPerfect for final tweaking of color and color balance. It is also excellent for RAW files too, although I don't do too much digital. I've learned how to scan using the scanning software (Epson) so my transfer to ColorPerfect is always easy.
 
I've tried just about every alternative to Photoshop and Lightroom and all of them fall short. Some produce images with poor color, some produce images with poor fine detail resolution (demosaicing raw files), some are slow, and some have poor user interfaces or workflow.

That said, I like Skylum's software best of all the Adobe alternatives because it produces nice image quality, though it is not as easy to use as Photoshop or Lightroom.
 
I still use Corel Paintshop Pro but these days I run it not so much as a stand alone (although I can do that too if I need to) but rather as a plugin for Lightroom. I find the Lightroom to be generally excellent as a tool for basic processing and some of its filters etc are really top notch. It is particularly good at performing lots of similar or identical adjustments on many images one after the other. But there are also times when I really need either to use Layers (which L/R does not have) or one or other of the specific filters in Paintshop Pro that I prefer over the equivalent one available in L/R. (Its perspective correction tool is an example of a tool that is head and shoulders above L/R's and cannot be beaten in anything else I have seen when it comes to fixing problems with converging lines that should be parallel etc.).

Corel Paintshop Pro is somewhat similar in scope, capabilities and price to Photoshop Elements (or was - I am not sure these days even in Elements is still sold by Adobe), in fact it was a little cheaper and I preferred some of its specific filters over those in Photoshop Elements too. Which is why I started using it. I always found the full Photoshop to be overkill for my photographic needs though no doubt it is excellent for Graphic Designers, Compositors etc. I am also opposed to paying a monthly fee to Adobe for the use of Photoshop given it is overkill for me and I would not get value from it. Or so I feel.

Running Paintshop Pro under Lightroom where it is only "a click away" gives me the best of both worlds - Lightroom for all those tedious adjustments and tweaks that most photos need, then quickly export an image on a selective basis to Paintshop Pro when I think it needs something that would be difficult to replicate in Lightroom. Then when when complete and I save the image I have been working on in Paintshop Pro the image automatically exports back to Lightroom as a new virtual copy of the original file complete with all the edits done in Paintshop Pro. This means using Paintshop Pro when used this way is completely non destructive - the old file is always available in Lightroom if needed. I do something the same with the Nik Effex suite.
 
Photo Ninja is good, Iridient Developer, which---so the story goes--- uses the same demosaic engine as PN, is also good, but, IMO, is hampered by an somewhat more primitive UI than PN. Hasselblad Phocus is free and actually works, but like PN and Iridient, is a simple raw converter with only global corrections/adjustments.
 
I use GIMP a lot and it serves my needs very well. Post processing film scans is easy and spotting dust and other blemishes is a doddle. It is also useful to add a thin black border to full frame scans which looks very attractive when framed. I used to do that with my enlarger by printing the rebate of the negative and it is a look that I prefer. Inkjet prints on A4 are a dead fit from 35mm film.
 
I have several programs from free to paid-for but I'm too set in my ways and lazy to learn them. I don't do a lot of involved manipulations and Lightroom does what I need. Still using LR 6. When I can't use it anymore, I'll subscribe (and curse while I'm doing it).
 
I've been using PhotoFiltre Studio for years and I never found any reason to change.

Joao
 
Faststone for simple operations (crop, levels, curves, heal).
Picture Window Pro for more advanced stuff (assign/change profile, masking, etc). Version 8 has been released as freeware.
 
Lightroom and Photoshop… I have the DXO apps, but they just seem to complicate my workflow, and I can do everything I need in LR and PS. LR printing support is outstanding - and after all, it’s all about the final print.
 
I recently switched to Affinity after many years of PS Elements. Adobe started dumbing down the program, hiding some of my most used features deep in the menus, and some things just never worked. I also got screwed on an update when it was offered at half off, but what they really meant was you only got half the program.

Still learning the ropes on Affinity, but liking it so far.

PF
 
I used Iridient Digital RAW Developer for years and loved its simplicity. Coupled with Photo Mechanic for Ingestion, my workflow was complete.


1. Ingest from card reader with Photo Mechanic, add/edit meta-data, copy to various locations for backups.
2. Use RAW Developer (iridient) to browse, edit, right-click and add to processing queue with a Web or Print Profile. For scanned images, that is still superbly fast (much faster than my C1 version).



Over time, the compressed RAW file from my Fuji bodies would crash the software; I never found out the root cause and eventually moved to C1 - but that has not been trouble-free, I still have an open bug report with them.


Darktable was also a pleasant experience.
 
I use Capture One and Lightroom, but also On1 for its texture module and Nik Silver efex (free version) for some monochrome conversions (especially if I want to use control points).
 
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