Please advise me on processing and library software (Mac OSX Big Sur)

[pschlute]

When LR came out, I had no use for it because I decide where to put files, not some stupid DAM prog.

Why on earth do you think LR decides where your image files are stored? You tell it where they are, not the other way round.

[xpatUSA]

Why on earth do you think LR decides where your image files are stored? You tell it where they are, not the other way round.

Sorry, I've never used it and based my opinion on sad and sorry Elements 7.

Pardon my mistake.

[Adrian]

Yes Peter, but as I mentioned earlier, when you cancel there are annoying consequences. I have got that T shirt.

I don't wish to give Adobe permission to tap into my bank account. I spent my professional life in the banking and finance industry. My security preference is such that I prefer one off payments using an account funded for that purpose just sufficiently.

[DanK]

Yes Peter, but as I mentioned earlier, when you cancel there are annoying consequences.

That's an interesting question. I know there are other programs that can read TIFF and even PSD files from Photoshop and the XML files that contain Lightroom edits (assuming you have it set to store edits in sidecar files, which IMHO is by far the safer alternative), but I have no idea what if any limitations there are in the further editing or use of those files. Perhaps someone else in this thread can answer that. I think that information would be of general interest.

The same issue arises if one uses other software and stops for any reason--dissatisfaction, unreasonable upgrade prices, development of the software one doesn't like, etc. Adobe has been so dominant in the past that all of the things I have read have been about moving files from Adobe into other software, but the same issue will arise with any change in software. This is something I had to grapple with numerous times in my career because of changes in statistical software.

[xpatUSA]

Ok I understand you don't like Adobe. But subscription is the way things are done these days. <>

A bit all-encompassing, I think.

Precluding subscription services will only limit your options.

I pay no subscriptions to anybody and yet my options remain unlimited - perhaps I am missing something.

[pschlute]

I thought this thread was started to ask for advice about what software people used and liked.

As it has become one about whether folk like a subscription based product or not I will not be taking any further part.

[xpatUSA]

I thought this thread was started to ask for advice about what software people used and liked.

As it has become one about whether folk like a subscription based product or not I will not be taking any further part.

In the first post of this thread and in addition to asking for advice, the author stated clearly "I dislike subscription software" - thereby opening the door for subsequent discussion on that subject.

Wrong side of the bed today, Peter?

[Adrian]

Threads often have a life of their own. I don't mind what people say, I m just looking for experience and expertise from experienced photographers, not websites dealing in products who reward them for positive reviews.

Anyway, I will be having a look at the DXO offering (I remember using DXO years ago but can't recall much about it either way) and last night downloaded Luminar AI, which is £59 (after discount) to run on two computers, no subscription tie. I wanted to see if the AI enhancement models are worth having. It can be used as a plug in to various other things, including LR, and works with OSX Photos. I processed a few images whilst watching TV last night and will have a proper look on Monday. Total Sky replacement is very clever, but I may come to look upon it as a gimmick. It is very easy to save images after autosave processing back into their library folder outside Luninar or within it, and the original image is fully preserved there. I like the before/after tool.

[davidedric]

FWIW I have both DxO and the Adobe pair, though I virtually never use Photoshop.

For my m4/3 files, DxO gives a better raw conversion, and it's lens corrections are superior to the built in ones that Lightroom uses. However, the PRIME, and now DeepPRIME noise reduction is what I really value.

Incidentally, if you do decide to go with DxO make sure you get the Elite version, else you won't get PRIME. It's the one you get on trial, but there are two versions when you come to buy.

[Adrian]

Thanks Dave, that is helpful. I will have a hunt for my previous copy of DXO on my legacy machines as I will have kept a record of why I bought it. I will have a look at the trial once I have worked my way through Luminar AI.

From a quick look this morning, the processing capability is at least as good as Lightroom, but there are some annoyances or drawbacks. For example I cannot work out how to see the camera and lens data within the programme (OSX Photos is moderately OK this regard though it truncates the camera data it displays) and I can't fathom out how to apply a file name prior to going through the export steps. This may just be my lack of familiarity. I do like the way in which the edit history function works.

[billtils]

A latecomer to this thread, but was drawn in when reading that the stimulus was Apple folding their Aperture software - you are on a journey that is all too familiar to me.

I'm not going to make any recommendations as from what I've seen it is possible to obtain satifactory results with any of the reasonably popular programs - it all comes down to familiartiy and personal preferences. However, here's a summary of my travels.

