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It is time for me to choose a photo editor


CrowingHen

Question

I've been using the free photo editor that comes with Canon and I love it.  I can do very simple and subtle edits like lens correction and colour/contrast stuff.  It's pretty powerful and easy to use for what it does do and was great for getting started.

 

But come the new year, I want to learn more about editing.  I can't see doing extreme editing except as fun exercise.  

 

My goals for photography are three:

1. to companion my writing (which has more editing than a forum post)

2. to create a passive income with stock

3. to capture the world that I see so I can share it with others

 

I never learned how to use Adobe and the more I learn about lightroom and photoshop, the more I feel it isn't for me.  There are lots of reasons.  One of the reasons is the first software someone learns tends to govern what they think is "intuitive to use".  I want to try other kinds before finally deciding if Adobe is for me so I can get used to non-intuitive tools first. 

 

What are your favourite raw editing programs?  

 

I want something that I can look at many photos and do quick edits like I do now, but also some more advanced edits like spot removal, clone, burn and the thing that is the opposite of burn which I can't remember the name.  I want to make lines not keystoned and have easy trick for horizontal horizon.  I also want to put keywords in the photo instead of doing them all after I upload.  I imagine if I keyword the photo file then I can search my personal library for these words when I want to find the photo.  Maybe I imagine wrong? 

 

Later on - maybe 2021 - I want to learn about making three exposures into one (has three letters, to expand dynamic range in a picture) and other neat things to do.  But mostly this year I'm still focusing on learning how to make the best in-camera photos (I want good ingredients) and slowly learning editing (I learn better with deep understanding so slow is my speed).

 

There are a lot of programs to choose.  Some are free.  Some cost money.  I don't mind paying money if the program is good, but I would like it better to pay once instead of every month.  But, I also don't know enough to know what words I am looking for when choosing a software.  I'm thinking of Capture One, but I wonder if this will do what I want?  It's hard to know where to begin until after you've already started then hindsight always shows you should have started elsewhere.  

 

(I only have windows 10 pc.  Canon mirrorless shooting raw)

 

Please forgive my spelling and such, I can't seem to make grammarly plugin work with this form and extreme dyslexia means my regular spellcheck goes on vacation for "the program cannot detect what language this is written in so spellcheck is disabled" or some reason.

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57 minutes ago, CrowingHen said:

I'm suddenly getting noise rejections on ISO 100.  I don't generally have this issue until over ISO 400.  About two thirds of the photos I processed with capture one have this issue, but when I process the same photo with the Digital Photo Professional, I usually get about 5% with this error.

 

That does seem strange as Capture One has a good reputation as a RAW file processor. Can you see the differences in noise that is causing them to fail?

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1 hour ago, CrowingHen said:

I've been playing with the free trial of Capture One for a week now.  I love it... mostly.  

 

 

1. when I submit my photos to the other site, I'm suddenly getting noise rejections on ISO 100.  I don't generally have this issue until over ISO 400.  About two thirds of the photos I processed with capture one have this issue, but when I process the same photo with the Digital Photo Professional, I usually get about 5% with this error.

 

 

 

 

Have they specified the type of noise? It is very unlikely that you would see any luminance noise at ISO 100 unless you are underexposing a lot and opening up the shadows a lot afterwards. So it is more likely to be colour noise. Could it be that you do not have any colour noise reduction on in Capture One? Some programs have this on by default (e.g. ACR and Lightroom) so it may not ever be noticed but it may be that Capture One has it off. I have never had a camera that does not need some colour noise reduction. 

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31 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

That does seem strange as Capture One has a good reputation as a RAW file processor. Can you see the differences in noise that is causing them to fail?

 

They don't specify the noise type.  But I haven't had this error with such low ISO before.

 

I'm pretty sure it's user error that's causing the problem. I need to learn something new.  I'm guessing that DDP was doing something automatically to make the noise/artifacts less and maybe I need to do something manually in Capture 1.

