Topic: Looking for a replacement for Lightroom?

[Francois]

Since Adobe decided to reinvent themselves as the equivalent of a tool rental company, I know many will either give some of their software the boot or simply keep on using old and tired versions until they no longer work.

Well, I've just learned that the old Lightzone program is now an open source project. As a matter of fact, the company that made it was kind enough to give their source code to the open source community when the company went under.

Lightzone is a replacement for lightroom (though with fewer features) that allows 16 bit non destructive editing.

Here's the link
http://lightzoneproject.org

[gothamtomato]

If you already have Lightroom (& Photoshop) they will keep working.

[JOEBUSY]

^^ Correct - Lightroom will act as a standalone product, still available as boxed purchase and able to have its own, stand-alone perpetual license - not like the way Photoshop and others are going.  Lightroom is essentially one of the few Adobe products not affect by the cloud mess. 

Ref - http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2013/05/lightroom-and-the-creative-cloud.html


BTW - my first post on film wasters! wooot! hi guys! (I am no way affiliated w/ adobe/lightroom as I'm more a photo mechanic guy myself for organizing) whoooo

[Terry]

Good to know that my creaky copy of CS2 will continue to work.  And if I may be so crass, there are still times when I find Gimp a handy thing...

[Francois]

I actually have the Gimp installed on a thumb drive that runs Portableapps.com
I't fantastic as I can just pop it on any Windows machine and get stuff done. Not as good as Photoshop but it's a lot better than nothing.

[Ezzie]

I use Aperture, also non destructive and 16bit. A bit heavy and slow (still), but intuitive and more than good enough if your intention is to perform edits that are in the realm of what you would could replicate in a darkroom. And it's not too expensive either.

[Late Developer]

Just as a matter of interest, to what extent does the FW community use photo editing software in connection with the work that they do with film...??

I have:
- Nikon Capture NX2
- Photoshop Elements 11 (replaced Photoshop CS3)
- Lightroom 4 (soon to be 5)

but, as far as film goes, I seldom use anything other than "Elements" to:

- apply levels
- correct contrast / brightness
- correct colour
- crop, resize and sharpen

I used to use Silver Efex Pro as a plug-in for PS CS3 to convert colour to mono but it won't work with Elements 11 - particularly as I'm using a Mac these days and the version I bought was for a PC.

For whatever reason, I tend to aim to make my film shots look as I'd like them to look if I was able to print them in a traditional darkroom - i.e. I don't do any heavy-duty post-processing.

What about the rest of us...?

[Ezzie]

For B/W I scan my negatives as a positive, it works better for me. I use PSE to invert the image, and flip it the right way. I then use Aperture to spot, adjust levels, sharpen and very seldom dodge and burn.

For colour negatives it is more or less the same rigmarole, though I scan these as negatives, and when in Aperture I may correct the white balance in addition to the above mentioned adjustments.

In principle I try not to do anything that cannot be replicated in the darkroom.

That's why Photoshop and other advanced suites have never really been an option for me.

[Urban Hafner]

I use Apple Aperture for most of my workflow. The only time I switch to Photoshop Elements (10) is when there's some difficult dust to spot. There are cases where Aperture just doesn't cut it.

[Francois]

Well, for me it's
-Photoshop CS3 for removing dust and adjusting levels.
-Picasa for sorting everything and doing some quick retouching.
-Irfanview for quick viewing (it's as fast as the Windows Fax viewer but incredibly better).

These account for probably upwards of 90% of my imaging software usage. Notice that it's 2/3 free software

[KevinAllan]

I'm in Lightroom 2 (yes, three versions old) for most things, with occasional use of GIMP. Things I use GIMP for are:

- spotting if there's a lot to do - I prefer it to Lightroom for this job.
- Occasional perspective corrections, eg straightening verticals, although I know if I had a later version of Lightroom it could do this
- editing the red, green, and blue curves independently to change colour balance - again later versions of Lightroom can do this.

I don't manipulate images much. The other day I was ashamed to find myself cloning out an ugly sign ... but I still draw the line at adding in things that were never there - a habit of others that encouraged me to leave a camera club.

[Adam Doe]

Photoshop CS5 for post scan adjustments:

- Curves for color/tone correction.
- Smart sharpening or Unsharp Mask if needed.
- Dust removal with content aware repair tool.
- Black and White adjustment layer for converting bw negs scanned as color, though sometimes I just scan as bw. This choice is largely dependent on time available divided by negatives to scan but laziness is also a contributing factor at times.

