AfterShot Pro by Corel
Bifurcator
Registered Users Posts: 109 Major grins
I just got this only a yesterday but I've found that's about the same as a few weeks for the less app-aggressive users out there. 
Man, have you guys used this yet? Drop the poorly-written slow-as-molasses LightRoom and put aside CaptureOne for awhile and give this a try!
It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux so you're afforded a bit of platform freedom with it. There's a trial version available on the home site here.
The Corel site starts off the introductory blurb with "Corel® AfterShot™ Pro is a fast..." and as these kinds of blurbs typically go they're drastically
understating the case. Running AfterShot Pro on my ancient 2006 MacPro1,1 (w/32GB RAM, and 8-cores of x5355 Xeon at 2.67GHz & GTX570) acts
much faster than LR on my liquid-cooled 16-core 4+ GHz Boxx 8980 XTREME with dual Tesla cards and 32GB RAM!
All the usual raw processing tools plus some unexpected goodies are presented in a pretty slick highly customizable, gooey (GUI):
It's of course all non-destructive. The last 4 or 5 revision releases have offered OpenCL support as you can see from the image above. Totally sweet!
It has layer masks for selective editing and processing. Layer brushing can be as accurate as 2 pixels and selection areas are sub-pixel accurate. It has
options for independent layers which allow opacity and unique selection spline sets and/or brush strokes per layer. The selection splines can be edited
at any time during editing or after saving the files out. I guess the spline data is saved in either of it's two kinds of XMP sidecar files. It sports a plug-in
architecture but I haven't looked yet to see what APIs it's using nor if the plugs are compatible with those from/for other apps. Mine came with a souped
up version of NoiseNinja and B&W processor with selective color capabilities.
It supports catalogs which I personally dislike, and also OS hierarchal folder structures of your own devise - which is what I prefer. It uses just two
user definable folders for all of its cache, work, proofs, previews, and profiles so it won't make a mess of things either. The review-and-select tools
are similar to all other good PP apps I've tried so finding, sorting, and tagging stuff is done in the usual ways. Basically if you already know LR, CP1,
or Aperture, there's no learning curve to deal with - just a HUGE speed increase and who doesn't want that?
It has some nice output features
but nothing others don't have IIRC. PDF files, Proof (Contact) Sheets, and so on. It also has a slide-show feature but it's fairly simplistic with just
interval, border offsets, and so on as available options. No fancy wipes or anything but this is a RAW processor so I'm not sure how fitting something
like wipes or etceteras, would be. It's got Versioning, Stacking, Keywording, Tagging, and Star Rating to help with progressive edit revisions and so
forth. And the various tool pallets can be docked and floated for us multi-monitor users.
My little old MP1,1 with GTX570 can select, apply many many adjustments, and display GH2 RAW files in 0.27s or 3 FPS depending how you look at it.
Processing, converting, and saving one raw-to-jpeg image at a time occurs in about 0.8 seconds with every slider and adjustment set to something
other than the as-shot defaults. Batch processing 100 such 16mpx GH2 raw files took considerably less time with an average 0.63 seconds for each.
That's fast in the extreme - given the machine spec!
So give this a try. DL the trial version, walk through all the preferences to optimize it for your particular system, then try out all the features, and
come back here and tell us what you thought - good or bad. I have a feeling some here will be typing CASP or ASP in their posts more often than LR
from now on. Me, I'm uninstalling LR all together - that's for sure! They've put together quite a system with hordes of free plug-ins and a fairly
energetic community.
Right now Amazon has it for sale for $14.99 as a download. But you can only take advantage of the deal if you're either in the USA or are using
something like a Tor network which makes you location independent.
Man, have you guys used this yet? Drop the poorly-written slow-as-molasses LightRoom and put aside CaptureOne for awhile and give this a try!
It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux so you're afforded a bit of platform freedom with it. There's a trial version available on the home site here.
The Corel site starts off the introductory blurb with "Corel® AfterShot™ Pro is a fast..." and as these kinds of blurbs typically go they're drastically
understating the case. Running AfterShot Pro on my ancient 2006 MacPro1,1 (w/32GB RAM, and 8-cores of x5355 Xeon at 2.67GHz & GTX570) acts
much faster than LR on my liquid-cooled 16-core 4+ GHz Boxx 8980 XTREME with dual Tesla cards and 32GB RAM!
All the usual raw processing tools plus some unexpected goodies are presented in a pretty slick highly customizable, gooey (GUI):
It's of course all non-destructive. The last 4 or 5 revision releases have offered OpenCL support as you can see from the image above. Totally sweet!
It has layer masks for selective editing and processing. Layer brushing can be as accurate as 2 pixels and selection areas are sub-pixel accurate. It has
options for independent layers which allow opacity and unique selection spline sets and/or brush strokes per layer. The selection splines can be edited
at any time during editing or after saving the files out. I guess the spline data is saved in either of it's two kinds of XMP sidecar files. It sports a plug-in
architecture but I haven't looked yet to see what APIs it's using nor if the plugs are compatible with those from/for other apps. Mine came with a souped
up version of NoiseNinja and B&W processor with selective color capabilities.
