New thread on DXO Photolab 4

[Adrian]

This is all true and established in reviews. Currently it does not bother me as we are fully Canon. However it needs bearing in mind.

I think you suggested Affinity a few days ago Manfred and I am looking at that now, as my wife has pointed out that it is integrated (or can be) with design and publishing apps. The graphics apps will be more than enough for my skill level.

I now have three trials in progress having added Affinity and still have access to Luminar AI for 7 days. I am giving myself a week to make a decision.

[xpatUSA]

You are not alone. It does not support Phase One / Mamiya bodies either and only one Hasselblad model. It supports a number of DJI cameras (the company that now controls Hasselblad). Leica is well supported, which is a bit of a surprise, but as Leica output is natively DNG format, that may explain things.

Plus the fact that Sigma likes to shoot themselves in the foot every so often. Witness the advent of their TRUE II processor, et subs, support for which was never implemented by Adobe in ACR.

But you've reminded me that the latest Sigma (Quattro) series of cameras can write DNG files. BUT, they are Linear DNG files - probably still too much for the Gallic mind ...

[Cantab]

I think Peter's comment was about the current subscription LR Classic. mine was.

Yes. I use the subscription Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, and ignore the cloud storage. Everything is on my hard drive with a backup to Carbonite.

P.S. Adobe couldn't have caused greater confusion over the different versions of Lightroom over the years if they had deliberately tried to confuse all customers.

[Adrian]

I think there is a bit of a Lightroom obsession in this place! Lightroom has been binned as an option. In any case the web information I have seen suggests that Adobe stopped developing Classic back in 2016. The world has moved on: in a declining camera market the landscape is changing. I think software with AI will quickly learn what processing steps we tend to prefer as users and present us with a range of automatic development options centred on our past use of the sliders and graphs. We can then tweak from there. Bring it on I say - most editing is repetitive.

I spent a few hours early this morning using Affinity. It has a huge number of options but boy is it slow. Unfortunately I tried it on a 13" Apple pro laptop and Affinity uses such a lot of screen real estate it is not viable except on a desktop. They also spray menu options pretty much all around the screen edges. Intuitive it is not. Very badly designed from that perspective. Will have another look on a desktop.

[Manfred M]

web information I have seen suggests that Adobe stopped developing Classic back in 2016.

Absolutely incorrect. I have the most current version of Lightroom Classic running on my machine and it underwent a major update in 2020. The web content you are reading is incorrect. In fact Adobe Camera Raw's user interface was replaced with the Lightroom Classic one in 2020 and I find it really problematic.

In your case, this is not an option, regardless...

I spent a few hours early this morning using Affinity. It has a huge number of options but boy is it slow. Unfortunately I tried it on a 13" Apple pro laptop and Affinity uses such a lot of screen real estate it is not viable except on a desktop. They also spray menu options pretty much all around the screen edges. Intuitive it is not. Very badly designed from that perspective. Will have another look on a desktop.

I totally agree with your assessment of Affinity Photo. I purchased it with an eye to getting away from Photoshop and the user interface is not something that is particularly well thought out or intuitive. That is the same issue I have with GIMP only I find it far worse than Affinity Photo.

Corel Paint Shop Pro Ultimate was another possibility, but I did not love the user interface either, but better than Affinity Photo. The raw convertor, Aftershot Pro 3, is sold separately and is definitely not in the same class as PhotoLab or Capture One. If I had to change to a non-Adobe product, this is probably where I would end up going.

[Adrian]

Thanks Manfred. This is why I prefer to consult real photographers in the forum, rather than rely in internet reviews alone, as they can be misleading.

I have processed a couple of raw images today using each of DXO Photolab 4, Affinity, OSX Photos and Luminar AI all on the desktop. I needed to watch some video tutorials. It was interesting. I chose RAW images that I had previously personally processed in Lightroom CC (but working from my unprocessed file obviously) so that I could compare against Adobe.

I actually got the best results out of Affinity. But it took a lot longer.
DXO was next best and would probably have matched it if I had time to watch some tutorials.
Then Lightroom (but the processing was done last June and I can't tweak now)
Then I preferred OSX Photos which is very quick and easy but of course limited in scope.
Then finally Luminar AI which was clear leader for some things, but mostly worst.

Luminar is exceedingly fast to use, and the sky replacements and portrait tools are very clever with enough adjustability. But there is a tendency for the AI engine to produce images that look a bit fake. I think this product is really aimed at Instagram users and social influencers as it is a very fast route to generic "photoshopping".

I have not tried Capture One yet as I am a bit sick of the whole process now.

Affinity is much better than photoshop for some things, such as creating detail and colour layers for removing skin blemishes in portraits. And at half price currently (around £25) it is so cheap that I may as well buy it as a back up for tricky edits. It is in my opinion unusable on a laptop though unless you have the pin sharp vision of a sixteen year old. I will only use it on my twin 27" retina screen desktop set up (I use the second screen in this context to keep my library handy along with a reference image so that I don't have to keep switching between layers and edits). Like Lightroom, Affinity feels rather old tech as software, as there is a lot of clicking around between different menu areas if doing a complex edit.