 

Here's a photo I've been having trouble with (I know it's not a good photo, but it tells a story and might be useful for someones blog or paint product talking about how not to have this happen)

 

Both done with fairly light touch on the sliders.  I can see noise in the second one when I zoom to 200%.  But I'm also having trouble training my eyes for noise.

 

Digital Photo Professional 4

 

post.JPG

 

Capture One

 

reno-2020-22.jpg

 

I'm pretty sure this is user error in the processing.  I can tell I also need to train myself more to see what's going wrong as they don't look hugely different at 100%.  On the whole, I like the effect that Capture One is giving me, especially with the way it can tone down the whites while keeping the midtones.  

 

22mm

1/60 second

a 2.8

ISO 250

 

 

 

 

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42 minutes ago, CrowingHen said:

Happy news - the set I processed for Alamy just made it through quality control! 

 

So I'm not too far off the mark!  But I still want to do better.

 

Well there is definitely colour noise in both images so that is something you need to attend to as you progress. It is clearly visible in the shadow areas under the knob of the banister.

 

The fact that it passed Alamy QC does not mean it is of acceptable technical quality - it may not have been examined or the QCer might have been tired and not noticed it. They only examine a small random sample. Myself I would not upload that for that reason as well as the fact that the depth of field is tiny and there is very, very little in sharp focus. If I was shooting that then I would want to be getting a lot more of the knob in focus. It is an ideal subject for focus stacking in fact. 

 

 

EDIT: Also the highlights are totally blown out. If that was mine I would pull them back using the highlights slider or whatever they have in your software so there is some detail visible. 

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1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said:

 

Phil recommended Iridient Iridient Transformer to me for my Fuji files and so far I'm very impressed with the workflow of using that to convert to DNG and then bringing these into Lightroom Perpetual. I don't have a need for it yet but it could well be a solution. They do a different version for each camera type.

 

Fuji RAW files do have a reputation for being difficult to process and it seems to me so far that Iridient is doing a better job than Lightroom (though Lightroom CC current version may be better anyway). It's $36 for each RAW file type and you can download a free trial that leaves a watermark on.

 

Thanks Harry, that's something to be born in mind! 

 

To be honest I can't detect any significant improvement for stock shooting between the images that I processed years ago using Canon's DPP program and then again using my much more recent version of LR.  LR is very useful as a database however, and I wouldn't go back to DPP.  I guess that the latest software is better, and more perceptive people can see this, but I can't, and I'm not sure that the improvements warrant the cost.  Is it a case of the Emperor's New Clothes?

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Thanks for the critique.  I agree, definitely not a good photo and most definitely not good enough to upload here but I think it made a good example of the difference between the two programs and how they automatically process noise.  As you noticed, the highlights are a problem with both, but I think Capture one has the ability to fix this better than DPP.  

 

The Capture one I can see the noise but the DPP one, I have a bit of trouble seeing it as I see the texture of the paint in that shadow.  

 

When I bring the noise slider up on DPP, I loose the crispness of the focal area.  I suspect with capture one, I can apply a mask and apply a noise filter to just the areas with shadow - but even sending the slider all the way to one side, I can still see noise.  So I think there must be a better way to fix this problem in Capture one. 

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1 hour ago, CrowingHen said:

Happy news - the set I processed for Alamy just made it through quality control! 

 

So I'm not too far off the mark!  But I still want to do better.

You’re still not quite grasping the kind of images that is needed for Alamy. Taking out all your textiles and looking at what’s left, you want to look at each subject and ask yourself, what would a buyer use this image for? Why would they want it more than what’s already offered by others?

Usually, it will be something that expresses a travel location, and those should often show people enjoying that location. Exceptions are beautiful locations that people travel to see. Those places usually feature water or mountains, or beaches, or landmarks. Something that when seen will make travelers want to go there.