The attractions of Aperture were: RAW development and editing combined in one package with a reasonable library plus, when the need or desire arose, the ability to round-trip to other editors. A non-photographic issue was that Aperture = Mac user = not interested in any program that won't run on a Mac.

Editors: I was one of the early beta testers of Affinity Photo and that would have been that were it not that it does not have a library. At the time of the enforced change I was not intersted in "Photoshopping" so that particular program was of no interest either.

Library: Given the above, the detemining factor was therefore software that incorporated editing and library. I took advantage of free trials of everything that appeared to meet that brief and ended with a shortlist of Lightroom and Capture One. When it came to the successful import of my Aperture Library, Capture One was a hands down winner and that's where I went. It is important to note the context of the decision.

Experience: I was reasonably happy, but two factors intervened: I found the support for Affinity Photo in the sense of tutorials to match the development of the various iterations did not match my needs and began using Capture One and NIK more and more; the second was that I drifted in to becoming president of my local camera club and felt that lack of awarenss of the widely used Adobe products was a barrier to communication with some of the members. At the same time Phase One implemented a substantial hike in the cost of upgrades and I jumped to Adobe LR and PS. LR was OK but nothing special but I found the Adobe (and other) support for PS superb and much better than that from Affinity. I kept the last version of Capture One to simpify access to the extensive library of images there.

And then ...: I had a couple of issues with LR (yes, like 99.99% of all computing errors the problem was with the user not the software but I was less than impressed with what it took to recover) and PhaseOne changed their pricing model and aligned Nikon users with their Sony and Fuji "brand" prices. Those experiences took me back to Capture One for enditing and library and I took another look at Affinity Photo. Well, a lot happended in the approximately one year - the support videos have been update and the functionality too to the extent that there's nothing I was doing in PS that I cannot now do in Affitiy Photo (note the "I was doing" qualification, I'm not saying there is nothing you can do in PS that cannot be done in AP at present).

End result: Dumped Adobe and very happily settled back into Capture One and Affinity Photo (and NIK).

Advice to Adrian: There are no absolute yes or no answers for you. What you will be happy with depends as much on your circumstances, and personality - some of the more consistently negative comments I have seen about Adobe are about their move to a subscrption model - that's an emotion-driven thing. However if it's important to you, Affinity Photo costs £50 for outright purchase and free .upgrades (that is no price increases withing the 1.x iterations but the 2.x is not far away and will probably require purchasing).


Last comment: You mention campatibility with Big Sur. Probably a more important issue is compatibility with the M1 chip as Intel is history in the Apply world. All the photo software providers will get there evenually, but some later rather than sooner.

[Adrian]

Yes, Bill, you make a good point there. Both of my laptops and my wife's are running Intel i7. The Apple ARM M chip has shown some impressive results but I am not a fan of buying Apple's latest innovations until they are well tested by consumers. I have a high spec laptop (not used for photo processing) with the horribly clicky butterfly keyboard, and I think Apple make some backward steps (eg removal of the magnetic charger clip). Their obsession with mobile and iPod software is annoying, and I think many of the software changes of late, including Big Sur, are unnecessarily cosmetic rather than functional.

OSX changes seem designed to support changes to mobile technology and hence keep people buying replacement phones every year or two. This will not be me. I only bought an iPhone 11 because my previous 10 got accidentally cleansed by the washing machine that thought it was just doing my jeans.

Most of my final photo processing is actually done on an iMac Pro of recent vintage, which replaced a Mac Pro. It has 5K Retina 27" display which I find very satisfactory (plus a Thunderbolt 27" screen beside it which I use to put folders etc on when editing photos), multi core Xeon W processor and good quality graphics all in a single package with a lot of SSD memory, will easily run any current software photo package for some years to come. Hence I will keep this as a legacy machine and at some point will stabilise the operating system. This is certainly part of the reason why I don't want to be at all reliant on a software subscription model, as it tends to hasten hardware obsolescence.

[Adrian]

It's evident that what I used DXO for previously was wide angle perspective correction. I suspect this was Viewpoint rather than the full DXO, but I can't find the actual software I had currently. It may have been on a (now sold) work machine.

[Manfred M]

DxO Photolab (formerly DxO Optics Pro) is probably the strongest and most capable raw convertor on the market. They have the strongest lens correction model and their noise reduction product is also wonderful. I have been using it since well before I used Lightroom and the other products.

