Alternatives to PS - what they can and can not do?

[Matus Kalisky]

Given the last news from Adobe there will be many of use who will - sooner or later - look for a software to replace Photoshop.

Obviously - there is not a software that can do all the things Photoshop has or even uses the same layout or logic, but there are several options some of you may already have quite detailed experience with.

Would you guys and galls be so kind and share your experience on image-editing software you use - what are the up and down sides compared to Photoshop?

Example of questions that just come to my mind:
- Can these softwares import PSD files?
- 16 bit processing?
- Adjustment layers or other way to make the changes revertible?
- noise reduction / sharpening / retouching tools ?
- batch processing
- Linux/Mac/Win
- color / contrast / levels / BW / toning ?

thank you in advance

[Lenny Eiger]

Example of questions that just come to my mind:
- Can these softwares import PSD files?
- 16 bit processing?
- Adjustment layers or other way to make the changes revertible?
- noise reduction / sharpening / retouching tools ?
- batch processing
- Linux/Mac/Win
- color / contrast / levels / BW / toning ?

thank you in advance

Just in case someone is taking notice, we definitely need a curves dialog, or something that will do the same thing, and the capability for masking. That's the big one for me...

Lenny

[Ben Syverson]

FWIW, Lightroom does all of the things mentioned so far, except for Linux.

[Greg Miller]

FWIW, Lightroom does all of the things mentioned so far, except for Linux.

Maybe. And maybe for some people that is an acceptable alternative. But the thought of having to use Lightroom to do what I do is not a welcome thought - not even close. I do 90% of my work in Photoshop for a reason.

[bob carnie]

plus 1
Lightroom does not even come close to PS in capabilities.
I use LR for quick edit and selection for our work, maybe setting up some final print canvases.

I think some are dreaming if they think a product will be developed to rival PS.

Maybe. And maybe for some people that is an acceptable alternative. But the thought of having to use Lightroom to do what I do is not a welcome thought - not even close. I do 90% of my work in Photoshop for a reason.

[Brian Ellis]

. . . . I think some are dreaming if they think a product will be developed to rival PS.

I agree if by "rival PS" you mean something that will do everything for everybody that Photoshop does. But many of Photoshop's tools and capabilities aren't used by most photographers, they're there for graphic artists/designers. Unless there are legal problems I would think that somebody might take those functions of Photoshop that are most used by photographers, leave out all the things most of us never use or do (which for me is probably 70% or more of Photoshop) and make a viable product that costs relatively little compared to Photoshop.

I should add that I haven't written a program in over 40 years and when I did I put the code on paper, handed it to a keypunch operator who put it on cards and then gave it to an operator who fed the cards into the computer. To say I'm a little out of date when it comes to software is a major understatement.

[bob carnie]

Photoshop yes travels across many levels,

Just considering the ability to move between colour spaces, separating out images, Man this product has been really thought out.
I consider myself a printmaker , not a photographer, the camera is just the beginning capture device. I use areas of PS that some here would not venture into, for many reasons.
The enlargers or in PS is where the magic starts happening. The designers past and present have really listened and put in this software basically more than any one person could ever master.
Consider Brian how long it has taken us to learn PS. We are all at different levels and use it in many different ways. Years of questioning and solutions have gone in to its design. Frankly I would never consider switching as it took me 5 years to grasp what I know, I have no intentions to learn another product that **could** rival PS.
If one is working basic then I can see a Rival product come out, but to replace PS in one single sweep would be impossible .

I never use plugins as I believe everything I personally could use is right before me , I just need to make my fingers request the functions I visualize or want to do. I am not talking photo comp here, I did this by hand, I am talking real world applications to create better images.
There are many workers experimenting with PS to alternative printmaking, and this is where the current crop of designers would not even have a clue on how to develop a working model. PS was designed by people who listened to old school masters and put in the things they want.

I still laugh every time I use the red ruby funtcion when masking , makes me all teary eyed.

[Matus Kalisky]

Guys - could we please stay on topic and just share the knowledge and experience we have with other image processing software (that includes Lightroom too, of course).

So again - what can other software tools do and what can they not? What are your workarounds for the missing (relative to PS) features?

Let's just try to help each other.

[Jeff Dexheimer]

I use both lightroom and photoshop. Lightroom is not a replacement for photoshop for many of us, myself included.