You have a number of subjects that are close up. A piece of the back of a stone bench. Not much sales value to that unless you can describe how the aggregate stone was put together and what kind of stone was used. That would be your tag interest. The lichen on the bench would be the likeliest sales hook, but there again, make that the interest of your tags. What kind of lichen? Scientific name, what, where? Taken as closeup as you can get a clear shot of. Plus tags like flora, nature, growing, plant, etc.

 

Benches are a dime a dozen. Unless there is something very unusual about your bench, it’s a waste of your time. Does it have unusual architecture? Need the whole bench. Is it sitting under a deep snowfall? That would feature weather. Are there old people sitting on it, or a family? That would be under concepts...togetherness, love, aging, etc.

I want to see you succeed, and not waste time shooting something that will rarely, if ever, sell. Your images need to feature a concept or a place, business, item, holiday or whatever that somebody needs to fit their article or website.

Spring will be here before you know it. Take pictures of flowers, getting down on their level, not just from standing over them. You’ll need the common name and scientific name. Take pictures of trees. “Elm tree (scientific name), leafless in winter.” Then as the leaves start to emerge, spring budding. Closeup and whole tree. Then fully leafed out whole (for tree shape) and a closeup of a small bunch of leaves to show their identifying traits.  Botany is a big market. Horizontal and vertical.
Don’t waste time shooting common ducks and geese. Something else that’s a dime a dozen and done better than you and I can do it by wildlife shooters. Lol, I wasted my share of time doing those!! They have never been zoomed, let alone sold!

Just because you are walking about with your camera and see something, don’t take the shot or waste your time developing, tagging and uploading unless it answers the question of ‘who and why would someone want to buy it.’

I can’t begin to tell you how looong it took me to grasp editorial. Way too long. I did not have the community help that you have your fingertips.

I don’t know your kit or what lenses. Sometimes when you can’t afford a macro lens, you can afford a set of closeup lenses that you screw onto your regular lens. I used those when I started out. My grandson has and uses them now.

Betty

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6 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

You’re still not quite grasping the kind of images that is needed for Alamy.

 

I agree.  I have a lot to learn.  

So much to learn that I find it easier to break it down into sections and focus on one or two at a time.  Right now it's in-camera skill and post processing skill.  As photography becomes less effort, then I'm focusing on the story telling aspect.

 

As for the lichen, it's good advise.  I've already sent that photo to the naturalist for an identification of that lichen.  When I hear back, I'll be adding the technical details of the lichen (botanical name, common names, stage of growth, etc) to the keywords.  

 

Ducks, geese, and chickens are my joy to photograph.  They seem to sell well on microstock (especially ducks) and one of my first photos to sell on alamy was a chicken (on a generic bench).  I'm very happy to waste my time on these as it's my time to waste. 

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1 minute ago, CrowingHen said:

 

I agree.  I have a lot to learn.  

So much to learn that I find it easier to break it down into sections and focus on one or two at a time.  Right now it's in-camera skill and post processing skill.  As photography becomes less effort, then I'm focusing on the story telling aspect.

 

As for the lichen, it's good advise.  I've already sent that photo to the naturalist for an identification of that lichen.  When I hear back, I'll be adding the technical details of the lichen (botanical name, common names, stage of growth, etc) to the keywords.  

 

Ducks, geese, and chickens are my joy to photograph.  They seem to sell well on microstock (especially ducks) and one of my first photos to sell on alamy was a chicken (on a generic bench).  I'm very happy to waste my time on these as it's my time to waste. 

Good for you! I still find it hard to pass up a duck...or any bird since I love them so. Now a chicken, they are one of my special loves but I seldom come across one. My nephew has a few but they are kept in a small pen. That reminds me to ask him to take one out to the yard so I can photograph it. He has some specialty, uncommon chickens. I had a chicken as a pet when young, and two white ducks as pets when grown.