I have yet to form a view on DXO. I originally bought a version of it years ago when we were doing a lot of travelling to different cities around the world, at the lens corrections and distortion fixes were really brilliant. Whether that functionality is enough to tempt me back, I don't know.

I did try Gimp late last year, as I think I mentioned in my other thread. I abandoned it after a day or so as I felt it was clunky in use. I think it's open source and there are pros with that, but also a lot of cons.

[xpatUSA]

I am still attempting to establish if I can be mean and use my very old version of DXO as an upgrade path.

I will now move on and have a look at library functionality, but if necessary I will use different software for that if I can preserve all the batch id's and EXIF data.

Adrian, I'm still following with interest the library aspect of this and the other thread.

May I ask if those "batch id's" are stored in each image's metadata and if so, do you happen to know where?

I did try Gimp late last year, as I think I mentioned in my other thread. I abandoned it after a day or so as I felt it was clunky in use. I think it's open source and there are pros with that, but also a lot of cons.

I use mostly open-source stuff and would be definitely interested in knowing those cons ...

[DanK]

I think there is a bit of a Lightroom obsession in this place!

I don't think so. Personally, I have no interest in persuading you or anyone else to use anything, and it's actually in my interest as an Adobe user to have more people looking at the competition. It will keep them on their toes. Just speaking for myself, I've been responding because threads like this can serve people other than the OP, so I think it's worth correcting misconceptions about Adobe products. While you may have binned them, not everyone reading the thread has.

I think it helps clarify things to note that the original freestanding Lightroom and the current current subscription-based Lightroom Classic CC are the same program, albeit with new features in the latter. Development has most definitely not stopped. One can find a list of new features by version here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Lightroom.

Re AI: I have a somewhat different view of this than you do, as I am trying to maximize control over my edits rather than turning them over to an algorithm based on someone else's machine-learning exercise. I find some of the AI-based algorithms useful but have no use for others. However, whatever one's preferences about this, there's no question but that Adobe is putting a lot of eggs into that basket. See, for example, https://www.adobe.com/sensei.html. As of now, the fruits of that effort show up mostly in Photoshop, not in Lightroom. One example that I do find very useful is the AI-based "object selection tool", which was introduced fairly recently. (I don't know exactly when, because updates come fairly often with the subscription model, and it's so effortless to install them that I don't pay much attention to when I do it.) Another example: Adobe recently added AI-based sky replacement analogous to what I have been told Luminar does, along with automatic adjustment of white balance in the rest of the image.

[Adrian]

I was not convinced by Luminar AI sky replacement. It is certainly clever and remarkably adept at avoiding other objects, but having compared a set of images of me sitting in a Spitfire cockpit, with just a hint of blue in a high cloud sky in the original raw image, I would not have chosen the enhanced one. Luminar has maybe 30 or 40 sky images in the programme and I think 6 of them are blue sky. You can download others I think. The problem is that once you have seen the images a few times you think "oh yes, Luminar fake sky again".

I feel much the same about the portrait capability: you can do things like slim down faces, smooth skin, reduce body bulges and such like automatically, as well as change eye colours (which is quite fun) - but I would not want to use this stuff in a published picture. This is why I said it suits the Instagram approach.

However, most processing tasks are predictable and repetitive, hence ideal candidates for machine learning. What I would like is interactive AI that will learn what I like.

A factor that is important to me is avoidance of excessive complexity. Apart from the fact that my wife wants to be able to use it and is not interested in any kind of learning curve beyond the basics, I simply don't have hours and hours to tweak photos. My main aim is to get the image as good as possible straight off the camera, and then apply some batch processing to the RAW images from a file set likely to be useful for that category. So for example right now I am having to process horticulture macros. Sky is not a factor, and they all need pretty much the same basic processes applying to them. If I can do this in one go, and do the naming in one quick and easy go, then this saves time.

I will only put energy into processing in detail a very few pictures. Home page on a website for example.

[Adrian]

I use mostly open-source stuff and would be definitely interested in knowing those cons ...

GNU is not intuitive. Interface looks like it has been designed by committee. It lags behind paid for competing products and it suffered compatibility problems. I was trying to run it on the version of Safari immediately prior to Big Sur (maybe 3 updates back) and it would hang during certain tasks, eventually requiring force quit. When you go back into the development forum you see someone has recently made changes that breaks the compatibility. Reminded me of the early days of Linux. So I pretty quickly gave up as my coding skills are now very rusty indeed outside of SQL and C sharp.

[Adrian]

Adrian, I'm still following with interest the library aspect of this and the other thread.

May I ask if those "batch id's" are stored in each image's metadata and if so, do you happen to know where?

