Recently I've been trying new photo editors. There are a lot of them out there at this point; the popular one is Lightroom from Adobe. It's the standard, if there is a standard. It's also now available in cloud-based subscription version and called Lightroom CC. I tried it when it came out and didn't like the interface. It doesn't think like I think. I've never owned it or used it.
You tend to stick with what you're used to. I've been using Adobe Photoshop (PS) since 1994, and Adobe Bridge. As you might know, photo processing in PS has mostly migrated to the raw developer app within Photoshop, which is called Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). I usually do most of my editing in ACR and then open the image in Photoshop for any final tweaks or local changes, or for printing. ACR is a beautiful little nested app, simple, efficient, and powerful. There's a version of it in Lightroom, too. ACR is simple enough that I've worked to improve my skills within it.
Photoshop, by contrast, is hopeless. Frank McLaughlin, who was in charge of the Dye Transfer department at Kodak for many years, once famously said that one lifetime wasn't long enough to master both photography and dye transfer. Well, my suspicion is that one lifetime is not long enough to master Photoshop, never mind what else you spend any of your time doing.
I guess that's not true, but that's what it feels like to me.
I've never been any good at it, anyway. It's a fantastically complex program that seemingly offers between ten and 100 ways to do anything. And yet, more often than not, I cannot find one of those ways. Frustratingly, when I do learn something, I tend to forget it again. I have to keep a stack of index cards on the base of my monitor telling me how to do some the many things I periodically need to do but can't remember.
I have a strongly visual memory; for the longest time I felt I could remember if I had ever seen a photograph before. I mean in my entire life. I've disproved this to myself, but I'm still pretty good at it. I'm not, however, good at abstractions. I'm one of those people who were horrible at algebra, but I got the highest grade in geometry my geometry teacher had ever given out. It was simple: it was visual. I never took to chemistry, which is abstract or might as well be. In the supermarket, I recognize things by the look of their labels. I can't remember the names. When products change labels, they essentially disappear for me for a while. When I remember a person, names can take an agonizingly long time to surface. This used to worry me—was I losing my memory?—until I realized that the faces were always coming back to my brain in an instant. With the visuals, my memory is still good.
Not as good as it used to be. When I was young, for example, I could remember how to find things in books without taking notes. It was simple—I just pictured the page where I read something, and then "read" the page number from my memory. So I could recall a passage in a book and go right back to it. I could sometimes "see" the page well enough in my head that I could quote from it in a school paper. I've largely lost that ability in my advancing middle age. (And of course it's impossible with e-books, which are much more abstract than paper books, no matter what you say.)
Photoshop is abstract. You have to remember arbitrary sequences of commands and keystrokes. It's like a giant, three-dimensional, infinitely intricate maze. I understand some people are good at that sort of thing. I'll never be.
As if mastering Photoshop wasn't already a high enough mountain to climb, they keep changing things, and thereby breaking my brain. Arbitrary shuffling of controls, rearrangements of the interface, and changes of the "look" of the interface shoves ignorance back in the way of skills I thought were settled. Suddenly something I knew how to do is lost, like products in the supermarket that got themselves "a new look!" and poof, disappeared.
The one I like best of the Adobe substitutes so far is Affinity Photo. It's a stand-alone program that costs only $50. You can buy it right in the Mac app store so you get the free updates whenever you check for updates on your computer. (It's also available from the iOS app store and the Windows store.) It was developed specifically for Mac but now offers a Windows version.
Anybody using it?
I'd say "I'll write more about it later," but see the previous post.... :-(
Mike
Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Robert Roaldi: "I've owned Affinity for several months but only started paying attention to it recently. I never used Photoshop so cannot compare. The online short video tutorials are good, forum help is very useful, and they publish a workbook now for when you don't want to watch a video to figure out one little thing. I love it—easy to use, easy to play with, dedicated to photos not graphics. When I need to process a large batch of pics, something that was easy in Aperture, I now use After Shot Pro 3 (formerly Bibble) because Affinity is really a one pic at a time kind of application and it doesn't have a DAM. But that separation of tasks is fine for me."
