It is time for me to choose a photo editor

[CrowingHen]

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.

Edited December 26, 2019 by CrowingHen
adding info

[Phil]

24 minutes ago, Harry Harrison said:

I believe Affinity Photo does both, you can trial it for free and it's only £50 anyway. You should definitely see if it works for you though.

 

Thanks.  Have heard of Affinity but never looked into it. 

[Harry Harrison]

7 minutes ago, Phil said:

Thanks.  Have heard of Affinity but never looked into it. 

It's produced by a long-standing English company called Serif but Photo hasn't been around for long. They are putting a lot of effort into developing it so definitely worth looking at.  They also produce Affinity Designer & Affinity Publisher, each at the same price and aimed to be integrated with each other. Now & then they have a 30% discount across all the software, you have to buy Mac & Windows versions separately.

[Phil]

1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said:

It's produced by a long-standing English company called Serif but Photo hasn't been around for long. They are putting a lot of effort into developing it so definitely worth looking at.  They also produce Affinity Designer & Affinity Publisher, each at the same price and aimed to be integrated with each other. Now & then they have a 30% discount across all the software, you have to buy Mac & Windows versions separately.

 

Some quick research seems to indicate Affinity Photo might be viable alternative to LR/PS for general image processing.  The pricing & update policy certainly seems reasonable.

 

Other than it is has no DAM (not yet anyway)  - one thing that did seem missing is it's current lack of support to copy image development parameters from one image to one or more additional images. Not a show stopper but it would slow down workflow if processing several similar images. Might try their free test drive and see how it goes.

[Harry Harrison]

11 minutes ago, Phil said:

Affinity Photo might be viable alternative to LR/PS for general image processing

It's weak on adding metadata as well, and it's a very different workflow to PS. They're not alone in not having a DAM though, I think it must be very difficult to implement judging by how long Photo Mechanic have been promising one, and Capture One bought Iview Media Pro off Microsoft, sold it for a while under their own name and then abandoned it. Either that or the market for one is limited, and possibly declining.

[Allan Bell]

Silly question.

 

What is DAM??

 

Allan

 

[Harry Harrison]

4 minutes ago, Allan Bell said:

What is DAM??

Digital Asset Management

[Allan Bell]

1 minute ago, Harry Harrison said:

Digital Asset Management

 

Thank you Harry. I should have realised earlier. Having a bad week.

 

Allan

 

[Harry Harrison]

1 minute ago, Allan Bell said:

Thank you Harry. I should have realised earlier. Having a bad week.

I used to work somewhere that did one so the term is familiar to me, I don't think Adobe talk about it when describing Lightroom so you wouldn't necessarily have come across it.

[Betty LaRue]

I’ve seen DAM mentioned in various threads and never understood, either. Thank you Allan. Hope your week improves.

I finally got a foggy impression it might have something to do with cataloging, but wouldn’t have placed a bet on it.

[KevinS]

On 19/01/2020 at 12:02, CrowingHen said:

Maybe I can find an affordable (or better yet, free) noise reduction software later on.

The 'Prime" NR on DXO PhotoLab3 is good, as far as I can tell. The auto setting always seems to work, but there are sliders for adjusting manually. The 'HQ' NR is faster than Prime, and usually adequate to my eyes. Both are in PL3. I think they offer a free trial.

Edited January 24, 2020 by KevinS

[sb photos]

On 23/01/2020 at 10:58, Harry Harrison said:

Digital Asset Management

 

Diverging a little from the origins of this thread, but relating to DAM ... has anyone use Extensis Portfolio?

 

[Harry Harrison]

2 hours ago, sb photos said:

has anyone use Extensis Portfolio?

I didn't even know they were still around until you mentioned them, I've got a copy somewhere but I think it was probably Windows 98 compatible. I didn't see any prices on their website, they may gone more for the corporate 'enterprise' market.

[Harry Harrison]

2 hours ago, sb photos said:

has anyone use Extensis Portfolio?

Automatic Keywording

Save time and resources by adding keywords to your assets with AI-enabled image recognition and metadata extraction from your files. You can also use batch tagging as well as develop your own custom metadata fields for business-specific keywords.

 

Hmm. Maybe not then.

[sb photos]

1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said:

I didn't even know they were still around until you mentioned them, I've got a copy somewhere but I think it was probably Windows 98 compatible. I didn't see any prices on their website, they may gone more for the corporate 'enterprise' market.

 

Yes, no pricing for the current Portfolio, it was never cheap, and certainly not now. The only Extensis product I ever used was Suitcase font manager long ago.

 

[John Mitchell]

I've recently started experimenting with Capture One Express for Sony, and I'm really impressed at how powerful it is, especially for free software. However, I'm a bit concerned about CrowingHen's experience with low-ISO noise. Has anyone else had problems with this when using Capture One for for RAW processing? Is this its Achilles heel?