I am not sure. I was using it to signpost file sets. So I would name 40 pictures or whatever "Kate", rate them, and assign a location and purpose. I would then export the images to my own library folder system, and also to OSX photos. In my own system the naming etc was fully preserved. OSX Photos however is a step back from Aperture and destroys some Exif data and hides other bits that make it a real pain to find. So just because I had labelled images as "Kate" did not mean that they would all find their way into the face or name recognition set for her. No idea why but I didn't bother looking at it for long as Photos is just a sync tool for me, not a true library.

[davidedric]

Minor point, Dan, but given the confusion sown by Adobe's naming, the desktop version is just Lightroom Classic (there is no "CC" in the name).

[xpatUSA]

GNU is not intuitive. Interface looks like it has been designed by committee. It lags behind paid for competing products and it suffered compatibility problems. I was trying to run it on the version of Safari immediately prior to Big Sur (maybe 3 updates back) and it would hang during certain tasks, eventually requiring force quit. When you go back into the development forum you see someone has recently made changes that breaks the compatibility. Reminded me of the early days of Linux. So I pretty quickly gave up as my coding skills are now very rusty indeed outside of SQL and C sharp.

OK, makes me glad I'm using a PC - my System 9.0 Performer being long dead.

Um, what is "C sharp" just out of interest? I vaguely recall C plus plus but that was long ago ...

[xpatUSA]

I am not sure. I was using it to signpost file sets. So I would name 40 pictures or whatever "Kate", rate them, and assign a location and purpose. I would then export the images to my own library folder system, and also to OSX photos. In my own system the naming etc was fully preserved. OSX Photos however is a step back from Aperture and destroys some Exif data and hides other bits that make it a real pain to find. So just because I had labelled images as "Kate" did not mean that they would all find their way into the face or name recognition set for her. No idea why but I didn't bother looking at it for long as Photos is just a sync tool for me, not a true library.

OK, thanks for the "cons". Pleased that they appear not to apply to my stuff.

[Adrian]

Um, what is "C sharp" just out of interest? I vaguely recall C plus plus but that was long ago ...

Wiki: C# is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language encompassing static typing, strong typing, lexically scoped, imperative, declarative, functional, generic, object-oriented, and component-oriented programming disciplines.

I learnt it for advanced maths theory programming, but useful for other things.

[pschlute]

I think there is a bit of a Lightroom obsession in this place!

Why do you not post some images of what you are trying to edit ?

Things may be a bit clearer then

[pschlute]

I think there is a bit of a Lightroom obsession in this place!

Perhaps because many of the experienced photographers on this site have looked at all the alternatives and have decided LR gives them what they want ?

[LenR]

Re AI: I have a somewhat different view of this than you do, as I am trying to maximize control over my edits rather than turning them over to an algorithm based on someone else's machine-learning exercise. I find some of the AI-based algorithms useful but have no use for others.

Dan, agree with you on this score.............

[Adrian]

Perhaps because many of the experienced photographers on this site have looked at all the alternatives and have decided LR gives them what they want ?

Maybe. I think it equally likely that people bought into Adobe years ago and have simply stuck with it, hence many people never spend the time to evaluate what the alternatives are and whether they are better. I spent a good few years using Lightroom, Photoshop and InDesign, so I am well aware of the software. I've even done two Adobe processing courses. But it is now time for a reboot. Maybe this will take me back to Lightroom (I am about to evaluate it against Capture One 21).

There are things though that put me off. For example, I have started the free 30 day Capture One 21 trial (and will post about that tomorrow). I am evaluating that against the current iteration of Lightroom which I have downloaded to a clean Mac (previously had problems with Lightroom Classic crashing on OSX Big Sur). With Adobe there is only a 7 day trial, but they also force me to give credit card details and will do the many grab if I don't cancel. So it requires a negative action from me. That is indicative of the Adobe attitude that I very much dislike. (My business used to need several full creative cloud multi app licences and that was very expensive).

[pschlute]

Maybe. I think it equally likely that people bought into Adobe years ago and have simply stuck with it, hence many people never spend the time to evaluate what the alternatives are and whether they are better. I spent a good few years using Lightroom, Photoshop and InDesign, so I am well aware of the software. I've even done two Adobe processing courses. But it is now time for a reboot. Maybe this will take me back to Lightroom (I am about to evaluate it against Capture One 21).

There are things though that put me off. For example, I have started the free 30 day Capture One 21 trial (and will post about that tomorrow). I am evaluating that against the current iteration of Lightroom which I have downloaded to a clean Mac (previously had problems with Lightroom Classic crashing on OSX Big Sur). With Adobe there is only a 7 day trial, but they also force me to give credit card details and will do the many grab if I don't cancel. So it requires a negative action from me. That is indicative of the Adobe attitude that I very much dislike. (My business used to need several full creative cloud multi app licences and that was very expensive).

Look at what you need from a creative point of view. If you obsess about companies "out to get you" you will get no-where.