Photography Software

Can anyone recommend a good easy to use software for photography except Photoshop?

Thank you

As @conrad_hoffman says, it depends on what you want to do.

The main areas of functionality that I use a lot are:

a) organizing: cataloging, rating, selection, keywording, etc.

b) 'global adjustments' to exposure, contrast, white balance, etc

c) importing and exporting images in different file formats and sizes

Less often:

d) much more detailed and refined (local) adjustments, edits and filters that I can build up in "layers" and apply in different intensities and blending modes and with different 'masks'

For a), b) and c), I use Adobe Lightroom (where I can apply all filters too). For d), I use Photoshop. An important point for me is 'non-destructive editing' so that I can go back and adjust my edits to an image that I've saved. This is one of Lightroom's main features - the trail of 'adjustments' is saved in the Lightroom catalog, leaving the original image file unchanged. Photoshop too, enables a way of working (in layers, using "masks") so that saved files can be adjusted later.

I tried Affinity Photo some years ago and I liked it. I'm sure the product has come a long way since then. At the time, the main reason why I decided to stay with Adobe was that I couldn't find a really good alternative to Lightroom. And I liked the 'seamless integration' between Lightroom and Photoshop.

Times have changed since then so it's worth making a list of what you want to do with software and comparing different products. My guess is that different products have relative strengths and weaknesses in one or more of the areas above. Here are some links that might help:

- Best Lightroom alternatives of 2022 (Techradar)

- 10 Top Alternatives to Adobe Lightroom Classic (Photography.Tutsplus.com)

- Photoshop vs Affinity Photo (educba.com)

I agree. First, there is no one answer; it depends on what you want to do. Most important is whether you want the level of sophisticated control that a pixel editor like Photoshop provides, with layers, blending modes, superb selection and masking options, etc. Are you going to print? Some software has very good print modules, like Lightroom.

Second, it's partly a matter of taste. I really like Lightroom a lot and would hate to lose it, but some people complain about it.

To some degree, I agree with Conrad: easy is easy until it won't do what you want. Still, some software has a steeper learning curve than others. Photoshop's is pretty steep, partly because the software is so enormously powerful and flexible. Also, there are often half a dozen different ways to get to the same end, which is nice once you know the software but a pain when you are learning it.

I think if you don't need the power of Photoshop, Lightroom is one of several very good options. It has very strong database capabilities. It doesn't have layers, etc., but its editing capabilities are getting better and better, and I have quite a number of images that have been processed only in Lightoom. As of the most recent version, its masking tools are quite sophticated. It includes good noise reduction and sharpening tools. It has an absolutely wonderful print module. And while it's not simple, it's far, far easier than Photoshop to learn.

Depends on what you want to do. "Easy" is great until you realize it won't do what needs to be done, but you probably don't want a huge learning curve either. IMO, they all have a learning curve. Budget? I like Affinity Photo. It's inexpensive and powerful. There are all sorts of free choices like Irfanview and paint.net. Luminar is pretty good for a lot of things. Almost everything has a free demo or 30 day trial. Try some!

Thank you, very helpful.

As @conrad_hoffman says, it depends on what you want to do.

 

The main areas of functionality that I use a lot are:

a) organizing: cataloging, rating, selection, keywording, etc.

b) 'global adjustments' to exposure, contrast, white balance, etc

c) importing and exporting images in different file formats and sizes

 

Less often:

d) much more detailed and refined (local) adjustments, edits and filters that I can build up in "layers" and apply in different intensities and blending modes and with different 'masks'

 

For a), b) and c), I use Adobe Lightroom (where I can apply all filters too). For d), I use Photoshop. An important point for me is 'non-destructive editing' so that I can go back and adjust my edits to an image that I've saved. This is one of Lightroom's main features - the trail of 'adjustments' is saved in the Lightroom catalog, leaving the original image file unchanged. Photoshop too, enables a way of working (in layers, using "masks") so that saved files can be adjusted later.

 

I tried Affinity Photo some years ago and I liked it. I'm sure the product has come a long way since then. At the time, the main reason why I decided to stay with Adobe was that I couldn't find a really good alternative to Lightroom. And I liked the 'seamless integration' between Lightroom and Photoshop.

 

Times have changed since then so it's worth making a list of what you want to do with software and comparing different products. My guess is that different products have relative strengths and weaknesses in one or more of the areas above. Here are some links that might help:

 

- Best Lightroom alternatives of 2022 (Techradar)

- 10 Top Alternatives to Adobe Lightroom Classic (Photography.Tutsplus.com)

- Photoshop vs Affinity Photo (educba.com)

Thank you. This is very helpful

In my previous response, I posted links to a couple of ''Best Lightroom alternatives" lists. I've browsed through the lists and clicked on a couple of links. To my mind, both On1 Photo RAW and DxO PhotoLab look interesting, mature, and well worth trying out. This is not to say that others in the lists may suit you better. Just that the On1 Photo RAW and DxO PhotoLab 'software brands' have been considered reputable brands for many years. It's also clear that they've both come a very long way from their humble beginnings as 'RAW image processing software'!