[Greg Miller]

I think there is a chance that Apple will jump in with an alternative product. The reasons they might:

1) They have plenty of cash on hand. They actually have enough cash to (theoretically) purchase all the buildings in Manhattan
2) They hate Adobe
3) They have some expertise in the market (aperture)
4) They have expertise in software development and the software engineers to do it
5) They have a very loyal customer base which would make it easier to pull customers who otherwise are tough to pull from Adobe

Even if there isn't a huge profit potential, I could see Apple doing it just to make Adobe sweat. I'm not saying they will, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.

[Ben Syverson]

One note that will inevitably come up... GIMP only supports 8 bit images in the main branch (I believe), but there are 16 bit beta versions available.

GIMP is frankly not a tool I would use, but those of you considering it should not discount it for lack of 16 bit.

[Ben Syverson]

I think there is a chance that Apple will jump in with an alternative product. The reasons they might:

1) They have plenty of cash on hand. They actually have enough cash to (theoretically) purchase all the buildings in Manhattan
2) They hate Adobe
3) They have some expertise in the market (aperture)
4) They have expertise in software development and the software engineers to do it
5) They have a very loyal customer base which would make it easier to pull customers who otherwise are tough to pull from Adobe

Even if there isn't a huge profit potential, I could see Apple doing it just to make Adobe sweat. I'm not saying they will, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
If I had to guess (and it's just a guess) I would imagine that Apple already has their own app in the vein of Photoshop. It would be a nuclear option in case Adobe ever really angers them. If so, it will probably never see the light of day.

Relations aren't that dire between the companies right now. Besides, at this point they could easily buy Adobe outright and cancel the Windows versions. That would be a better threat.

[Preston]

Here's one for you Mac folks that looks pretty good. It's called Acorn (http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/).

Unfortunately, there's no Windows version.

--P

[Ken Lee]

GIMP only supports 8 bit images ... but those of you considering it should not discount it for lack of 16 bit.

That's the main reason I do not use it.

http://www.kenleegallery.com/images/forum/steps.jpg

[Ken Lee]

Here's one for you Mac folks that looks pretty good. It's called Acorn (http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/).

Note: Acorn requires OS X verison 10.8+

That being said, it appears to support PNG and TIFF files in 32-bit format. Now we're talking !

[mdm]

Picture window pro is functional if somewhat clunky, true 16 bit, text editable curves files for digital negatives people and fussy printers. Saves super fast compared to photoshop. does masking. but the older version i have does not have anything like context sensitive spot healing brush (but there is a clone tool) and there is no photokit sharpener plug in. I usually crop and do curves in picture window pro, spot and sharpen in photoshop, also layers and resize and sharpen to print, and use lightroom export to resize to web. Somewhat eccentric workflow, but photoshop takes some learning. Windows only.

[bdkphoto]

Maybe. And maybe for some people that is an acceptable alternative. But the thought of having to use Lightroom to do what I do is not a welcome thought - not even close. I do 90% of my work in Photoshop for a reason.


Greg,

I've gone the other direction over the last 2 years, I'm at 90% with lightroom and only use PS for big retouching, transformations, and stitching. With LR 5 the new transform features look very promising too. It took me a while to warm up to LR, but now I find it has too many advantages for my workflow. That said, the other 10% is still really necessary.....

[Matus Kalisky]

Here's one for you Mac folks that looks pretty good. It's called Acorn (http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/).

Unfortunately, there's no Windows version.

--P

This looks interesting - PSD import is possible too!

******

On a general not about Lightroom. There seem to be strong opinions about it. Could those that have experience with both Lightroom and PS state what is really missing in Lightroom and what can be worked-around?

[John O'Connell]

On a general not about Lightroom. There seem to be strong opinions about it. Could those that have experience with both Lightroom and PS state what is really missing in Lightroom and what can be worked-around?

Sure. Every time I look into Lightroom, I check and see if it has a channel mixer. It still doesn't have a channel mixer. Since I only do B&W prints, and the reason I use digital is to apply contrast filtration to color captures in post-production, I think the channel mixer is pretty important.

I've used other tools to do B&W conversions, and I've seen the Lightroom dialog. I still prefer a workflow with the channel mixer. I'm sure there are other functions I use that don't exist in Lightroom, but that's the big one for me.