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For every 400 photos of a bird, I throw 399 away.  But every now and then, I get one fun or unique enough to upload here.  I want to get that number down to 1 keeper per 200 photos, then 1 keeper per 100 photos.  I need a lot more practice.  When I can get chickens down to 1:100, then I want to start on some of the wild birds.  

 

Funny story: when I was first learning about stock (especially microstock) I read about the "ducks on a pond" and I thought this meant that duck photos sold the most since this is the kind of photo I'm selling the most of (at that time).

 

But like I said, I have a lot to learn and I do appreciate the suggestions.  I read and absorb the advise... but I also am going to make mistakes.  A friend of mine says, "try 200 things and maybe 4 will succeed."  I'm going to try a little bit of a lot of things until I find my groove.  

 

I just wish I could get my eyes trained better for noise and artifacts. This seems to be where I'm failing the most this week. 

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That will come in time. Noise was my bugaboo, too. In the beginning, my Nikon D70 was a bit noisy. Part of it was that all of the Nikons I eventually shot underexposed by at least .3. I learned to set the exposure compensation to +.3, but even then user error cause a lot of underexposed images. Part of that was because I was shooting birds a lot, so was setting the shutter speed at minimum of 1/250, and many times the light didn’t support that. And the camera didn’t support higher ISO settings, too noisy.
When I corrected underexposure in post, that introduced more noise. Finally I set the camera where the histogram showed on the screen, and I tried to adjust the exposure before the shot by not quite pegging the histogram to the right. Just off touching the side, so I wouldn’t blow the highlights. That helped the noise more than I can say.

As far as training your eye...be sure your glasses are what you need. If they are off, even a little, that can screw up your evaluations. I speak from experience and some past failures, because I wasn’t  seeing the flaws well even at 100%. My mistakes were more whether they were sharp enough, and poor vision messes with that big time.

Once you settle on your software, and if it does layers, you can set the camera to bracket exposures. Then using layers, you can combine two images. One showing the foreground exposed properly and one that shows the sky well, a nice blue. Right now you’re not shooting landscapes, but you eventually will try some.

 

Try overexposing your image just a bit. You can pull exposure back in post, or reduce highlights, and it won’t introduce noise.

As far as birds go, they were my main focus when I started out. In fact, my first ever sale was a hummingbird, shortly after, two different blue jay images. That was early days, though. They don’t sell as well now. 😞

Betty

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On 16/01/2020 at 20:26, Betty LaRue said:

As far as training your eye...be sure your glasses are what you need

 

Reading glasses and a clean computer screen is helping!  Thank you for the tip!

 

Still not getting as much noise reduction in Capture One as I do in DPP.  In Capture One, even with the slider pushed all the way, it's still noisier than the same image in DPP with minimal slider push - BUT, the Capture one slider doesn't blur the crispness of the focal area as much as DPP noise reduction. 

 

I need to do more learning about Capture One.  But halfway through the free trial, and I think this will work.  Maybe I can find an affordable (or better yet, free) noise reduction software later on.

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22 minutes ago, CrowingHen said:

 

Reading glasses and a clean computer screen is helping!  Thank you for the tip!

 

Still not getting as much noise reduction in Capture One as I do in DPP.  In Capture One, even with the slider pushed all the way, it's still noisier than the same image in DPP with minimal slider push - BUT, the Capture one slider doesn't blur the crispness of the focal area as much as DPP noise reduction. 

 

I need to do more learning about Capture One.  But halfway through the free trial, and I think this will work.  Maybe I can find an affordable (or better yet, free) noise reduction software later on.

 

There is always an interplay between noise reduction and sharpness. Increasing sharpness increases noise. You shouldn't get obsessed by this and you should only be seeing colour noise at ISO 100 so you should not be needing any luminance noise reduction at such low ISO if your exposures are reasonable and you are not opening up shadows. Better to concentrate on making good quality images.