Just an additional note on 'organizing': Lightroom is known for it's wide range of 'organizing features'. But the amount of 'organizing' you want to do depends a lot on the type of photography you do and how you store your photos. I have for years transferred all my photos from my camera or cell phone into one photography folder that is subdivided into years. Each year is further subdivided into months and each 'photo import' creates a date-specific folder within a month folder. So my 'structure' is chronological. An alphabetical or subject-based structure is equally good. Whatever the 'folder structure', it helps if this is visible and usable in the software as it is in Lightroocan find a group of photos just by clicking on a year/month folder. An equivalent technique would be to search on meta-data (shooting date) between data ranges.

I do find 'rating' and filtering on 'ratings' very useful! My usual 'process is to browse imported photos in any folder and 'rate' them. It doesn't really make much difference to me whether the software provides for 3 or 5 ratings. I only use 3: lowest: good enough (candidate), middle (good). high (best). Any unrated photos (not good enough), I usually delete. I should add that when rating, I'm not only looking at the photo 'as is' (straight out of the camera) but I also consider the potential photo after further post-processing (cropping, adjustments, etc.)

Lightroom has a construct called a 'catalog' to which you can import certain photos. In principle, individual photos can be in multiple catalogs. I use the construct mainly for separating out the different photos I take for various voluntary organizations and for specific projects from my 'personal photos'. Any software that allows users to assign keywords to groups of photos and select photos on these keywords would work just as well as separate 'catalogs'. I basically just want to find photo's that I took for organization or project x in 2020 (or whatever).

There are just one or two occasions per year when I do larger 'projects' that result in 1000 - 3000 'burst shots'. Keywording and rating help me bring some order into this vast number of shots. In Lightroom, I often use color-coding (as a visual keyword) to distinguish between different sections of an 'event'. But keywords would work just as well.

My point is just that 'organizing' can apply to photos taken over a longer timeline (years) or a short timeline (1 day).

If you're a frequent contributor to the 'No words' forum, then keywords could help you quickly find photos that correspond to multiple topics.:)

I always have to rack my brains to remember in which year/month I took a certain photo that matches a 'No Words' topic!

A last point:

One of the main reasons why previous Lightroom users have switched to an alternative is IMHO because of Adobe's 'subscription pricing model' introduced a few years back. Since then, consumers can't 'buy' either Lightroom or Photoshop as a product for a one-time payment. They can only sign up to one of Adobe 'subscription plans ' that allows them to use one or more products. Unless someone makes regular use of Photoshop (included with Lightroom in the 'Photography plan'), a subscription just to use Lightroom is very expensive! At least $10-$12 p.m.

Let us know how you get on with your trials and evaluations of software. Don't hesitate to post additional questions or observations. I personally hope that this thread will become more of an ongoing 'conversation' than a one-off 'ask a question, get some tips' thread. I for one am interested in learning from your experience in trying out a couple of software packages.

I'll post a link to this thread in the 'Digital Darkroom'' forum. Perhaps post-processing enthusiasts have something to add.

Lightroom has a construct called a 'catalog' to which you can import certain photos. In principle, individual photos can be in multiple catalogs. I use the construct mainly for separating out the different photos I take for various voluntary organizations and for specific projects from my 'personal photos'. Any software that allows users to assign keywords to groups of photos and select photos on these keywords would work just as well as separate 'catalogs'. I basically just want to find photo's that I took for organization or project x in 2020 (or whatever).

There is an important typo here. All of your photos are in a Lightroom catalog, and you can use only one catalog at a time. I think what Mike meant was "collections". Lightoom allows you to assign any photo in any part of your catalog to a "collection." The collection is just a pointer to where the photos are in your directory structure and the catalog.

I didn't use collections for the first few years I used Lightroom, but I use them now. For example, suppose you want to show 5 of your photos at an event, and the 5 you choose are from different dates and live in different parts of your directory structure. You can assign them to a collection (you can do it by dragging and dropping) so that you can access all of those photos without having to hunt for them. Likewise, if you are collecting a bunch of photos for a photo book, and so on.

