|
Helen Highwater posted:AfterShot - this is Corel's version of Lightroom. It's supposed to be pretty good and you buy it as a standalone one-time purchase rather than as a subscription which is a big advantage for some people. However, AfterShot Pro 3 poo poo the bed when I tried to use it just after New Years. It cannot import photos - it hangs and eventually crashes without accomplishing anything - and it's got other "Windows must close this program" problems. I tried again yesterday (and downloaded the most recent patch/update, from late 2018), no joy. I sent a Support Request to Corel back in January and another one yesterday but they seemed to be ignoring me. However, I just checked my spam folder and a tech person at Corel did reply with instructions to edit my registry. Blergh. Maybe I'll try it, see if I can resurrect AfterShot. Maybe I'll give up on it. In any case, I downloaded RawTherapee (RTP), the other open-source LightRoom alternative, after pondering the various offerings from ACDSee. Free is good, so it's worth a try. So far, I have used RTP to edit and upload exactly one image:  Road Turtle by Martin Brummell, on Flickrand the process wasn't particularly painful. The workflow of AfterShot is different from that of LightRoom (I used to run LR 3.6), but the overall setup is fairly similar. RTP is different again, but again it's fairly intuitive and the underlying idea - nondestructive edits, followed by export - is the same. I suspect (hope) I'll figure out ways to streamline things for how I like to work. My priority is to grind through large numbers of photos for good-enough edits to get them up on my Flickr, entirely to make myself feel less bad about the tens of thousands of photos I have looked at maybe once then ignored for years. So it's quantity over quality for me, and if I talk about RTP or AfterShot again it will be in the context of "How hard was it to plow through 900 photos last weekend?" Thanks for putting the thread together, HH.
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2019 05:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 00:46 |
|
|
Update: AfterShot 3 is un-hosed after a tech support person from Corel told me the simple steps to reset it. So it's back up and running, and nothing I've done (mainly rate thousands of photos) has been lost. I'm also already deep into my first pass through a big set of several hundred photos from last weekend in RTP, so I'm going to finish that clearly-defined job in RTP then try to make some decisions. The problem with switching software is the complete change in keyboard shortcuts and mouse movements even if the basic workflow structure remains the same. Maybe I need to change my workflow, and now is a better time than most to try something new. The critical issue has nothing to do with software and everything to do with self-discipline and motivation. Question for the thread: do you tend to work in long (multi-hour) stretches, or more frequent little sessions (say, 30 minutes or less)?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 10, 2019 10:39
|
|
|
refleks posted:Is Capture One the only option if I don't want to be roped into a subscription? I've been away from SomethingAwful for no particular reason for a while, and in the meantime (since the bottom of page 1) I've settled into using ACDSee for my post-processing. Quick story time: I bought LR 3.6 a few months before LR 4.0 came out, and in that time I bought a new computer specifically to make LR run faster - success! I did not upgrade to LR 4 because among the changes reported by people was a slowing down in things like import - the main problem I had just spent hundreds of dollars to overcome. Time passes, Adobe comes up with their subscription-based business plan. I don't want to subscribe, so when I get another new computer I decide it's time to see what the alternatives are; this was late last year. For reference, I'm running Windows 10 64 bit on an ASUS middle-of-the-range laptop I use mainly for work (I'm a scientist, but my data-crunching is not really something that taxes a processor). Photo and video editing is the most processor-intensive task I ask my computer to do. Corel AfterShot Pro 3 - fits the bill, in that it's similar to LR in how it looks and feels. However, it suffered terrible crashing problems even after Tech Support solved the "complete failure" thing it was doing due to a Windows update. One thing I did not like about it, when it was working, was the auto exposure / light balance options. In LR, if you hit "auto" it shows you where it moved the sliders but AfterShot's two built-in auto modes just change your image in mysterious ways, so they're less useful as a learning tool. I had been using LR's auto to figure out ways to use some basic editing options. Cost: about $50 depending on where you are. ACDSee Professional - the middle option from ACD Systems. LR-alternatives are what this company does, as far as I can tell. I've been using this since February and I'm happy with it. The workflow is a little different from either LR or AfterShot but the basics are similar and I had no trouble adapting once I figured out my current workflow. It's still clunky, but I'll probably figure out smoother ways as I continue to use it. Cost: about $65 though a subscription is available. This makes me mildly worried, as I hope ACD Systems does not decide the Adobe business model is also for them. There is also the cheaper consumer version, which does NOT do non-destructive editing, and the Ultimate version that handles layers. Professional does not do layers, so the Edit module is effectively redundant for me and I never use it; the Develop module has all of the same functions and loads faster. RawTherapee - the Open Source alternative. Probably the most different from LR in how the little details of a workflow fit together. For example, in LR and AfterShot the first step after copying the files from my camera onto my computer is to import them, and then wait for the software to do that. In RTP, the software doesn't import an image until you click on it (or go to next image) in the file-handling module. This means that rather than clicking "import" then going off to get another drink, my first-pass image evaluations ("poo poo, poo poo, poo poo, OK, good, poo poo, poo poo, poo poo...") is slower, with a few seconds of not much every time I move to the next image. The killer for me, though, was the lack of a key feature that I need in an image-editing program: dust-spot removal. My camera sensor is usually filthy, and I need to scrub those spots out on nearly every