Just for the record, I'm not that angry at Adobe over this, but software and computing costs are a big deal in digital work. (Plus the fact that my printer was just orphaned by HP and I can't even buy photo inks for it anymore. Argh!)

[Greg Miller]

Greg,

I've gone the other direction over the last 2 years, I'm at 90% with lightroom and only use PS for big retouching, transformations, and stitching. With LR 5 the new transform features look very promising too. It took me a while to warm up to LR, but now I find it has too many advantages for my workflow. That said, the other 10% is still really necessary.....

Hi Bruce. I respect your opinion on this. Thanks for adding your input.

Here are some things that Lightroom does not have that are critical for my workflow:

1) No blending modes. Almost all of my color balance, contrast, and saturation changes are made with a blending mode to avoid things like changing saturation and hue when making a contrast change. I am a propoent of using color theory to optimize an image. e.g. When changing color balance, don't also change luminosity and saturation (which happens unless you change the blending mode).
2) No ability to overshoot an adjustment and then back off with the opacity slider
3) No stitching of multiple photos
4) No manual blending of two images with different exposures (with high dynamic range scenes)
5) No organizing of adjustments through layers and groups (and with labels)
6) No targeted dodging and burning with a very specific curve

[Ben Syverson]

Hi Bruce. I respect your opinion on this. Thanks for adding your input.

Here are some things that Lightroom does not have that are critical for my workflow:

1) No blending modes. Almost all of my color balance, contrast, and saturation changes are made with a blending mode to avoid things like changing saturation and hue when making a contrast change. I am a propoent of using color theory to optimize an image. e.g. When changing color balance, don't also change luminosity and saturation (which happens unless you change the blending mode).
2) No ability to overshoot an adjustment and then back off with the opacity slider
3) No stitching of multiple photos
4) No manual blending of two images with different exposures (with high dynamic range scenes)
5) No organizing of adjustments through layers and groups (and with labels)
6) No targeted dodging and burning with a very specific curve
Unfortunately NOTHING is going to check all of those boxes except for Photoshop.

The truth is that people may need to learn new techniques and approaches if they want to give up PS.

[Greg Miller]

And that's precisely why I am less than thrilled with Adobe and their double whammy of switching to a rental license with a significantly higher price.

[Greg Miller]

I could probably go n for quite some time, but here are some more:

7) Painting on a layer mask with an opacity of my choosing (typically 30% or less)
8) Adding blur to a layer mask
9) Applying a curve to a layer mask
10) Viewing channels of a pixel layer
11) Creating precise selections and saving them
12) Paths
14) Color Range selections
15) Creating a selection and then inverting it

[Ken Lee]

On closer examination, Acorn appears to convert files to 8-bit, even though the documentation suggests otherwise. Am I missing something ? Why go to the trouble of making an otherwise lovely application and not provide support for decent bit depth ? I could understand if they were trying to build the application on different platforms, but OS X only should make that easier, no ?

[welly]

There's always Pixelmator on OS X as another option but again that doesn't support 16 bit and converts files to 8 bit, however it is a pretty and quite functional image editor. Although doubtful it would be up to the job that many of you require of it. I'm quite amazed that no one, even prior to Adobe's recent announcement, has ever stepped up to build a legitimate competitor to Photoshop.

[sanking]

I'm quite amazed that no one, even prior to Adobe's recent announcement, has ever stepped up to build a legitimate competitor to Photoshop.

I am not surprised at all. Adobe was the early entry into this field, and for a long time the product was readily available to most people. At universities it was basically free to students and professors at on-campus labs, and relatively inexpensive to buy for students and professors.

But with the CC marketing strategy Adobe has left a gate wide open to competition, and I have no doubt but that in a relatively short period of time someone will drive a big truck right through that gate.

Sandy

[Ben Syverson]

I am not surprised at all. Adobe was the early entry into this field, and for a long time the product was readily available to most people. At universities it was basically free to students and professors at on-campus labs, and relatively inexpensive to buy for students and professors.

But with the CC marketing strategy Adobe has left a gate wide open to competition, and I have no doubt but that in a relatively short period of time someone will drive a big truck right through that gate.

Sandy
...and then they'll have to deal with customers who want to know why they haven't implemented Feature X from Photoshop. "I need Difference Clouds for my overly complex workflow!"

