Goodbye Adobe

Back in 2013, when Adobe introduced their “Photography Program” - Lightroom and Photoshop for AU$9.99 a month - it seemed like a reasonable deal, especially compared to the highly inflated prices that Adobe had previously charged for Photoshop in NZ. At the time, one wondered how long those prices would last. The answer, it seems, was three years; in 2016 the price went up to AU$13.79 and now, in 2017, it has risen again to AU$14.94. And so,  once again, it was time to look for an alternative to Lightroom and Photoshop that would address all my photographic processing needs.

A Google search suggested ACDSee Ultimate 10. What? Surely not. Not that picture indexing, format converting, lightweight editing tool that I remembered from the early 2000s? How on earth could that replace Lightroom and Photoshop? But I had to look and, amazingly, found something beyond my wildest dreams. ACDSee U10, manages photos much like Lightroom, it developes RAW files much like lightroom and it edits photos much like Photoshop - and it does it all in one application.

I had some specific requirements that ACDSee had to meet. It has to support the RAW formats from all my cameras (past and present) - Nikon, Sony, Canon - which it did. It had to support my workflows for photography and especially infrared photography - which it did. And it had to support the Topaz, Photoshop filter plugins, which are an integral part of my workflow - it did that too.

There were two areas where I was worried at first - ACDSee’s lack of support for merging either panoramic photos or HDR photos. Both of these functions are standard in Lightroom and Photoshop and, although I rarely use HDR these days (modern camera sensors are just too good) the missing components were close to being a deal breaker. However, I have copies of both Microsoft’s ICE (free) for panoramas and Photomatix (paid) for HDR - both of these programs can be installed in ACDSee as ‘external editors’ and the handoff of files between ACDSee and these programs is seamless - making the process just as simple as in Lightroom or Photoshop. Issue avoided.

The tools available in ACDSee Ultimate 10 are not direct one-to-one replacements for those in Lightroom and Photoshop; U10 is clearly not a clone of the Adobe products. Having said that, I found that my knowledge of Lightroom and Photoshop allowed me to navigate ACDSee U10 fairly easily and come up to speed within a day or two, helped by ACDSee’s excellent introductory and tutorial videos. But, the key to ACDSee’s utility does not lie in any functional equivalence to Lightroom and Photoshop - the key question for me is, ‘can I produce equivalent results’ and the answer here is decidedly, ‘yes’. In fact, in some areas, like infrared, I found myself producing better quality results more easily than with the Adobe products.

I am, quite frankly amazed by ACDSee U10. Previously, when I have looked for alternatives to Adobe’s expensive products, I have only been able to find alternatives which had severe limitations either in functionality, usability or reliability. So far I have found nothing in ACDSee which has posed any significant issue. I am producing the work I have always produced just as easily, possibly easier, and at a much lower cost. Seven months of Adobe subscriptions will see ACDSee fully paid for (perpetual license) or ACDSee also offer a subscription plan for those that are interested at about 60% the cost of the Adobe subscription.

Christchurch Botanic Gardens 720nm infrared processed in ACDSee Ultimate 10 and Topaz.


Of course, you shouldn’t just believe me, so have a look at this review from fstoppers: https://fstoppers.com/originals/all-one-imaging-software-and-digital-asset-manager-fstoppers-reviews-acdsee-175036

Is that HDR?

Is that HDR? I hate that question. I hate it because (a) it’s irrelevant and (b) it can’t be answered without lying - if I said “yes” it would be a lie. If I said “no” it would still be a lie. There’s a third reason too - (c) usually its a loaded question, preceding an attempt to invalidate the picture as a photograph. Well, duh, its not a photograph; its a picture - cameras take photographs; I make pictures (out of photographs).

But let’s get back to the lying thing. “No” its not HDR (High Dynamic Range) because it was an overcast day and my camera could capture everything necessary in one exposure (and did). However, I did take a series of exposures using a technique called “exposure bracketing”. The picture you were looking at (previous post) came from combining two or more of those exposures using both tone mapping and exposure blending so, if that’s what you think of as HDR, then your answer is “yes” (but it's still not an HDR picture).
But, it gets even more confusing: I also produced a picture that, to the casual observer,  looks almost identical to the one accused of being HDR - similar tonalities, similar contrast, similar details. It was made using only Lightroom and only one exposure - in other words it used none of the features of the so-called HDR process yet, because of its look, it would have undoubtedly invoked exactly the same question - is that HDR? In this case I could have answered “no” with an absolutely clear conscience.
Definitely NOT an HDR:produced from a single exposure processed only in Lightroom:

The picture in the previous post is also not HDR but was created from multiple exposures, tone mapped and blended - some people incorrectly call that HDR.

Let's stop what has always been an irrelevant debate around the misuse of the term “HDR”. It’s a style thing; you either like a picture or you don’t, the HDR question is an irrelevance which makes the questioner sound amateurish and ignorant.

Shovels and clarity

This weekend I've been testing a new Topaz filter, "Clarity". It's not yet released (perhaps 2-4 weeks away) but it looks very promising and a worthy addition to the Topaz toolbox. I used it on this picture (in addition to other filters) to restore what was a rather flat 6,400 ISO RAW file, to what I remembered seeing:

Nikon D600, 1/5 sec (hand-held) @ f11 and ISO 6,400 28-300 Nikkor lens @ 62mm. Processed in Lightroom and Photoline using a variety of Topaz filters.