In my previous response, I posted links to a couple of ''Best Lightroom alternatives" lists. I've browsed through the lists and clicked on a couple of links. To my mind, both On1 Photo RAW and DxO PhotoLab look interesting, mature, and well worth trying out. This is not to say that others in the lists may suit you better. Just that the On1 Photo RAW and DxO PhotoLab 'software brands' have been considered reputable brands for many years. It's also clear that they've both come a very long way from their humble beginnings as 'RAW image processing software'! Just an additional note on 'organizing': Lightroom is known for it's wide range of 'organizing features'. But the amount of 'organizing' you want to do depends a lot on the type of photography you do and how you store your photos. I have for years transferred all my photos from my camera or cell phone into one photography folder that is subdivided into years. Each year is further subdivided into months and each 'photo import' creates a date-specific folder within a month folder. So my 'structure' is chronological. An alphabetical or subject-based structure is equally good. Whatever the 'folder structure', it helps if this is visible and usable in the software as it is in Lightroocan find a group of photos just by clicking on a year/month folder. An equivalent technique would be to search on meta-data (shooting date) between data ranges. I do find 'rating' and filtering on 'ratings' very useful! My usual 'process is to browse imported photos in any folder and 'rate' them. It doesn't really make much difference to me whether the software provides for 3 or 5 ratings. I only use 3: lowest: good enough (candidate), middle (good). high (best). Any unrated photos (not good enough), I usually delete. I should add that when rating, I'm not only looking at the photo 'as is' (straight out of the camera) but I also consider the potential photo after further post-processing (cropping, adjustments, etc.) Lightroom has a construct called a 'catalog' to which you can import certain photos. In principle, individual photos can be in multiple catalogs. I use the construct mainly for separating out the different photos I take for various voluntary organizations and for specific projects from my 'personal photos'. Any software that allows users to assign keywords to groups of photos and select photos on these keywords would work just as well as separate 'catalogs'. I basically just want to find photo's that I took for organization or project x in 2020 (or whatever). There are just one or two occasions per year when I do larger 'projects' that result in 1000 - 3000 'burst shots'. Keywording and rating help me bring some order into this vast number of shots. In Lightroom, I often use color-coding (as a visual keyword) to distinguish between different sections of an 'event'. But keywords would work just as well. My point is just that 'organizing' can apply to photos taken over a longer timeline (years) or a short timeline (1 day). If you're a frequent contributor to the 'No words' forum, then keywords could help you quickly find photos that correspond to multiple topics.:) I always have to rack my brains to remember in which year/month I took a certain photo that matches a 'No Words' topic! A last point: One of the main reasons why previous Lightroom users have switched to an alternative is IMHO because of Adobe's 'subscription pricing model' introduced a few years back. Since then, consumers can't 'buy' either Lightroom or Photoshop as a product for a one-time payment. They can only sign up to one of Adobe 'subscription plans ' that allows them to use one or more products. Unless someone makes regular use of Photoshop (included with Lightroom in the 'Photography plan'), a subscription just to use Lightroom is very expensive! At least $10-$12 p.m. Let us know how you get on with your trials and evaluations of software. Don't hesitate to post additional questions or observations. I personally hope that this thread will become more of an ongoing 'conversation' than a one-off 'ask a question, get some tips' thread. I for one am interested in learning from your experience in trying out a couple of software packages. I'll post a link to this thread in the 'Digital Darkroom'' forum. Perhaps post-processing enthusiasts have something to add.

I use AcdSee Ultimate it is a very robust software package and it's way cheaper than Photoshop. Despite its quirks, I use this more than any other software package I used in the past, be it Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Light Room, etc etc . Unless I have to do some Heavy Editing which requires a lot of Selections, Layers an Paths, or whatnot, Photoshop and the others mainly sit on the shelf.

As far as a quick editor for large and quick editing sessions, I find this software more convenient than LR. You just import your pictures (I usually import by date/time) and forget about it. There is no need to go through a bunch of complicated "Libraries" like in LR. AcdSee has a Geometry function that lets you straighten out horizons and do perspective control on architecture that make Photoshop look like you are going back to the Dark Ages. It's that easy ! Also I find the constant prompts asking you to back-up in LR very annoying. AcdSeee will prompt you to back-up maybe once a month. and that's it. Happy editing....

The time between backups in LR can be set in the "Catalog Settings" menu. You can set it to back up only once a month, although I would never do that. Even once a week, which is how I have it set up, is infrequent; I back up the rest of my files daily.

In LR, once you import your photos, you don't have to do anything more with the catalog than you want. By default, it will open the most recent catalog when you start the program, although you can change that also, I believe.

The time between backups in LR can be set in the "Catalog Settings" menu. You can set it to back up only once a month, although I would never do that. Even once a week, which is how I have it set up, is infrequent; I back up the rest of my files daily.

 

In LR, once you import your photos, you don't have to do anything more with the catalog than you want. By default, it will open the most recent catalog when you start the program, although you can change that also, I believe.