The biggest one from what you are trying to do, Adrian, is that it really is very rudimentary when it comes to image management. It has virtually none. Lightroom and Capture One are much stronger that way. That is the one reason I did not mention it in my earlier posts. I don't think this is what you are looking for in this type of software.

[Adrian]

I think it is becoming evident Manfred that even I don't know what I am trying to do! I've spent much of the day writing code for a website build. I've also processed in Luminar AI half a dozen images from a string the my wife took this morning (macros of plants deeply frosted for the most part = a lot of ice crystals).

My usual workflow is to put all of the images from a shoot into a new desktop (and my own cloud server) folder. This will have separate folders for RAW, jpeg and processed. Might also have TIFF if I intend to print. Junk is binned straight away. "Processed" will only get the very few images I bother to work on.

My usual practice (worked fine with Luminar AI) is to import the folder I plan to work on, batch process if necessary (quite useful today as it was cloundy but high light levels, and everything was coated in frost. My wife overexposed everything slightly. Then fiddle about with cropping and everything else. Processed work is then exported back to the storage folder after each image is descriptively named (and in this case latin plant names added or whatever my wife wants recorded). Useful stuff will be uploaded from there to the website file storage depository, from which I will select images to put into the website. Camera card is reformatted at this point. Every photo I have ever taken since Aperture folded has been stored this way and for amateur use I have zero dependence on a third party system for my library records even though I do use OSX Photos for it's quite useful sorting capabilities, especially face recognition.

So it seems to me that I am looking for software that will aid this process. By far the most important thing is the processing quality to create images that we like.

[AaronRoberts]

I am also using a 27” iMac, currently running Catalina. I, too, object to renting software, since it makes companies so obviously beholden to their shareholders rather than their end users. I also try to avoid keeping all of my eggs in one basket; I would rather use multiple tools, each of which does one part of the job and does it well.

Because of all that, I have settled on:

Culling - FastRawViewer. A really good, really fast way of culling through photos to find the keepers. Last I looked, it cost about $20.

Raw Development - CaptureOne Pro. Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s still the best Raw developer out there. I can do things with color and tones that I never dreamed of doing before. I used to use DxO PhotoLab (up until version 3) but just couldn’t get the kind of color and tone definition that a few simple sliders get me in Capture One. I don’t use Capture One’s catalogue, so I can’t speak to how great or awful, it might be.

Raster Editor - Affinity Photo. For price, it really can’t be beat. And, unless you’re doing some super esoteric stuff, it can handle anything that Photoshop can do. With rare exception, it has not failed me yet.

DAM - Photo Supreme. It’s digital asset management only. No raw development, no editing. But, as a catalogue, it’s great. Keywording is easier than in any application I’ve ever used. Searching is easy and fast (although it can be complex and geeky, if that floats your boat).

Does that help? I found myself in a similar situation to the OP. Objecting (if only on principle) to software by subscription, this is the list I came up with. I am quite happy with my choices.

[Manfred M]

I think it is becoming evident Manfred that even I don't know what I am trying to do!

That does make things a bit difficult when trying to decide on the tools you need to do the job. Let me give you a high level view of my workflow:

1. Downloading the image files from my camera and storing them on my computer. This includes a process to back up the images on an external NAS device. I use a named file / directory structure for projects and for miscellaneous shoots I use a date based structure. If the project is multi-day, I will use these dates within the main directory structure;

2. Culling (often referred to as Editing in some quarters) where the images that I want to work on are identified and classified to determine which images will be worked on. In my case, this is usually not a single step process and depending on the number of images from the shoot, I may take two or three passes at it.

3. Editing or Post-Processing, depending on which terminology one prefers.

3a. RAW conversion / global adjustments - This is where I do things with sliders on the raw convertor only. White balance, colour space assignment, input sharpening, brightness, setting the white point, the black point are generally all that I do here. This is generally a 1 minute exercise. I use three different tools here; Adobe Camera Raw, Capture One and Photo Lab, depending on the characteristics of the image data. There are advantages and disadvantages to all these tools and they do impact the final image quality.

3b - Area adjustments - selective adjustment of large areas of the image; this could be the sky and / or water in a landscape or the background in a portrait. This is something I will generally spend 3 or 4 minutes on.

3c - Local adjustments - I will start with processes like sensor dust removal, cloning / healing out distracting elements and lots of dodging and burning, in-process sharpening, etc. This process can take many hours, done in bits and pieces over days, weeks and months. The finished product is my "master file" and is saved and archived in a separate folder under the main project.