[LT]

I use cs4 mostly,although I occasionally use gimp too.

Flow:

16 bit greyscale scan from vuescan
Spot out dust etc
Apply USM
Do some global and local contrast and dodge/burn using selections and curves
Convert to colour file and add warmtone tint.
Save large copy then shrink file for web display and resharpen incrementally to make up for loss of accutance.
Save for web.

Jobs a goodun.

[Jack Johnson]

For me, there's a lot of laziness involved, so it's usually Picasa for everything, normally spotting, some level or horizon adjustment, occasionally a shift to monochrome, and exporting back out to the web.

I'm rarely very happy adjusting levels in Picasa, and spotting is sometimes very nice and sometimes frustrating. I used the LightZone demo a while back and *loved* the way it handed adjusting levels and curves, especially for monochrome images, but I'm on a Mac and waiting for the open source version to come out of beta.

I have considered swapping over to LightZone and digiKam on either Mac or Linux, or just buying Aperture and calling it done. Also, if you haven't seen the blasphemy that is Windows 8 on Mac hardware, it runs extremely well on Macs that won't run OS X 10.8+, and unfortunately I've never been able to get the SilverFast demo to run well on OS X, and I keep hearing good things about it.

[moominsean]

I use Photoshop CS4 because it's the last version I could get to recognize my scanner. CS5 removed the twain drivers and I couldn't scan (which they may have fixed since then). It does everything I need...the only thing I don't like about it is that it is a huge memory hog. It uses up like 4gigs of ram for a 200k jpeg. And I use epson scan because Silverfast wouldn't install properly on Windows 7. But I haven't had any issues with scanning or Photoshop in general.

I remember when Gimp first came out when I was working on magazine design, and it was a joke to see how many gimp filters you could use on your photo because they were all so bad then. Haven't used it since, I don't think.

[Fotoaday]

LR5 for me, with very occasional use of CS3, although now LR5 can do much better spot removal than LR4, i doubt I will have much reason to go into CS3.

[Francois]

the only thing I don't like about it is that it is a huge memory hog. It uses up like 4gigs of ram for a 200k jpeg.

I don't know if they changed it but memory is a user controllable setting. If you go to preferences/performance, you can select how much memory you want to give the program. On CS3, I have it set to 939mb (55%) of my memory. I could drag it lower or push it higher. It does affect how fast both the computer and photoshop run.

[Mike (happyforest)]

Capture one express 6, is being given away (coupon code and download from phaseone.com) with the July edition of digital camera magazine. (Sorry bought it to read while my daughter had a job interview.  She got the job)

I'm still playing with it, but seems to do quite a bit.

Mike

[moominsean]

the only thing I don't like about it is that it is a huge memory hog. It uses up like 4gigs of ram for a 200k jpeg.

I don't know if they changed it but memory is a user controllable setting. If you go to preferences/performance, you can select how much memory you want to give the program. On CS3, I have it set to 939mb (55%) of my memory. I could drag it lower or push it higher. It does affect how fast both the computer and photoshop run.

I haven't messed with it for awhile, but I think this is completely broken in CS4 (at least on the PC version).

[02Pilot]

I use GIMP more than anything else, but I'd like to integrate Darktable into the workflow, but I need to modify my home network to get my primary Windows box and my Linux box tied together. Even so, I don't do much more than play with contrast/brightness, a little color balancing where appropriate, and healing out the dust from scanning.

[Francois]

I don't know if this is of any help but on my home network, I have a file server that I made from a donated 1.8GHZ Pentium4 and a bunch of external drives I used to have on my desktop. The server runs Turnkey Linux fileserver and it's incredibly easy to setup. I use FUSE to access the NTFS drives.

Just for a bit of specs, the computer is an old desktop computer (the type that fits under the screen) and was upgraded to 1.25 GB of ram. I changed the cards that came with it so I could put a USB2 card and a SATA card. I removed the CD and put in a SATA drive bay. The original boot drive was replaced by an IDE-CF adapter and screwed under the power supply. I have an 8gb card on this. The computer runs without a monitor or a keyboard and boots in about 30 seconds.

Turnkey Linux comes pre-installed with Samba so accessing it with either a Linux or Windows box is pretty easy.