11 Photoshop alternatives for photographers at every level

Cowabunga

Cowabunga

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Ceredigion,Wales
Since the subject has come up here today and, in a most timely fashion, DPReview has just put this review up today as well.

It starts off thusly……

"Adobe Photoshop – now 26 years old – is the worldwide gold standard of pro-level image editing production and workflow. So why even consider using another photo editing app? Plenty of reasons: You may not need Photoshop’s heavy-duty firepower or you may not want to invest the time and effort required to scale its learning curve. You might also simply prefer to hold on to your software license without a perpetual monthly fee. Happily, there are some top-notch alternatives to Photoshop for Mac, Windows and Linux that are bound to please shooters of every level."
 
Cowabunga

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
Lightroom has many fans although personally, if I had a PC [I do bit not for photography] I would choose the Corel Aftershot Pro, or at least think about it.
If you already catalogue your images to your satisfaction, how about Nikon's free software? That will give you all their colour profiles and things?
If you choose to use the camera's JPEG files rather than shoot raw, then you might not need anything more than you have currently.
Up until recently Google Picasa was a reasonably powerful and user friendly cataloguing and processing program, but Google seems to have stopped developing it.
 
Cowabunga

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
I'm in the process of uploading 300 Gigabytes of photographs to Amazon Cloud drive, since I mistakenly pressed the upgrade button to Amazon Prime. It gives unlimited photo storage in the price, which is about what Apple Cloud Drive want just for 1 Terabyte of storage.
It has been four days uploading so far and is not a quarter of the way there. I don't mind as long as it gets it all uploaded safely in the end. I'll have to find an alternative Cloud for my videos though. I think Evernote Profesional, which I subscribe to, may allow a certain number of Gigabytes a week to be uploaded in the deal. I'll have to investigate once the photos have been safely uploaded.

As it is, all photos and videos are uploaded from SD cards to my iMac which stores them in an external Raid drive. OSX [the Mac] backs up all files, including those on the Raid to yet another external hard drive, automatically, using its Time Machine. Now I intend to back up everything again to the Cloud or Clouds.

The Windows PC can do similar things and the same Cloud Drives are available to PC users as I use. That includes Google Drive, Drop Box, One Drive, Amazon Drive and so on.
 
Mursal

Mursal

Member
Photoscape is free, we only use a fraction of its power.
You have to invest quite a bit of time to get the best from them
Or Paint which you already have on the PC (in your accessories folder), to get you started
 
Cowabunga

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
Cowabunga said:
I'm in the process of uploading 300 Gigabytes of photographs to Amazon Cloud drive, since I mistakenly pressed the upgrade button to Amazon Prime.
Click to expand...

It's been six days uploading the photographs so far and it reached halfway about an hour ago. It has currently uploaded 15,250 out of 30,300.

I have a few more small folders of pictures to upload after this batch has finished, so it shouldn't take more than 14 days uploading in total. I don't think it keeps uploading when the computer goes into a deep sleep after idling for a few hours. So it may not be constantly uploading.
 
Cowabunga

Cowabunga

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Location
Ceredigion,Wales
Great In Grass said:
I'd go with a programme which has the best algorithms best suit the RAF raw files produced by your Nikon, I'd go with Adobe either CC or Lightroom or Phase One Capture One Pro.
Click to expand...
I'm sure you would. Does he need that kind of high end program with the associated learning curve to get it right? Does he want or need to shoot raw files and post process in such programs? I'm not so sure. It depends on the individual and their delight. With that big Nikon, for the greatest flexibility in post processing, of course he should use Photoshop Creative Cloud with a subscription, or similar. However, only a small minority of non-professional photographers need such tools in my opinion. Only a small number will have the time and patience to bother, much less the actual need.

There's no right way or wrong way. Its a matter of matching the workflow and program to the individual.

Having said that, storing photos only on SD cards thrown in a drawer is a recipe for disaster in terms of the possibility of losing images permanently. No post processing should be done to images on SD cards for a start, and files should be transferred to the computer and backed up externally, ideally to an external hard drive AND to a Cloud storage service. Again not everyone is bothered and in the grand scheme of things it matters to nobody but the individual and possibly their family.
 