Time will tell... I anticipate many things like Pixelmator, but nothing with 16 bit, paint, filters, layers, actions, etc. That's a lot of development time just to make something that will ultimately compare unfavorably with Photoshop.

[Oren Grad]

Picture window pro is functional if somewhat clunky, true 16 bit, text editable curves files for digital negatives people and fussy printers. Saves super fast compared to photoshop. does masking. but the older version i have does not have anything like context sensitive spot healing brush (but there is a clone tool) and there is no photokit sharpener plug in. I usually crop and do curves in picture window pro, spot and sharpen in photoshop, also layers and resize and sharpen to print, and use lightroom export to resize to web. Somewhat eccentric workflow, but photoshop takes some learning. Windows only.

I will probably go back to PWP when I've run out the string with CS6. Details here:

http://dl-c.com/content/view/47/74/

[jonreid]

Sure. Every time I look into Lightroom, I check and see if it has a channel mixer. It still doesn't have a channel mixer. Since I only do B&W prints, and the reason I use digital is to apply contrast filtration to color captures in post-production, I think the channel mixer is pretty important.

Lightroom's channel mixer...95001

Jon

[mdm]

And if thats not enough then you can get silver efex pro.

[Mike Reyburn]

Has anyone used Photoline, www.pl32.com?

[Chuck S.]

Nobody's mentioned Corel's Paintshop Pro? (not to be confused with Corel Painter, a painting program)

No experience with current version, but I believe it now supports 16 bit, raw, psd's and many other formats. Seems highly featured, even if it is priced more to compete with PSE...

See features & free trial here:

www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4900069

(BTW, I have no connection to Corel or this product.)

[Sevo]

Has anyone used Photoline, www.pl32.com?

Yep. That is, I use the 64bit version. The GUI is rather Windows XP/PS7 age, but the software works well.

[barnninny]

Time will tell... I anticipate many things like Pixelmator, but nothing with 16 bit, paint, filters, layers, actions, etc. That's a lot of development time just to make something that will ultimately compare unfavorably with Photoshop.

That's a strong point. Very strong.

The basic problem is that Photoshop is really several pieces of software for several distinct user groups, rolled into one. Those of us doing photo processing often piggyback on features actually designed and implemented for graphic designers, digital painters, etc. I agree with Ben that it's really hard to imagine anyone else building all those pieces for all those user groups, much less then rolling them into a single package. If they had it to do over again, I doubt Adobe would.

Corel might, I guess, since they have some version of most of the pieces already, but my guess is they're more likely to follow Adobe to the SaaS model than try to fill the void it left behind.

[polyglot]

While it's no PS substitute, I use a combination of VueScan (or ufraw for digital) and gimp. While default gimp (that I have installed on my linux* box) only does 8-bit, I tend to only need curve and colour adjustments at the input so I do that in VueScan on the raw 16-bit data then export as high quality jpeg. And keep DNGs of the raw scan data.

Once I have the image in gimp, all I do is rotate, scale, crop, clone/heal and sharpen, none of which have quantisation issues.

This doesn't get you anywhere if you want to do dodge/burn in 16 bits.


* PS was never really an option for me. I refuse to fund Adobe and my linux box can't run it anyway. I'm not an imaging professional so I don't need to care, though I feel for those who just got lumped with a significant and uncontrollable overhead.

[Jac@stafford.net]

[...] The basic problem is that Photoshop is really several pieces of software for several distinct user groups, rolled into one.

Photoshop evolved in the paradigm of monolithic software. Later, Adobe integrated much of the creative suite so that the programs can share a file as a smart object. I predict that Adobe will eventually break Photoshop down into more role-specific modules so that a photographer, for example, can choose which parts he wants and leave the rest, or add more at a future date. That will likely fulfill their profit track for a long time.

[Joseph Dickerson]

Sure. Every time I look into Lightroom, I check and see if it has a channel mixer. It still doesn't have a channel mixer. Since I only do B&W prints, and the reason I use digital is to apply contrast filtration to color captures in post-production, I think the channel mixer is pretty important.

I've used other tools to do B&W conversions, and I've seen the Lightroom dialog. I still prefer a workflow with the channel mixer. I'm sure there are other functions I use that don't exist in Lightroom, but that's the big one for me.

Just for the record, I'm not that angry at Adobe over this, but software and computing costs are a big deal in digital work. (Plus the fact that my printer was just orphaned by HP and I can't even buy photo inks for it anymore. Argh!)

