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

[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...

Jon

[mdm]

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