Rob Strong: "I’ve long thought of Photoshop as a Hospital. No doctor walks into a hospital and 'knows how to use it.' I’m fairly proficient at the suite of tools I use regularly for work, but there are whole wings and sub-menus full of humming machinery so hyper-specialized that I would only kill the patient (and possibly irradiate myself) if I started flipping switches and pressing buttons."
Steve Jacob: "The problem with Photoshop is that it expects the user to understand the underlying mechanisms, such as colour theory, sharpening, colour spaces, rendering intents, layer blending, etc. It doesn't hide this complexity from the user. The great thing about Photoshop is that it assumes you understand the underlying science and gives you direct access to, and full control of, the functions you need. It doesn't filter them through some inscrutable algorithm that robs you of control in the name of simplification . The first thing I did when I bought my first copy was find a good course. Money well spent."
Mike replies: Yes, that was my problem, personally. No education. I just had a copy on my work computer from the Graphics Department at the magazine and started figuring it out on my own. Gradually I learned how to do a lot of nifty things with it, and I can do what I need to, mostly. But I didn't learn it systematically, because I didn't have time. I just haphazardly asked questions of our graphics people (who didn't have time to spend on me either) and poked around. Those were the days well before online videos, so no help there.
Joe Holmes: "The surprising thing about Photoshop is that designers who started in physical pasteup had a big advantage learning the application, because Photoshop is based on a lot physical paste-up concepts. The whole idea of adjustment layers goes back to physically layering in paste-up. Even 'Unsharp Mask' is named after the physical process of laying a less sharp image on top of the regular image as a mask."
Mike replies: The granddaddy of our TOP print sales was the "Collector Print Program" at Photo Techniques magazine. One of the prints we offered was a Howard Bond print from an 8x10 negative that was physically unsharp masked. I asked Howard how long it took him to get a good mask and he said usually about a day or a day and a half, but that it had taken him a long time to master the process. He hadn't heard of the Photoshop control at the time—it was brand new then—but I wondered how he would take it when he learned that anybody could do in several seconds what had taken him so long to master...of course it's not quite the same.
He is quite a photographer/printmaker. I really admired him.
Bruce Alan Greene: "Photoshop seems like an infinitely complex program, but you don't need to get too complex to use it effectively. One can do 90% or more of what one needs with two concepts: 1. The curve control 2. Adjustment layers. Master these concepts, and it's not too difficult, and you'll be able to accomplish just about anything in Photoshop. And these are the things you can't do in Lightroom.
"Like you, I've tried Lightroom, but...I stick to Photoshop, ACR, and Bridge. Put simply, an adjustment layer is a way to adjust the image without commitment. It's non-destructive and you can turn each adjustment on and off with the 'eyeball' button. They consist of two parts: First is the actual adjustment, 'curves' in our case, and next to it is a mask. Where ever the mask is white the adjustment goes through. Where ever it is black, no adjustment is applied. In this way one can literally paint where on the photograph the adjustment affects. Gray is a partial adjustment.
"Find someone that can walk you through this and you'll never desire another editing software. With the Curves control you'll be able to adjust most normal things with a photograph. White balance, color, gamma. Almost everything. And any other software that you'll want to learn, you'll also want to learn this technique, so there's no getting around it anyway. Good luck Mike!"
[Bruce is an accomplished Hollywood cinematographer. —Ed.]
Alan: " I own and occasionally use Affinity Photo...it's an okay program, but in my opinion things that should be easy are exceedingly difficult and drive me nuts! For example, to simply copy a layer mask from one layer to another is mindbogglingly difficult, 'Blend If' uses curves and, for me, it's difficult to get smooth transitions. These are just a couple of examples...I could go on.