Mursal

Mursal

Member
Enjoy the process, that usually means keep it simple.
Nothing worse then buying expensive software for it to be used twice and only under duress
 
Derrick Hughes

Derrick Hughes

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✓
Location
Ceredigion
Cowabunga said:
I'm sure you would. Does he need that kind of high end program with the associated learning curve to get it right? Does he want or need to shoot raw files and post process in such programs? I'm not so sure. It depends on the individual and their delight. With that big Nikon, for the greatest flexibility in post processing, of course he should use Photoshop Creative Cloud with a subscription, or similar. However, only a small minority of non-professional photographers need such tools in my opinion. Only a small number will have the time and patience to bother, much less the actual need.

There's no right way or wrong way. Its a matter of matching the workflow and program to the individual.



Having said that, storing photos only on SD cards thrown in a drawer is a recipe for disaster in terms of the possibility of losing images permanently. No post processing should be done to images on SD cards for a start, and files should be transferred to the computer and backed up externally, ideally to an external hard drive AND to a Cloud storage service. Again not everyone is bothered and in the grand scheme of things it matters to nobody but the individual and possibly their family.
Click to expand...


just pulled my sd card out of the washing machine and uploaded 2000 images
 
J

jamj

Member
Location
Down
Cowabunga said:
I'm in the process of uploading 300 Gigabytes of photographs to Amazon Cloud drive, since I mistakenly pressed the upgrade button to Amazon Prime. It gives unlimited photo storage in the price, which is about what Apple Cloud Drive want just for 1 Terabyte of storage.
It has been four days uploading so far and is not a quarter of the way there. I don't mind as long as it gets it all uploaded safely in the end. I'll have to find an alternative Cloud for my videos though. I think Evernote Profesional, which I subscribe to, may allow a certain number of Gigabytes a week to be uploaded in the deal. I'll have to investigate once the photos have been safely uploaded.

As it is, all photos and videos are uploaded from SD cards to my iMac which stores them in an external Raid drive. OSX [the Mac] backs up all files, including those on the Raid to yet another external hard drive, automatically, using its Time Machine. Now I intend to back up everything again to the Cloud or Clouds.

The Windows PC can do similar things and the same Cloud Drives are available to PC users as I use. That includes Google Drive, Drop Box, One Drive, Amazon Drive and so on.
Click to expand...
Each to their own, but I can't see much point in paying an ongoing subscription to back up photos.
Yes, useful to share across devices but cull some out and save to an external drive.
Realistically will anyone ever look through 30k photos?
 
Cowabunga

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
jamj said:
Each to their own, but I can't see much point in paying an ongoing subscription to back up photos.
Yes, useful to share across devices but cull some out and save to an external drive.
Realistically will anyone ever look through 30k photos?
Click to expand...
Some people manage 10k+ per year believe it or not.

I store on an external drive and back up all files to another external drive. In the process ofbacking all photos to the cloud.

I have the screensaver set to randomly work through all photos and there are some real gems that come up and it never fails to interest visitors.
 
Cowabunga

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
I have not used Lightroom, so I don't know if it is a full cataloguing and editing suite. I guess that it is on the easy side of hard to use, as it is a consumer program, not aimed at professionals like their Photoshop products.
All I know is that Lightroom is very popular. Although I have the related Photoshop Elements program, I don't use it any longer because I find the Apple programs more user friendly and I have others, like Google's Nix software and Affinity Photo [Apple only] and DXO Optics Pro [for Photos] and Tonality among others to do specialist editing when needed.

Lightroom isn't very expensive, so give it a try. Be patient though because nothing is ever simple in this life. Not to me anyhow. There's always a learning curve. Which may be a 'good thing' as it keeps the little grey cells in our heads active.

Don't feel pressurised to shoot raw. I only find it useful under tricky lighting conditions and then only rarely. But if you set a profile [however that is done?] in Lightroom for your camera and the style or styles you prefer, I think you can batch process a lot of images with minimum effort from then on. I find it just as good to shoot good jpegs in the first place most of the time.

I was at a wedding last week where I shot Raw+jpeg. It fills memory cards up very quickly and I've only found one or two out of some 200 images that justified me editing the Raw. You may find differently. I have edited many more from the jpeg files to my taste and left many many more as shot in jpeg because they are perfectly good in my opinion..
 
Derrick Hughes

Derrick Hughes

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✓
Location
Ceredigion
I'm using Sony at the moment. Editing is primitive and basic .but it's good for storing and sharing images. Lightroom is £100 from amazon. How long would that run for and can I use it to store images or is it just for edit
 

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