Photo editing programs: Lightroom, Luminar, Affinity Photo, Darktable, FastStone, ACSDSee and more
- Thread starter wordie
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(coughs...)
ummm "The kind of thing that is marketed at fools who have bought a dSLR. The ones who think of themselves as professional photographers because they own a copy of Photoshop, and a dSLR. You know the kind... the mate who offers to do your wedding photos, the work colleague who shows you what photos he took on the weekend. (Which invariably consists of 600 JPEGS shot over the an afternoon in Dorset.)"
Well that's pretty much described me down to a T...well done F!
ummm "The kind of thing that is marketed at fools who have bought a dSLR. The ones who think of themselves as professional photographers because they own a copy of Photoshop, and a dSLR. You know the kind... the mate who offers to do your wedding photos, the work colleague who shows you what photos he took on the weekend. (Which invariably consists of 600 JPEGS shot over the an afternoon in Dorset.)"
Well that's pretty much described me down to a T...well done F!
editor
hiraethified
I was ready to be wowed by the super slick interface and the power of Adobe, but after seeing the program gobble up 400meg of RAM while doing precisely nothing, my enthusiasm faded.
The fact that you can't even drag images straight into Photoshop didn't exactly impress, so I found myself going straight back to ACDSee.
The fact that you can't even drag images straight into Photoshop didn't exactly impress, so I found myself going straight back to ACDSee.
mauvais
on reddit or something
Lightroom's great if you've got the PC for it. Fortunately I have now. It's still got bugs like out of memory errors but it's stable enough.
One thing's shite about it. Minimum color temperature of 2000, like Camera Raw, and not like my beloved Pixmantec RSP. What does this mean? No infrared colour conversion, that's what. Black/white or red, that's it.
One thing's shite about it. Minimum color temperature of 2000, like Camera Raw, and not like my beloved Pixmantec RSP. What does this mean? No infrared colour conversion, that's what. Black/white or red, that's it.
editor said:It runs on my 4GB RAM-packing dual core Athlon fine - just so long as I don't have lots of other programs open.
Which I always do.
Ditto... My puter is a bit of a screamer and it runs Lightroom pretty well on its own, although it is slower than I'd expect but if for some strange reason(?) you want to run it at the same time as Photoshop, it really slows things down and it gets much worse if you have Flash running at the same time. I've had to shut it down occasionally to stop my puter going into meltdown.
I've moved my pagefile and scratch disk onto a dedicated drive and it has helped somewhat but I certainly wouldn't want to be trying to use it on anything with less than 2 gig of RAM and a screaming processor.
cybertect
It's grim up north (London)
editor said:
Speaking personally, I find a dedicated keyboard command a lot quicker than drag 'n' drop.
Since I moved over to Lightroom, I've found that I can process a bunch of photos in about half the time it used to take me using Canon DPP or ACR with Photoshop. 90+% of the time I don't need to do any further PP in Photoshop, so I'm making a big saving on the disk space I'd be using to store a TIFF for that purpose (I do shoot RAW almost exclusively; it would probably be far less important if I was working with JPEG files out of the camera).
As much as anything, though, it's the way it handles metadata and organising my photos that is attractive. Bridge, even in CS3 isn't as flexible for IPTC tagging. It's the organisational features that that make Lightroom different from a plain old RAW converter. It's not going to improve my photography by any significant degree, but it makes my life easier, and for that it's worth the price of admission. I don't think that makes me a fool.
Judging by other users' reports, it does seem to be a little more perky on the Mac than Windows. I'd probably agree about needing 2GB of RAM to make effective use of it in combination with Photoshop, but you probably don't want to be running PS on its own with much less than that these days if you're using it seriously. It works fine on my Dual 2.3 GHz G5 desktop (2.5 GB RAM) and it flies on my new 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (2GB RAM)
Either way, it's a lot faster than Aperture, which was my major alternative for a library tool.
It ain't perfect. firky's comment about 2K°C white point minimum strikes a note with me. It's fairly clearly not aimed at large agencies who need to shift stuff around between different users a lot.
editor
hiraethified
I'm mulling over actually spending my own dosh on this program. I'm currently using ACDSee Pro and it's pretty damn good, but I keep hearing good reports about Lightroom.
At some point, I'm going to have to take a week out and finally tag and categorise my thousands of images, so I want to make sure that whatever program I do it with, it's the one I'm going to stick with.
So anyone using the latest version yet?
At some point, I'm going to have to take a week out and finally tag and categorise my thousands of images, so I want to make sure that whatever program I do it with, it's the one I'm going to stick with.
So anyone using the latest version yet?
cybertect
It's grim up north (London)
Yep, v4 since about the day it came out and Lightroom in general since the v1 public beta. Tagging and keywording take a bit of time to do, but it pays off when you're looking for a specific photograph six years later. Even taking that extra work into account, it streamlined my old Photoshop-based workflow by about 50%.
New stuff in v4 that I like: The new 2012 Process Version RAW converter can pull a lot more detail and colour out of highlights than the old one, the Geotagging/Map module is excellent and one-click CA correction is a godsend.
Frankly, I couldn't do without it. I barely ever need to go into photoshop unless I'm doing Pano stitches.
New stuff in v4 that I like: The new 2012 Process Version RAW converter can pull a lot more detail and colour out of highlights than the old one, the Geotagging/Map module is excellent and one-click CA correction is a godsend.
Frankly, I couldn't do without it. I barely ever need to go into photoshop unless I'm doing Pano stitches.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Coincidentally I have only just installed it as a demo on 12 PCs for a training course that's happening on Friday.
Given the specialism of the person concerned, I have no idea what it's in aid of ...
Hence my subscribing to this thread ...
Given the specialism of the person concerned, I have no idea what it's in aid of ...
Hence my subscribing to this thread ...
RoyReed
Must fly!
I'm waiting for v4.1 to come out (it's in public beta now) as that's meant to improve the speed issues that some people were having in edit mode. It's also meant to import Point Curve adjustments from v3 which v4 doesn't do correctly. And it will have a much improved Colour Fringe Correction control.
cybertect
It's grim up north (London)
I've been using 4.1 RC2 and that is very useful - allows correction of Axial Chromatic Abberation in addition to the Lateral CA correction that was already available.
fractionMan
Custom Title
Damn. I really want some all-in-one application decent to organise and tweak my photos. No way I can download that over 3g
Crispy
The following psytrance is baṉned: All
Picasa too basic for you?Damn. I really want some all-in-one application decent to organise and tweak my photos. No way I can download that over 3g
fractionMan
Custom Title
The image tweaking is pretty bad. No curves or levels. Auto contrast sometimes does the job but sometimes gets it totally wrong.
The organisation isn't great either. I want to be able to have a place for source images, a place for editied ones and software that understands the difference. Plus tagging.
fractionMan
Custom Title
tbf, you have like a million photos.
editor
hiraethified
83,000 ackshully. Which isn't that much if you're pro/semi-pro/very keen indeed.
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