 

I have never used Capture One but I read here that the default sharpening is set quite high - Adobe actually increased the default sharpening in Lightroom a few years ago after that article was written.

 

If you would like to post a few of your typical raw images on Dropbox (allows raw images) and post a link I would be happy to have a look and give you an opinion.

 

 

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"There is always an interplay between noise reduction and sharpness. Increasing sharpness increases noise. You shouldn't get obsessed by this and you should only be seeing colour noise at ISO 100 so you should not be needing any luminance noise reduction at such low ISO if your exposures are reasonable and you are not opening up shadows. Better to concentrate on making good quality images."

 

Did you mean to write shouldn't here, Michael? 

 

 

 

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16 minutes ago, Ed Rooney said:

 

"There is always an interplay between noise reduction and sharpness. Increasing sharpness increases noise. You shouldn't get obsessed by this and you should only be seeing colour noise at ISO 100 so you should not be needing any luminance noise reduction at such low ISO if your exposures are reasonable and you are not opening up shadows. Better to concentrate on making good quality images."

 

Did you mean to write shouldn't here, Michael? 

 

 

 


 No Edo but I didn’t put that very well. What I meant is that if there is any noise visible at ISO 100 then it should only be colour noise and not luminance noise. Colour noise tends to be visible even at low ISO but is easy to deal with. Lightroom and ACR have a colour noise correction on by default so it may never be noticed by Adobe users. I wonder if Capture One has a colour noise correction on by default. Whatever the case, the images above have a problem with colour noise, not luminance noise.  

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This thread has mainly concentrated on the image processing side of things, RAW processing, noise correction etc. However keywording (and captioning) is also important to the OP and I've just read that Luminar & DxO are pretty limited in this respect, as is Affinity Photo I believe. I don't know how true it is, and upgrades can suddenly improve the situation but it is worth checking.

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I need to do some more experimenting, but is it possible that the jpeg size from capture one is larger than the jpeg size from DPP?  And if so, would it show up noise more?  

 

 

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I imagine that you mean the size on your hard drive. Without knowing either program I'm fairly sure that both will offer you varying degrees of jpeg compression when you save the jpeg so that with greater compression the size on disk decreases but at the expense of image quality.  You will begin to see what are known as compression artefacts, posterisation in areas of even tone and, at worst,  a 'stepped' appearance to straight edges.

 

Once you have discovered how to control the degree of compression with each program then experiment for yourself and see how the quality decreases. Alamy recommend no compression when saving jpegs. Perhaps you are comparing different degrees of compression between the two programs.

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Does any of the Lightroom and Photoshop image editing alternatives support focus stacking and/or panoramic stitching?

 

I know there is standalone s/w that provides these but just curious if any LR/PS alternatives support them.

 

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18 minutes ago, CrowingHen said:

I need to do some more experimenting, but is it possible that the jpeg size from capture one is larger than the jpeg size from DPP?  And if so, would it show up noise more?  

 

 

 

It appears you are concerned about digital noise. Wether using C1, PS or DPP, the image saved at the jpg maximum resolution and with the same horizontal and vertical dimension should be the same same size. There will likely be different levels of noise depending upon how effective the applications different RAW converters are. Continue experimenting. To minimise noise, try keeping the iso as low as possible, expose accurately, and where possible minimise opening shadows. If the subject allows, shoot tripod mounted at the lowest iso when hand holding the camera isn't ideal. If with the applications RAW converters default sharpening the image is still too noisy for QC, then consider reducing the image size. Personally, I'm currently happy with Adobe's offering, making as many necessary adjustments first in ACR, but can't comment on others. 

 

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43 minutes ago, Phil said:

Does any of the Lightroom and Photoshop image editing alternatives support focus stacking and/or panoramic stitching?

 

I know there is standalone s/w that provides these but just curious if any LR/PS alternatives support them.

 

Lightroom does panoramic stitching very well, as does Photoshop.

Photoshop will also do focus stacking...

Phil

 

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