So if you ever finally got fed up with Adobe?

PhotosbyKW

Then what other programs are even out there, to act as potential contenders for Photoshop?

Any personally experiences with them?

Sometimes I grow weary of their business practices and am curious.

KAW.

ziggy53

I haven't found any other software to run the same action sets that Photoshop runs.

I do have (a slightly older version of) Corel Photo-Paint installed on my best laptop and it runs the filters that I need and the scripting capability is similar to action sets.

I can even run some plug-ins designed for Photoshop on Photo-Paint.

The Corel software lacks a RAW file capability so I use other software for that, mostly RAWTherapee.

I just couldn't bring myself to buy another Adobe license when I already had the Photo-Paint available. Plus the Photo-Paint was in addition to Corel Draw, which I like better than Adobe Illustrator (really).

Most of this stuff is Windows only.

CatOne

PhotosbyKW wrote:

Then what other programs are even out there, to act as potential contenders for Photoshop?

Any personally experiences with them?

Sometimes I grow weary of their business practices and am curious.

KAW.

Depends on what you want. If you're mostly doing photo work, then Aperture these days is pretty good. If you want the ability to do layers and pixel tweaking, then Acorn and Pixelmator on the Mac are a couple nice equivalents. If you want a heinous UI but with a fair bit of functionality and you like free, then Gimp is an option.

MarkR

Lightzone is a fantastic and powerful non-destructive image editor that, within its limitations is a lot of fun to use. They recently announced work on LZ 4, no release date yet.

I had a coworker who got quite good results with Paint .NET on the Windows side of things.

insanefred

I just became a fan of Capture One 5.1 for my raw processing. I like the end results better then Capture NX 2.

Rhuarc

I've heard the latest GIMP actually has a much better design UI, getting rid of those horrid separate windows and adopting a similar to Photoshop tab structure.

Ric Grupe

Sometimes I grow weary of their business practices and am curious.

I was "tired" of Adobe before I ever owned one of their products!

After buying and using PS-CS4...I'm willing to put up with them.:D

Scott_Quier

Bibble 5 might be something worth looking into. I tried version 4 some time ago and couldn't be my head around the way they were working so I dropped it. Because I now have CS4 and LR2 there's not much reason to go shopping around. But I do plan to give Bibble another play in the next few weeks, just to see if it's worth considering when it again comes time for me to upgrade either LR or CS.

MarkR

Scott_Quier wrote:

Bibble 5 might be something worth looking into. I tried version 4 some time ago and couldn't be my head around the way they were working so I dropped it. Because I now have CS4 and LR2 there's not much reason to go shopping around. But I do plan to give Bibble another play in the next few weeks, just to see if it's worth considering when it again comes time for me to upgrade either LR or CS.

Bibble 5 would actually compete more closely with Lightroom/Aperture as a DAM/workflow/Raw Converter, rather than as an image editor. (Tho it does have some ability in that regard.)

As a former Bibble 4 user, I follow it's progress somewhat. Some very cool plugins are being made by some very talented users. (And Scott, if you do go the Bibble route, make sure you buy the Andrea plugin. You won't regret it. (I used it back when it was AndyPro. Not sure why the sex change. )

Dan7312

I don't claim anywhere near the 'tog competence or talent of most of the people on dgrin, but I've been using Bibble 5 and for my purposes it been working out pretty well.

I've tried LR when it first came out, but overall my impression is that Bibble has very similar capabilities but is a bit lighter weight an implementation. Bibble also seems to do RAW conversion faster, but that's just my impression based on when I first tried LR and from using PS.

Bibble doesn't have full fledged actions as such, but you can configure a set of reusable commands for the typical sorts of things you do to make it fit into your workflow. For example, it you find this useful, you can generate the .jpg file name from a pattern based on simple text and metadata and a few other things.

It also has soft-proofing now.

One of the things I like about it, not necessarily because it makes it work any better than any other product like it but because I like gears and arbors:ivar , is that all processing is done by applying filters to regions in layers over the raw image, including plugins.

As far as being a DAM, that's optional. For what I want to do it seems sufficient but I know a number of people have commented that is a bit limited in how you can do look up and use separate DAM software for that purpose.

I think the biggest issue for Bibble is that just about the only source of info for it is their forum, which is pretty good. LR, however, just has a lots more sources of information for it. But if you have some understanding of how digital image processing works it's not that hard to see what is going on. I don't think the results I am getting with are limited by the software

Scott_Quier wrote:

Bibble 5 might be something worth looking into. I tried version 4 some time ago and couldn't be my head around the way they were working so I dropped it. Because I now have CS4 and LR2 there's not much reason to go shopping around. But I do plan to give Bibble another play in the next few weeks, just to see if it's worth considering when it again comes time for me to upgrade either LR or CS.