John,

Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 works with Lightroom and Photoshop (as a plug in) and beats the channel mixer approach by a lot, at least for me.

You can download a trial version, the whole Nik Suite is now only $150, some of my students found it discounted at $120. It's now marketed by Google. Maybe with Adobe's new policy Nik/Google will release a stand alone version of the Nik software.

At least we can hope...

JD

[Jim Andrada]

I'm too damned old to worry about learning any alternative and what they charge for the full CS suite is half of what I have to pay every year for RealFlow alone so I think it's astounding value for the money - so much that I can't really see them losing much if any business because of the new rental model, nor do I see a real significant market opportunity for any other company. I think the only true alternative to Photoshop is to build a darkroom and buy an enlarger.

I know - I feel curmudgeonly today!

[AuditorOne]

Well, back to Paintshop Photo Pro X3.

[Kuzano]

Two thoughts from this front...

If anyone thinks simply defaulting to Light Room is a course of action, how long do you think it will be until Adobe closes the door on LightRoom... Seems to me, last I heard, they own LightRoom, and PSE as well.

Secondly, if the market place has successfully twisted Microsofts Nuts to force a re-think and rewrite of Windows 8, does it not follow that six months to a year of "stone-walling" Adobe products altogether would bring them to their knees... .Come on folks... this is all about money. Plug the income stream. Don't fall for this lease/rent software program, or we'll not see the end of it. Just bypass Photoshop and Adobe for a few months.

Microsoft has knuckled under with an intro of Window Blue, or as I refer to it, an improved "Windows 7 risen from the ashes of Windows 8 Surface". The word is that Windows Blue is not a Service Pack for Windows 8, it is fully a new operating system designe to quietly replace Windows 8 Surface without Microsoft admitting defeat.

In fact, I am so pleased at the back down from Microsoft, as this weekend I have to write the new outline for "Introduction to Windows 8" to teach at the Community Ed department of our local Community College for Fall Term. So pleased!!

If Adobe has no sales or rental agreements signed for six or more months, they will be looking for a back door out of this problem as well. Just close your wallets, and put your plastic away... BOYCOTT.

The market has the solution...withhold the income stream they are making this move to acquire. Make them compete in the market. Perhaps someone will step up and fill the need during the void. Excellent opportunity for aggressive companies. Adobe can't really own all the marbles.

I vote Boycott of Adobe products.... All of them. They'll be back with products for sale as usual. However, don't stop looking for alternatives. If Adobe can do Photoshop, surely someone else can..... After all, It's just computer code.... Right?

Now let me say, admittedly, I have not paid a dime to Adobe since I purchased the academic version of Photoshop 7, which is still working great for me. But then, I don't know what I am missing, nor do I know what you all have become addicted to with all the CS stuff.
:cool:

[Daniel Moore]

Photoshop CS6 is a very mature product, let's ride it into the sunset. There will always be other ways to convert RAW files from newer cameras for those who depend on ACR.
Years of shunning the monthly fee in sufficient numbers will inevitably matter to Adobe. Sure hope I'm right on this.

So my recommended alternative to Photoshop is Photoshop. Use what you have for a very long time.

[barnninny]

If Adobe can do Photoshop, surely someone else can..... After all, It's just computer code.... Right?


Not really, no. It's the talent pool to write computer code. Really good computer code. Really good computer code that works the way photographers work. And the capital to make it successful in a marketplace where Photoshop already exists and is so established that it is the English verb that means "to digitally manipulate an image."

[Ben Syverson]

If Adobe can do Photoshop, surely someone else can..... After all, It's just computer code.... Right?
I would say "yes, but..."

If you look at Apollo 11, the on-board computer was a bit less powerful than a pocket calculator. "So if they could get to the moon in 1969 with a pocket calculator, surely someone else can, right?" Sure—all you need are the scientists, researchers, programmers, fuel, rocket, tons of money and a few years to make it happen. Let's get started! :)

[ruckusman]

Cinepaint had/has promise, no idea where the development is at currently

It actually has feature motion pictures to it's credit, but they were likely done with in-house code additions/modifications.

It's a good starting point...

