Which post processing software ....

[dandrewk]

I've had Topaz, Nik, Alien Skin and On1's suite. I only use On1 - it's completeness, ease of use and support are first rate. Using their "dynamic contrast" filter alone justifies the price (which is quite reasonable). I believe they have a full function, limited time evaluation for those who are interested.

 

[Jim DE]

I had never heard of On1........ I will have to look at that one

 

[Godfrey]

Wow.

I almost never use any plugins at all. I try to get focus and exposure right in the camera, only rarely have need for any but minimal sharpening, and only very rarely need much noise filtering. If an exposure needs much of this kind of post processing, I consider it bad and move on to the next candidate.

Maybe I'm not critical enough, but I see little dissatisfying about the prints I produce with LR...!

G

 

[CharlesK]

I have both C1 Pro 8 and Lr6/CS6. For ease of cataloging and usage I prefer Lr6. It achieves 98% of what I need. For more detailed and finer PP I quickly export in PS6 and back into Lr once I am complete. The plugins of Nik suite are excellent and for portrait work I use Imagenomic Portraiture as I find this is still one of the best programs for portraits. My thinking is "keep it simple", as it is quite easy to fine tune Lr to your needs.
Originally I purchased C1 Pro for the M9 as Lr was inferior for PP then. I stayed with C1 Pro for a long time and use it occasionally now, but Lr6/CS6/+dedicated plugins work great now.

 

[Jim DE]

Wow.

I almost never use any plugins at all. I try to get focus and exposure right in the camera, only rarely have need for any but minimal sharpening, and only very rarely need much noise filtering. If an exposure needs much of this kind of post processing, I consider it bad and move on to the next candidate.

Maybe I'm not critical enough, but I see little dissatisfying about the prints I produce with LR...!

G

Godfrey, You must not shoot Sony cameras much above base iso IMO the original a77 was just horrible in iso noise above 400iso. The NEX 7 was little better at 400 and higher. The a99 could go to 1000iso before imo it got hit with objectionable noise and the a77II hit that level at 1600iso. I will admit I hate iso noise as much as I hated grain in film which moved me to medium format very early in my life and later LF. Topaz DeNoise was just about a have to on nearly every image above those iso's until DXO came out with Prime then I had a real noise busting software for that purpose. Did I mention I hate noise

You can get focus as good as you want at the time of capture but Topaz Detail will make the overall image just have that special look by just even uploading it to the plugin, hit apply and bring it back to aperture alone without using anything else.... though I do at times.

It's not that the plugins can do things better than one can do in the basic PP conversion softwares; it is just for me, it is much quicker day in and day out. For my needs and wants speed and IQ is money in my pocket.

 

[Jack]

For whatever it's worth to the few of you who still want to hear what I have to say about this:

Since I switched to C1, I have not needed any plug-ins. And I did have the complete Topaz suite -- and relied on it -- before C1...

 

[Vivek]

For whatever it's worth to the few of you who still want to hear what I have to say about this:

Since I switched to C1, I have not needed any plug-ins. And I did have the complete Topaz suite -- and relied on it -- before C1...

Just to be clear, I had actually sulked about your absence earlier if you recall that, Jack.

I have never heard of Topaz suite until now. It is the ease of use that led me to comment on LR.

I may give C1 another try.

 

[Jack]

Just to be clear, I had actually sulked about your absence earlier if you recall that, Jack.

I have never heard of Topaz suite until now. It is the ease of use that led me to comment on LR.

I may give C1 another try.

Intuitive and ease -- unfortunately -- do not always directly translate to best... They do however tend directly toward popularity, since not everybody is inclined to take the time to learn the ins and outs of more complex -- which are often also more powerful -- alternatives...

 

[Godfrey]

Godfrey, You must not shoot Sony cameras much above base iso IMO the original a77 was just horrible in iso noise above 400iso. The NEX 7 was little better at 400 and higher. The a99 could go to 1000iso before imo it got hit with objectionable noise and the a77II hit that level at 1600iso. I will admit I hate iso noise as much as I hated grain in film which moved me to medium format very early in my life and later LF. Topaz DeNoise was just about a have to on nearly every image above those iso's until DXO came out with Prime then I had a real noise busting software for that purpose. Did I mention I hate noise

You can get focus as good as you want at the time of capture but Topaz Detail will make the overall image just have that special look by just even uploading it to the plugin, hit apply and bring it back to aperture alone without using anything else.... though I do at times.