[CrowingHen]

I ended up going with Capture One with the perpetual licence.  The trial was a big help as I can see how the controls work and if I can get along well with the software, although, I suspect part of my choice was being lazy and this is good enough for my needs. 

 

The spending money part of the process was easy and I got an email with an licence key.  However, the instructions for activating that key are difficult to find and didn't work.  I had to deactivate then reactivate and I got there, but it was a very different process than the tutorials suggested.  During my frustration, I got some help from capture one via email and they were very polite.  I sent my query in before I went to bed, and the reply was there before I got up the next day.  Bonus points for quick response time.

 

I like that the licence key can be used on three computers at one time.  I could see this being useful if I have need of it at work.

 

Noise: I'm doing better with this.  I'm still convinced it's user error as DPP was doing something automatically and trained me not to think about it.  I wish I knew what that was.

• A big part of the noise problem - I usually darken the shadows for my art photography and some of my stock https://www.alamy.com/an-example-of-hemstitching-on-handwoven-cloth-in-white-cotton-yarn-on-the-loom-unwoven-warp-showing-strong-sunlight-and-shadow-as-example-of-need-image331024905.html But for the series of shots I was doing at that time, I needed to lighten them a bit to brighten the entire scene (I need to sit down and have a talk with my camera about what settings will give me this so I don't have to do it in post - but that's something for another day.  Now I'm going back to my regular style, it's not so bad.
• seeing the noise - still working on this one.  glasses are helping.  Need more training.
• I have been playing with my new 22mm f2 lens a lot, and the out of focus area seems to be more noisy than the same with my kit lens. But I haven't done some controlled experiments to see if this is true yet.
• There are a lot of buttons and sliders I have yet to learn on capture one.
• I can do something called a mask and apply the extra noise reduction layer to the shadow parts.  This is neat.  I haven't figured out how to do this well, but I've been playing with it for my personal/art photography.  When I get better at it, I'll try it for stock.  (yes, I'm an absolute beginning at this editing thing)

I'm still using DPP for sorting and culling images and for quick processing, but I love having a more powerful editor for my fun stuff and for removing spots or more targeted exposure, highlight, shadow, and colour.  I also really like that I can batch add keywords.  I've been doing 30-40 keywords that belong to the batch, then doing the last few word that are individual to the image.  It's going to take me a bit of practice to get this method more efferent.  

 

Thank you everyone for your help and this thread.  There's so much great stuff here, I'm enjoying going back and rereading all the advise.  

 

 

[John Mitchell]

Good luck with Capture One. I've been experimenting with Capture One Express for Sony (free). I quite like it in a lot of respects. However, there seem to be some issues. Noise reduction in Capture One is not nearly as good as with DxO Optics Pro, which I use most of the time. The default sharpening is a bit too high in Capture One. In addition, I find the catalog confusing and somewhat annoying, and it doesn't seem possible to disable it (in the Express version anyway). I've also seen some weird, noise-like colouring in images after applying saturation. Some of the problems I've mentioned no doubt have to do with user (me) error, so I'll keep on practising...

[NYCat]

I think Betty was right to suggest checking the histogram when you are shooting and using a setting that brings it all the way to the right. I'm a bit lazy about that and what I am more likely to do is set my LCD to show "blinkies" when I review my image. The sections that are over-exposed blink. I look to have tiny areas blinking and use Lightroom to make adjustments if I have gone too far. Like Betty, I have found that I usually want a +1/3 exposure compensation with my Nikons. A slight over-exposure is better than underexposure when it comes to noise.

 

Paulette

[spacecadet]

On 29/01/2020 at 19:12, NYCat said:

I think Betty was right to suggest checking the histogram when you are shooting and using a setting that brings it all the way to the right. I'm a bit lazy about that and what I am more likely to do is set my LCD to show "blinkies" when I review my image. The sections that are over-exposed blink. I look to have tiny areas blinking and use Lightroom to make adjustments if I have gone too far. Like Betty, I have found that I usually want a +1/3 exposure compensation with my Nikons. A slight over-exposure is better than underexposure when it comes to noise.

 

Paulette

Having come across a few "blinkies" in New Zealand, I'm convinced that cameras over-emphasise them. When I got them back home they were easy enough to correct.

As the image you see replayed on the LCD is a jpeg, the blinkies are set for that, not for what would be blown out on a RAW. So they're less helpful than they might be- they were leading me to underexpose a bit, with more developing work than I usually have to do. Next time I may just let them go.

The light in New Zealand just seems to be brighter and contrastier. Makes no sense, I know but it just is. Perhaps it's the latitude. Or the clean air.

Edited February 1, 2020 by spacecadet

[NYCat]

Light can be amazingly different. TV shows that are supposed to be New York but are shot in California never look quite right. I actually look to make sure I have some blinkies. If I don't see any I increase my exposure because, as you say, if they are a problem at all Lightroom easily takes care of them.

 

Paulette