[kgm]

Thom Hogan wrote this week that he had looked at Adobe's projections, and they are planning for a loss of revenue for the next couple of years. Their data shows that only 10% of their sales are to individuals, and they're willing to take a loss there in return for increased revenue in the future from their business users. I suspect that for business users, the increased cost of a Photoshop license is a small part of their expenses, and that it's not worth losing customers in the short term while their staff learns new software.

I'm one of the 10%, and I'm going to try to make CS6 last a good long time, computer operating systems willing. But it's surprising to me that, when the OP asked what people are using other than Photoshop, for the most part people didn't answer the question - they just complained about what Adobe is doing because most of us are using Photoshop and we don't know of another program that can do as much. Personally, I find Photoshop a much more precise tool than Lightroom for many tasks. I doubt that anyone will come up with another program with as many different ways to work. There are already good programs for basic photo editing, and Adobe's decision opens the door for even more. But the people and businesses that really need Photoshop (which does not include me) will likely pay the increased fee rather than switch to something else that doesn't do as much. If that's the case, it will make it hard for anyone to incur the costs to try to build an equivalent program. I think that it's possible that Photoshop will primarily become a tool for professionals with graphic design needs in addition to photo editing, and others will adapt to programs that can handle photo editing well but that don't have nearly the features of Photoshop.

[AuditorOne]

I upgraded to Corel Paintshop Photo Pro X5 a couple days ago. For my purposes this software seems to handle most of my needs. I hope it doesn't head down this same path because I would then be forced to find an alternative that I am not at all familiar with.

[pasiasty]

While it's no PS substitute, I use a combination of VueScan (or ufraw for digital) and gimp. While default gimp (that I have installed on my linux* box) only does 8-bit, I tend to only need curve and colour adjustments at the input so I do that in VueScan on the raw 16-bit data then export as high quality jpeg. And keep DNGs of the raw scan data.

Once I have the image in gimp, all I do is rotate, scale, crop, clone/heal and sharpen, none of which have quantisation issues.

This doesn't get you anywhere if you want to do dodge/burn in 16 bits.


* PS was never really an option for me. I refuse to fund Adobe and my linux box can't run it anyway. I'm not an imaging professional so I don't need to care, though I feel for those who just got lumped with a significant and uncontrollable overhead.

I do the same - actually not because of having some adverse filings to Adobe, rather to spending my $$$ at all.

There is clone of GIMP or a branch cut off from the trunk years ago that, among others, supports 16 bits. It's called CinePaint (http://www.cinepaint.org/). It was very unstable when I tried it, at least the version available for Fedora. I haven't tried compiling the newest release though.

AFAIK 16-bit support was a target for GIMP 2.10, yet development seems to be stalled - as for now, no beta release has been issued.

[pasiasty]

I would say "yes, but..."

If you look at Apollo 11, the on-board computer was a bit less powerful than a pocket calculator. "So if they could get to the moon in 1969 with a pocket calculator, surely someone else can, right?" Sure—all you need are the scientists, researchers, programmers, fuel, rocket, tons of money and a few years to make it happen. Let's get started! :)

Sure, the only thing needed is a project's sponsor with as deep pocket and so determined, as of Apollo program. But at the and it would be cheaper to just buy Adobe...

[polyglot]

Now there's a big kickstarter campaign!

[marfa boomboom tx]

If I had to make a living doing photo, I'd have:

Capture One: (~$300) http://www.phaseone.com/capture-one
June, they are making a push for 'transition' people....

AND

DxO viewpoint: (~$50)
http://www.dxo.com/intl/photo/dxo_viewpoint/features


// scrn grab -- one of my bars

[r_a_feldman]

Does anyone have experience with LightZone (www.lightzoneproject.org)? It's free and bills itself as "Open-source digital darkroom software for Windows/Mac/Linux."

[Tyler Boley]

seriously, check out Photoline...

color management, layers, masks, was hard to find anything I couldn't do.. but I need more time with it. Interface is lame of course, but you pay for that.. see adobe...

[Barry Kirsten]

No experience. I found the site a bit poor on specs and wonder if Lightzone handles 16 bit files.

[Paul H]

I've been using Lightzone since the 4.0 betas came out, and really like it. It does handle 16 bit files, and does non destructive edits.

So far, I've only been using it for digital files, I've not yet tried it on a medium or large format film scan.

Give it try, it's free.