"How about products such as ON1's Photo Raw 2019? DxO PhotoLab 2 is nowadays a fairly complete editor, albeit no layers. There is a very powerful editor by two brothers in Germany called PhotoLine. The only real difficulty with this software is getting your head around their terminology and where stuff is in the menus. That said, there is functionality in this program that I actually like better than PS. Anyway, good luck with your search!"
manmadewilderness: "The visual memory. You've eerily come close to describing me, so I suppose the condition must not be that unusual. Algebra: no; geometry: yes. Chemistry: evaporated except for the teacher's face. Mechanical drawing: a natural fit. Photoshop: hopeless; Affinity: manageable. And you buy it once instead of paying the unending Adobe tax. Many of the same commands, but I've hardly used much beyond the basic development process—which is pretty similar to ACR. Also a goodly number of online tutorials, both written and video."
Ed Hawco: "OMG, thank you for validating how I feel about Photoshop. I work in the software industry—specifically, I explain (in writing) how to use software applications—and I cannot parse anything in Photoshop. It is the most hulking behemoth of confusion and complications I have ever touched. (Second place is Salesforce, which happily has nothing to do with Photography.) I've been using Lightroom for years, and I find it pretty intuitive to my way of thinking. It reminds me somewhat of actual darkroom work, where you dodge and burn by swiping or blocking light, unlike in PS where you create masks and layers and all that stuff that just makes my head explode.
"I also have Affinity but I only use it occasionally, and completely outside of my LR workflow, such as if I want to do a quick touch-up of an iPhone shot."
Andrew (partial comment): "I am contemplating my next software move as PhotoNinja seems to be almost dead and Picture Window Pro 8 is still in early beta, and was never a great raw developer. This shows the challenge of picking the small guys: you never know when they will give up the ghost."
Mike replies: Indeed. Apple Aperture even—big company, but a little guy in that space.
Grant: "Thanks to TOP, I have been a longtime user of LightZone. However, my photo gear changed and I had to look for new software. I have tried just about everything out there, with the exception of Capture One. I didn't get the results I wanted with Affinity, plus it locked me out when I changed some hardware on my computer. I eventually settled on ON 1 Photo Raw. The software gives me pleasing results, has not been difficult to adapt to, can be installed on up to five computers and has a huge range of tutorials. It also has good integration with Lightroom and Photoshop. That's a feature I will never be using; I'm just repeating what I read. I'm a Windows and Linux user, but I believe Mac users would have the same experience as me."
Michael Houghton: "I've used Affinity Photo since the Mac beta. Adobe haven’t had my money for over three years. It is excellent; in a few small (and not-small, if you’re an automation type) ways, it is less than Photoshop. But in many ways it is more. Better layer blend ranges. Proper live filter layers. Really effective layer group masking. Parameterised macros. The ability to apply Lab curves to RGB images. Good LUT support including inferring LUTs from image pairs. A built-in frequency separation tool. A really quite usable focus stacker. The ability to save full history with a document. In lots of ways it is a refinement of the core principles of Photoshop-type editors. I would recommend everyone at least tries it so they know what’s out there as an alternative.
"Oh and it’s already on the iPad. It is very much a one-photo-at-a-time thing, though it does have effective batch support. For bulk raw processing I am generally a DxO user, but I'd switch if I needed to."
Paul Judice: "I have very fond memories of Frank McLaughlin. When I first started in the dye transfer business, Frank was incredibly generous with advice and helped me network among other dye transfer lab people to get further technical help. Some of the most successful and talented dye transfer printers would take my calls and help me with questions about masking or custom developers or modifying dyes. Once I asked Bob DeSantis why he was freely sharing his secrets with a competitor. I'll never forget his response: 'kid, if you can take my business, you deserve it.'
"Today I work in a retouching studio that uses Photoshop, although I myself don't work with it in any significant way. I can barely find the toolbar. What I've noticed is that the professional camaraderie from the dye transfer days is gone. Competitors guard their techniques and have strict policies about layered files leaving the studio. I even had a client ask me if my grain layer was copyrighted."
Clayton: "A few days ago there was some mild criticism of Apple here, and they lost a zillion dollars of market value. I would expect they will start paying attention soon."
