So I wanted to try a few more options for RAW conversions before settling on my programme of choice. It's reasonably intuitive, but very slow, clunky, and lacks a lot of the more refined selection and adjustment options of other products. I was, and still am, impressed with Olympus's proprietary software, and believe it gives a superior result with less effort, especially in colour accuracy.īut for all its good points, OV3 isn't the slickest software on the planet. In my last two posts, I pitted Olympus's free RAW conversion software - Viewer 3 (OV3), up against Adobe Lightroom CC (version 2015.4). Basically, if you can conceive of a way to sort and tag your vast image collection, AfterShot Pro 2 lets you do it.The great thing about deciding on new software is that you can usually download a fully functioning trial for a month to 'try before you buy'. Even without creating a database (“Catalog,” in AfterShot Pro 2 parlance), you can make nondestructive image adjustments, tag images with keywords, rate them, label them with colors, and flag them as Picks or Rejects. I found AfterShot works well for managing a vast collection of images. You can name layers and selected regions. You’ll have to manually draw around the areas you want to adjust. It’s a good thing the region selection tools are well built, because one thing you won’t find is a Magic Wand: There’s no way to click a contiguous area of the image to make a quick selection. It takes longer to explain than to use-a truly fun and nuanced way to make fine-grained region selections. Put it inside the feathered part and scroll, and the degree of feathering changes. Put your mouse inside the core area and scroll, and the area instantly grows. What makes the tools cool is how they scale and control feathering: Each selection has an inner area (the core) and an outer one (the feathered part). Using the selection tools is surprisingly fun and intuitive: You can select circular areas, draw out polygons, create curves, or brush over areas of the image freehand. Once you have a layer, it’s time to select one or more regions of the image to adjust. Scaling and feathering selections is easy. You can have multiple Adjustment layers, and a single Heal/Clone layer per image. There are Adjustment layers, and then there are Heal/Clone layers. This presents one of the few confusing things about AfterShot Pro 2: You have two types of layers. You won’t find the Layer Manager on the sidebar: There’s a small button on the top toolbar, next to the name of the current layer (which is always Main Layer if you’re not using layers). Combined with AfterShot’s robust support for RAW images, this makes for a fun editing playground. AfterShot lets you compare these versions side by side and adjust each independently-and when browsing your photo collection in thumbnail mode, you can stack image versions so they only take up a single thumbnail. Non-destructive editing also means you can easily create multiple versions of a given image and try out different adjustments. Image versioning takes some getting used to but comes in handy. Any changes you make are fully reversible, since they’re saved alongside the original image in an XMP file. Working directly on the disk makes for very fast browsing, and you still get to enjoy one of AfterShot’s key features: non-destructive editing. You can choose whether you want AfterShot to import your photos into a database or work on the folder structure you already have on the disk (similar to what Picasa does). Thumbnails load quickly, and it’s easy to switch between different viewing modes.
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