image. RTP does not have this feature; if you google it you'll find the discussion thread where various Open Source devotees are talking about how they're trying to build that function, but they're not there yet. Cost: free! of course. Though you might need to grow a giant beard and spend a few months in a lightless basement to really get the full experience. There are other products out there that I have no experience of, yet also qualify with key features like non-destructive editing and the ability to apply edits in batches to many photos at once. Most software in general comes with free download trial versions, usually full-featured. I've never used Capture One. Yesterday I discovered that video editing programs are a completely different ball game, even if they're from the same companies. The free video editor ACD Systems bundled with my purchase of ACDSee Pro is useless to me because, like RTP for photos, it lacks a key function I need: shake reduction. This is beyond the scope of this thread, but I tried a couple of free-download shake-reducing video editors and I'm happy with Corel's offering, Video Studio Ultimate 2018 that I bought bundled with AfterShot last year. It has yet to fail on me, and so far so good though I'm the first to admit I have no idea what I'm doing when the pictures start moving on their own.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 28, 2019 09:20
|
|
|
Kangra posted:I’m currently trying to figure out a good way to manage/process all my photos since I have them all in one spot but only haphazardly have picked out the ones I liked. I also upgraded by computer lately and want to choose some software for photo management. I use ACDSee, having started with Lightroom back in the day (version 3) and moving through AfterShot Pro and a brief fling with RawTherapee. I've always heard good things about Darktable but I've never actually used it. The problems I had with AfterShot, and the problems I've not had with ACDSee have been issues specific to what side of the Windows/Mac divide you're sitting on. AfterShot was buggy and crashed, hard, way too often, and I fear you may be right about ACDSee's Mac version being behind the leading edge of the Windows version. I've accepted that kind of behind-the-front-lines approach in my purchase of the middle tier of ACDSee, "Professional" rather than "Ultimate". The main difference between those tiers is that A) the support is all targeted at Ultimate so if you have a problem or want to learn from a tutorial, it might not apply to your version and B) Ultimate lets you edit with layers, which is pretty useful but I'm not prone to over-editing my photos. At least 99% of the edits I make in ACDSee are basic, global edits like contrast and noise reduction and fiddly little spot removals. The copy-paste settings feature works very well and lets me apply the exact same edits to as many pictures as I feel like, and I can choose which edits to copy (often, I de-select the geometry options, cropping is specific to each shot but brightness or spot-removal might be consistent). RawTherapee, at least when I used it, loads the full version of each photo only when you select it in the strip, so tapping the right arrow through the 200 photos I shot yesterday takes a long time, just sitting there tapping a key every little while when the pixels shrink. Lightroom, Aftershot, and ACDSee import the whole folder, which if it's a large folder gives me time to wander away from the computer for a little while. Obviously this is highly dependent on the computer and how it's set up and this annoying delay was from a few years, and a few computers ago. Might not be an issue for you. My current desktop setup I bought a year ago imports several hundred raw files in about 30 seconds from the spinning disk I dump from camera onto, the program files for ACDSee are on a SSD but I don't know if that makes a difference. Tapping through photos in Develop mode comes with a very short delay, less than a second. It's noticeable but I don't mind it. EDIT: I remembered another thing about RawTherapee - when I was trying it out, several years ago, there was no spot removal function. The heavily-bearded Unix types in the open source discussion boards were, from what I could interpret, planning to implement such a feature but the work was going slowly. I hope they got it done. ExecuDork fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Mar 1, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2022 02:23
|
|
|
I'm struggling with time management more than anything, but I think a new thing might be useful for motivating me to get into a routine of editing & uploading my photos. The massive backlog is weighing on me and makes walking around shooting - an activity I very much enjoy - a little less fun. TourBox looks quite interesting, but Loupedeck seems like overkill - like I'd have to learn a whole new way of using my computer to see the benefits. Having three things in front of me - mouse, keyboard, and console-thing - seems like something that would work for me. The actions that spring to my mind first when I'm looking at these devices are things like going to the next photo even when I've zoomed in the view with a single button press (or wheel-turn or whatever) that I don't need to use my eyes and my mouse hand to do. This may be specific to ACDSee (the alternative to LR that I use) but if the image is fit to window, the left and right arrows on the keyboard move from one photo to the next. But if it's zoomed in at all, the arrows move the visible area around; I'm often trying to cull photos of birds, and the way I do this is to be as ruthless as I can with images that are not perfectly in focus on the bird's eye, so I zoom in to 100%. Usually, there will be half a dozen or more very very similar shots that I took while making tiny adjustments to focus through my 300mm f/4 and just banging away hoping for one good one. The composition will be more or less identical, so all I want to do is quickly see which, if any, have in-focus eyes. I'm sure there are many other functions such a device could help me with - I'm even thinking of using something like that in MS Word when I'm editing someone else's work (I am happy to get ultra-pedantic about grammar, spelling, and formatting on something like a scientific paper), with a bunch of quick-to-access commands in the Paragraph and Font menus. Anyway, what other options are out there besides TourBox and Loupedeck? What are the useful keywords for searching for this kind of thing?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2023 01:25
|
|