3d - Output prep - as I do a lot of printing, I will use the master file and resize the file to final size, do my output sharpening and other small tweaks that are dependent on the device the output is prepared for. This takes up to 4 or 5 minutes for a print and less than a minute for a digital image for the internet. I do not save these output files as they are fast and easy to recreate from the master file.

I don't use Lightroom often and when I do it is to use the geo-location functionality. When I travel I record GPS data with the shots and Lightroom lets me identify where I took the shots.

[Adrian]

Thanks. All helpful. My filing and processing routine was taught to me by a pro photographer that my son and I went on a course with for a week or so years ago. I still follow it. The only purpose of a library is finding images either processed or original in whatever form. That aspect works easily and perfectly and on reflection I will stick with this folder method (and back up), plus importing everything into Photos which gives a different indexing method (sometimes useful), syncing and auto additional back up.

What I seem to be focussing on is an intuitive processing routine that is quite fast, and not having to shift images back and forth much between programmes to do things.

[davidedric]

Welcome to CiC!

Difficult. If you put all your eggs in one basket you can lose the lot. On the other hand, by spreading around you increase the likliehood that at least one component will fail. I think it's down to personal perception of risk.

In the commercial world, all companies are accountable to the shareholders (sort of, could be a different debating point), I don't think subscription software changes that - in fact it may exaggerate it.

I am also using a 27” iMac, currently running Catalina. I, too, object to renting software, since it makes companies so obviously beholden to their shareholders rather than their end users. I also try to avoid keeping all of my eggs in one basket; I would rather use multiple tools, each of which does one part of the job and does it well.

Because of all that, I have settled on:

Culling - FastRawViewer. A really good, really fast way of culling through photos to find the keepers. Last I looked, it cost about $20.

Raw Development - CaptureOne Pro. Yeah, it’s expensive, but it’s still the best Raw developer out there. I can do things with color and tones that I never dreamed of doing before. I used to use DxO PhotoLab (up until version 3) but just couldn’t get the kind of color and tone definition that a few simple sliders get me in Capture One. I don’t use Capture One’s catalogue, so I can’t speak to how great or awful, it might be.

Raster Editor - Affinity Photo. For price, it really can’t be beat. And, unless you’re doing some super esoteric stuff, it can handle anything that Photoshop can do. With rare exception, it has not failed me yet.

DAM - Photo Supreme. It’s digital asset management only. No raw development, no editing. But, as a catalogue, it’s great. Keywording is easier than in any application I’ve ever used. Searching is easy and fast (although it can be complex and geeky, if that floats your boat).

Does that help? I found myself in a similar situation to the OP. Objecting (if only on principle) to software by subscription, this is the list I came up with. I am quite happy with my choices.

[Adrian]

The subscription model benefits the company greatly. It gives them very predictable annuity income for almost no additional cost. The hook is "upgrades" but these are often marginal, or forced by competitors trying to steal their clients. Usually there is little that is new or even so worthwhile that you can't live without it.

And as time wears on your dependence is increased: especially if you are locked into a library system and doubly so if you are dependent on their cloud storage. This makes the perceived (which may be different to actual) risk of change higher as time passes.

And the costs mount up. Adobe photographer is circa £10 a month or £120 a year, but that just gives 20Gb of storage I think it is about 50% extra for 1Tb of storage in the plan. In five years I would have spent between £600 and £900. If I go with purchased software and treat it as I do, where everything is kept compatible by not radically changing the operating system, I can do it on two computers using (say) Luminar AI for £59. In total. Over 5 years.

Storage is so cheap now that I can easily have multiple very secure backups. I use 1 Tb portable SSD drives (I have several) the size of a credit card. And a desk top hard drive. Plus I also have a big RAID array that I use for my work projects. I can back up several times for next to nothing and have no cloud dependence (though I also use iCloud - not so much as a back up but because sync is handy across multipe computers and it is very cheap).

Microsoft have gone in this direction with a subscription model for what was MS Office then Office 365. It locks people in and is exceedingly disruptive in terms of file compatibility if you wish to move away from it and have thousand of weird files and Excel spreadsheets. For me it is unwise to become dependent on US companies, running through Amazon or other US servers, for data that I wish to own and control. I will accept some compromises if necessary (in fact there are few if any) in order to avoid dependence.