Show the show jumper

A couple of posts ago I included the 'straight out of Lightroom' version of this picture (as I usually do on this blog). However, after blogging, the better pictures then go into my 'to be processed' folder from where they are given a fresh and more careful development in Lightroom and a fairly intensive going over with other software tools (in this case Photoline, Topaz and OnOne). The best of these pictures then go on (hopefully) to be sold. This is one of those pictures.

A superficial glance at the before and after versions may possibly show only minor changes, but print them big and the improvements in clarity, detail and depth are quite amazing. I just wish I could show that at web sizes but you'll just have to take my word for it :-)

D600, 1/1250 sec, f5.6, 116mm on a Nikon 28-300 lens.

Shear skill

Watching the shearers at work is fascinating; a real display of speed, strength and skill. The D600 did a fantastic job under challenging lighting conditions, Lightroom brought out the shadow detail and Topaz dealt with the introduced noise (I keep trying other tools but these are the ones I come back to).  1/2500 sec @ f5.6 and 300mm on a Nikon 28-300 lens. Good job everyone; you too sheep.

Photoshop - $25 - almost

I have been a user of Photoshop Elements since v8 and Photoshop Lightroom since v3; together they make an awesome library, development and post processing combo for photographers. Despite having flirted with CS6 during the beta stage, I always baulked at the exorbitant price premium that Photoshop commanded (see "Photoshop CS6 Beta - first thoughts" and "Photoshop CS6 - second thoughts"). But now I have nearly all the functionality of Photoshop for a mere NZ$25 thanks to two small programs - "TPG Elemental" and "Elements+".

TPG Elemental is a Lightroom plugin which links Lightroom to Elements in a very similar way to Lightroom's  built in linking with the full Photoshop CSx application. It allows the user to send images from Lightrrom to Elements for editing, stacking or merging and a number of other functions. It is simple and works as advertised. It is 'donation ware' so send the author whatever you think is appropriate and he will send you a license key to unlock the full functionality of TPG Elemental.

Elements+ is a Photoshop Elements plugin. Photoshop Elements is a stripped down version of the full Photoshop product, only it seems that most of the full product's functionality is still lurking under the hood of Elements. Adobe blocked access through the Elements interface but did not remove the functionality. Elements+ provides it's own interface to the hidden functionality so now, for example, I have access to the color channel functions, can align layers, merge and blend layers and access dozens of other functions previously reserved for the users of the full Photoshop. Elements+ cost NZ$15.

Now, this combination is not perfect and some may find the interface to Elements+ 'odd' - I know I did at first. Not everything in Photoshop is there either but, if Elements on its own is 80% of Photoshop, then these two little apps take that percentage up to about 95% - now that IS worth NZ$25! Which makes paying another NZ$930 for the last 5% even less likely than it used to be.

Photoshop CS6 - second thoughts

A week or so after downloading the CS6 beta, I could have brought it - I was in love with all the cool things it could do compared to to Photoshop Elements. Fortunately for me and my bank account, CS6 was not yet for sale and I was granted a cooling off period during which sanity prevailed and I uninstalled CS6. I imagine that it felt much like walking away from an affair before anyone really got hurt.

Let me be clear, my digital tools of choice for the last year have been Photoshop Lightroom (now v4) and Photoshop Elements (v10). To move from PSE10 to CS6 would cost well over NZ$930 while Lightroom and Elements together cost me about NZ$400. As I asked in the last post on this subject, were the additional features that CS6 offered over and above PSE10 worth it? No they weren't - at least not to me.

I will miss the 'adaptive wide angle tool' - that was really useful but, that aside, there was really nothing that CS6 brought to the party that I couldn't achieve in PSE10. Perhaps PSE10 isn't so polished and CS6 is definitely quicker at many tasks, but my photography is not of the mass production type (think weddings) that could benefit from the smoother CS6 workflow. Most of my time is spent deciding how to process an individual picture, not applying the actual modifications. Add to that the fact that Lightroom provides all the RAW processing abilities from CS5/6's Camera RAW (but packaged better) and it was clear that CS6 could add very little to my current post processing setup.

So that was it; CS6 is in the past, even before its arrival, and I am more convinced than ever that Lightroom and Elements make an awesome tool set for non-commercial photographers.

'Easy as' photo website

Just finished revamping phoxford.com. This qualifies as the fastest website redesign I have ever done thanks to  the "LRB Exhibition" plugin for Lightroom. The largest part of the job was curating the pictures to include in the galleries. Once that was done I simply had to work down a (long) list of options - ticking boxes, choosing colours, setting layout, and entering text. Then I published locally, made a few tweaks and published to the web-server. Checked out the result on an iPad and a netbook, tweaked and republished and it was done.

What I like is the ease of maintenance - simply drag a new picture into the 'web-site' collection in Lightroom, adjust the picture count for the gallery, and republish; LRB Exhibition takes care of the rest. Cool and quick.

LRB Plugins also have other web gallery options - "LRB Portfolio" and "LRB Showcase" along with other Lightroom tools. Well worth checking out at lrbplugins.com. Thanks Sean McCormack.