I wasn't aware of that. One thing I was aware of is that there is this 'Learning Curve' when it comes to Light Room. Actually various online schools and brick and mortar schools offer it as part of their curriculum. I guess you could say the same about Photoshop and AcdSee except that with the latter there is really no need to go to school, it's that intuitive. I took a full course of Photoshop at NYIP and some classes in photo editing at a local college, so maybe that helped a little, but I still say that AcdSee is the easiest photo editing software I have used so far(not including the limited Apple photo editing software that comes with your iPhone or Tablet).

I must be the odd one out here (so what else is new ?) I don't do any form of cataloguing at all of my images - every time I download a day's images to my HDD (my Pentax K3 kindly labels each folder with the actual date !), I amend the folder name (Using File Menu Tools [free]) so that I know all data which I consider relevant thus :

K3 64 04 - 101_0802 - Cley

K3 - camera; 64 - size of SDXC card; 04 - card number (i.e. the 4th 64 GB card used in K3); 101_0802 - camera-designated folder name (original folder numbers re-set with each new card); 0802 date; Cley - place images taken. This is just for DNG files direct from camera. Then when I perform whatever PP I feel is necessary, I create one folder per card called 'Processed', wherein I place the output from PP, each file still with its original identifier but saved as a TIFF file, usually with an indicator of the subject matter :

K3 64 04 - Processed

K3 64 04 - 101_0802 - TONY0022 - Avocet chicks.tif

Then it is a simple matter to search through all my Pentax files, using Windows Explorer, for any files with 'Avocet Chicks' in the name. Bit less resource-heavy than Lightroom, I expect, too.

BTW, for PP I use FastStone and XnView - again, both free !

FWIW, I'll describe the various tools I use.

Affinity Photo- My main editor. It's inexpensive and covers an amazing array of things. Focus stacking, HDR and other stacking are built in. It has all the usual editing tools for color and contrast, cloning and repair work. It manages color profiles correctly. It has a decent raw converter. It has a decent color-to-black & white converter with all the necessary sliders. Does stitching. It has a before/after slider. It uses the Lensfun database for lens corrections, or you can do it manually. And a bunch of other stuff. It's not Photoshop, but it's not subscription and does everything I've ever needed. Well, almost, thus I use several other tools.

Qimage- This is fundamentally a printing tool. A very inexpensive one, considering what it can do. It does super job of arranging prints on a page and getting maximum quality data to the printer. It has superb color management. Yes, you can usually print from your main editor, but this is the icing on the cake. It also has a raw converter and editing capability. The converter does an excellent job of getting a raw mapped to a practical dynamic range, and with less time and trouble than most. The editor lets you fine tune color, contrast, cropping and some other things. It also has some very unusual tools for altering colors and doing selective enhancement. It has a unique sharpening tool that avoids edge effects. All that said, it's main thing is printing. Windows printer drivers are 8-bits and the programs focus is getting things perfectly mapped into that 8-bit range. It will convert files, but it can't output a 16-bit image. Nor does it have sophisticated noise reduction. It can do lens corrections for some lenses. If I'm going to print or if I'm going to the web, this may be the only program my images see.

Nikon NX-D- IMO, nobody understands their sensors and camera processing like the people that designed it. I use NX-D when I want a huge16-bit tiff image from my raws. If I'm doing a full court press, this is the (free) tool I start with, followed by everything else.

Luminar- The latest version is just Luminar, no number attached. This thing is a bit of a chameleon. It's very easy for a beginner to use. Maybe too easy. It does everything you might need in terms of color/contrast/tone. It uses some sort of AI and can wildly enhance an image with little effort. That's in fact the danger. If you take every image and crank up the saturation, enhance the skies and overly clarify things, all your images will look the same and a bit garish. This is a program where you need self-control. It's capable of outright image replacement, but that's not really my thing. I use it to spruce things up subtly and always carefully evaluate the results so as not to overdo it. It really shines when an image needs just an extra bit of something to make it stand out. It does have a raw converter. For many people it could be their only editor, but it doesn't have the broad features of Affinity.

All inexpensive, no subscription pricing. There are certainly free solutions, but none have really pleased me. Nor have I found one program that does everything I want, though Affinity comes close.

The raw file conversion is just a starting point, and with many software programs, it's not a fixed characteristic of the program. There is no one initial saturation or contrast level in Lightroom, for example. Those depend on the profile one uses. Lightroom has 6 profiles on its basic menu (also called "favorites") and over 50 more that you can get to by picking "browse". You can also build your own.

I like to use a profile that doesn't impose much saturation or contrast, as I find it easier to add those to taste when editing than to remove them (particularly contrast). However, if you want a punchier initial conversion, you can certainly pick a profile that gives you that. I do use Adobe color, the new default, even though it's a tad punchier than the old Adobe standard, which I used for years.