It supports catalogs which I personally dislike, and also OS hierarchal folder structures of your own devise - which is what I prefer. It uses just two
user definable folders for all of its cache, work, proofs, previews, and profiles so it won't make a mess of things either. The review-and-select tools
are similar to all other good PP apps I've tried so finding, sorting, and tagging stuff is done in the usual ways. Basically if you already know LR, CP1,
or Aperture, there's no learning curve to deal with - just a HUGE speed increase and who doesn't want that?
It has some nice output featuresbut nothing others don't have IIRC. PDF files, Proof (Contact) Sheets, and so on. It also has a slide-show feature but it's fairly simplistic with just
interval, border offsets, and so on as available options. No fancy wipes or anything but this is a RAW processor so I'm not sure how fitting something
like wipes or etceteras, would be. It's got Versioning, Stacking, Keywording, Tagging, and Star Rating to help with progressive edit revisions and so
forth. And the various tool pallets can be docked and floated for us multi-monitor users.
My little old MP1,1 with GTX570 can select, apply many many adjustments, and display GH2 RAW files in 0.27s or 3 FPS depending how you look at it.
Processing, converting, and saving one raw-to-jpeg image at a time occurs in about 0.8 seconds with every slider and adjustment set to something
other than the as-shot defaults. Batch processing 100 such 16mpx GH2 raw files took considerably less time with an average 0.63 seconds for each.
That's fast in the extreme - given the machine spec!
So give this a try. DL the trial version, walk through all the preferences to optimize it for your particular system, then try out all the features, and
come back here and tell us what you thought - good or bad. I have a feeling some here will be typing CASP or ASP in their posts more often than LR
from now on. Me, I'm uninstalling LR all together - that's for sure!
They've put together quite a system with hordes of free plug-ins and a fairlyenergetic community.
Right now Amazon has it for sale for $14.99 as a download. But you can only take advantage of the deal if you're either in the USA or are using
something like a Tor network which makes you location independent.
0
Comments
Second, neither LR nor Capture Pro run slowly on my machine, so that takes away what might be seen as the primary advantage of this software.
Third, I do all my front end work (tags, captions, ratings) in PhotoMechanic which is as fast as I could ever imagine.
So I guess the thing for me why do I want to add this? Is the IQ better than LR or Capture One? Does it do something those don't? I guess I am trying to reason out why I'd spend a workday trying this out. Not to say it won't work, and maybe work well, but will it work "better".
perroneford@ptfphoto.com
First I can't believe LR is fast on any machine. "Fast enough for you" maybe but certainly not "fast" in a humanly relative sense. :P LR isn't even "fast" on my liquid cooled Boxx 8980 XTREME tricked out with dual Tesla cards.
As for the questions you asked I believe they're answered already in the original post - given you already know the features available/unavailable in C1 and LR.
As for features, LR4 doesn't have layers but C1 does. C1 allows brush strokes per layer, though LR4 does not. Not sure about LR5. LR has an excellent plug in architecture, whereas C1 does not. C1 can do sessions or a catalog structure. Personally I like catalogs as I go through a LOT of files in a year. I am not sure if C1 does versioning, but LR does. Both have sorting, keywording, star ratings, etc.
The Corel program sounds like it could be nice for some users. You seem very taken with it. Maybe others will be too.
perroneford@ptfphoto.com
perroneford@ptfphoto.com
None are of course one-to-one matches for any other. Each has a feature or two different than the other naturally - which can be said for most other RAW editors as well no doubt. The couple of features different in ASP seem to be fairly significant in terms of the results they yield or the workflow they offer. And for a measly $15 with free upgrades the words "heck, why not" seem to bounce around in my head freely (along with the other junk in there
perroneford@ptfphoto.com
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky
In two areas with older hardware. 1) GUI Responsiveness and 2) Single and batch conversions on a multi-core system.
No. 1 doesn't need an explanation I guess - just everything is buttery smooth. For no. 2 as mentioned in the OP, if I move every slider and apply every included plug-in then shot to shot navigational display happens at about 3fps or a tad less than a third of a second per 16.5mpx (16bit?) ProPhoto, RAW (preview) rendering. And batch output (again with everything applied and also with scaling) is just shy of 2FPS or about 0.63 seconds per saved image. That's basically one hundred 16.5mpx images heavily processed, scaled and saved to disk per minute.
But that's all in the original post so I'm not sure why you asked that. I tried not to leave too much out of the OP but I guess it's a little too condensed?
On a $30K workstation the differences while in the same ratios, won't be as noticeable - except in LR which is incapable of making use of advanced hardware (OpenCL, CUDA, and multiple cores over about 3 or 4 cores).
The editable selection tools, and editable brush strokes both available in independent layers with adjustable opacity, also mentioned in the OP, reduce the need to load up photoshop which is probably the biggest time saver when such things are needed.
It outputs 16bit tiffs with any ICC profile you may have, yes. It has straightening natively but for perspective keystonning like I think you're talking about you have to install a free plug-in called zPerspector. And while you're installing plug-ins be sure to grab the wavelet based sharpener (no halos) and the wavelet based denoiser from their download pages.
.
Kind of a big issue! I hope they fix this soon. We need highlight adjustments on a lot of images a lot of the time.