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

[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...ightZone-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.