[zenny]

My choices are among the following:

1) Gimp 2.8 (does not support 16 bit unless it is 2.9 using GEGL engine)-- http://gimp.org
2) Krita (does support 16-bit) -- http://krita.org
3) Darktable (for raw images) -- http://darktable.org)
4) Delaboratory (floating point precision and supports LAB) -- https://code.google.com/p/delaboratory/
5) Lightzone (https://github.com/Aries85/LightZone/wiki/LightZone-4.0.0)

[Ken Lee]

Krita looks promising: is there any support for color spaces, ICC profiles, etc. ?

[gmfotografie]

photoshop cc with lr for 9,99€ is not expensiv i think so.. the told me that after a year there will be a new special offer. i think that the price will stay in this range for ps

[Bob Gentile]

My last version of PS was version 6. Since then, I've been using Paint Shop Pro.

[Jim Jones]

Irfanview is more of an image viewer than editor, but it's fast and easy to use for those operations it can do, and is free. It should supplement every real image editor. Picture Window Pro did indeed handle 16 bit, but in a computer upgrade I went back to PSE-7, and occasionally GIMP.

[Shootar401]

I use Photoshop CC and only use about 20% of it's capabilities, I don't composite or do any special effects, just basic photo editing. Curves, burn & dodge, brightness and contrast are almost all I ever do.

Unless Adobe lowers the pricing I will never buy it. Especially with the CC, pay by the month model.

Unfortunately PS works too well to not use.

[Adamphotoman]

Be care full with infranview. If you save anything it strips all the metadata.

[sog1927]

On closer examination, Acorn appears to convert files to 8-bit, even though the documentation suggests otherwise. Am I missing something ? Why go to the trouble of making an otherwise lovely application and not provide support for decent bit depth ? I could understand if they were trying to build the application on different platforms, but OS X only should make that easier, no ?

Sorry to be a year late ;-). The Acorn documentation says that 8-bit is the default depth, but that you can change it in the Image->Image Depth menu. Did you not find this to be the case (it wouldn't be the first time that a documented feature didn't work ;-) )? Furthermore, it goes on to say:

"If you open up a 64 or 48 bit image in Acorn, Acorn will place your image into a 64 bit workflow and save the image in a 64 bit format."

[cabbiinc]

I know this is an old thread but Corel Paintshop Pro does everything the OP asks. And they've stated a number of times that they will not go down the path of rental only, but they likely will offer it as an alternative to buying the software license outright. About the only thing mentioned in this thread that it doesn't do is stitch photos. It also doesn't work with ColorPerfect, the author of which doesn't want to make it compatible to PSP and Corel doesn't want to make PSP compatible to ColorPerfect.

[Noah B]

I like using photoshop and lightroom combined. Lightroom is great for cataloging all of your files and making quick edits. There's a tab at the top that allows you to open the files as layers or single files in photoshop. Photoshop is great for compositing and focus stacking, plus a variety of other things lightroom can't do.

[Joseph O'Neil]

I know this is an old thread but Corel Paintshop Pro does everything the OP asks. And they've stated a number of times that they will not go down the path of rental only, but they likely will offer it as an alternative to buying the software license outright. About the only thing mentioned in this thread that it doesn't do is stitch photos. It also doesn't work with ColorPerfect, the author of which doesn't want to make it compatible to PSP and Corel doesn't want to make PSP compatible to ColorPerfect.

We use the new 64 bit Corel Paint Shop Pro X6. Fantastic program. I also use Lightroom. Between the two, they do everything I need, but as the old saying goes, your mileage can and will vary.

[AuditorOne]

I am using Lightroom right now but I just picked up Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro.

[Barry Kirsten]

I've been following this thread with interest because I can't afford PS at Australian prices (roughly 2x $US price) and won't get sucked into the new Adobe web rental scheme. I've been using Pixelmator for Mac for several years but its main drawback has until now been low bit depth. I was looking into Acorn which can operate at higher bit depth, then checked to see if there have been any changes in Pixelmator. I was very happy to find that version 3.1 Marble, "now supports 16-bit per channel images for the first time." See http://www.pixelmator.com/ It's not PS, but I feel Pixelmator is now a well-specified alternative.

Barry

[Sal Santamaura]

Within the last month this


http://www.serif.com/photoplus/

X8 version of PhotoPlus was introduced. It claims full 16-bit editing, curves and is very reasonably priced. Has anyone here used it yet? If so, how does it compare to CS6? Thanks in advance for your input.