It's not that the plugins can do things better than one can do in the basic PP conversion softwares; it is just for me, it is much quicker day in and day out. For my needs and wants speed and IQ is money in my pocket.

bolded 1: I had the A7 for a year and a half. I found up to ISO 6400 netted good results as long as I had the exposure right. But I sold the A7 and all the rest of my Sony gear because I ultimately found the cameras too clunky to work with.

bolded 2: Now there is where we differ. I like nice, smooth renderings some of the time and I like grain at other times. For this recent Leica M-P photo, I added grain because, to my eye, it looks good that way:

​

With the A7, to my eye this is a grainless, typical ISO 1600 photo:

​

I still shoot with medium format occasionally, especially the SWC, and love its smooth grain too. But even there, sometimes a coarse-grained image is my preference and I jump up to Delta 3200 to get it:

​

(All three images rendered in LR, btw.)

The time I tested Topaz Detail, to my eye it made my photos look artificial. Decided not to buy it, or NIK, or any others.

But both of those notions are reach into the realm of aesthetic preferences and have little to do with camera capabilities.

I'm not in that much of a rush when I'm processing my work. And because I focus on getting it the way I want in the camera, processing is often a case of reading in the raw files, making a tweak to one typical image, and doing the same to all the others.

G

 

[Godfrey]

Intuitive and ease -- unfortunately -- do not always directly translate to best... They do however tend directly toward popularity, since not everybody is inclined to take the time to learn the ins and outs of more complex -- which are often also more powerful -- alternatives...

"Complex" and "confusing" are often mistaken for one another too, Jack. I found C1 not complex but confusing, and hard to remember unless you use it constantly. I find software which requires a half hour introductory lesson just to learn how to start using it generally not worth the trouble.

A fabulous diamond trapped within a five-master rated Chinese puzzle box is not much to look at for the vast majority of people... ;-)

G

 

[Jim DE]

Godfrey that was one of the set backs to aperture... you have to do each photos PP individually and no real batch processing.

I do product photography as a part time job (being as I am retiree from a fortune 500 major corporation and just looking for things to stay busy) which has recently been a 5 day a week gig which my contracted customer pays by the pic.... time means money in this regard and it mostly studio work. Now this a7RII will never be used for this work assignment as I have other better suited camera bodies for this purpose. The a7rII is my NEX7 replacement for a carry in scenic camera. Time in PP mean nothing in this specific case so I can fiddle and futz in a single PP software to achieve my goals....... These are printed and sold for a completely different client base in a gallery type marketplace and their likes and dislikes are different than those of my product work.

I use camera systems and PP softwares/ plugins like golf clubs.... picking the strengths of the tools and using them to it's best applications to utilize these strengths and stay clear of it's weaknesses.

 

[Godfrey]

Godfrey that was one of the set backs to aperture... you have to do each photos PP individually and no real batch processing. ...

I seem to recall a way to save and apply settings from one photo to another in Aperture, but as long as I've had it, I've only rarely used it.

With LR, you can select a whole bunch of photos, turn on Auto-Sync, and then all your edits to the one photo are applied to all the others as well. You can also do one, then select a whole bunch of others as well, and apply the same edits to them. You can also do a bunch of edits, save it as a preset, then apply the preset to whatever photo you want. As a production system, if you shoot consistently and get most of your exposures close to the money, you can edit and output 10,000 photos as fast as your computer can process them. I never had a call for that many, but for some of the jobs I did, I had 300-400 exposures that the clients wanted to pick through. With LR it took just a short while to pump out all those proofs.

As a production system it's hard to beat. I have not yet figured out how to do this kind of stuff with C1, and it's FAR easier to apply changes to a lot of photos at once with LR than it was with PS batch operations.

G

 

[ptomsu]

I seem to recall a way to save and apply settings from one photo to another in Aperture, but as long as I've had it, I've only rarely used it.

With LR, you can select a whole bunch of photos, turn on Auto-Sync, and then all your edits to the one photo are applied to all the others as well. You can also do one, then select a whole bunch of others as well, and apply the same edits to them. You can also do a bunch of edits, save it as a preset, then apply the preset to whatever photo you want. As a production system, if you shoot consistently and get most of your exposures close to the money, you can edit and output 10,000 photos as fast as your computer can process them. I never had a call for that many, but for some of the jobs I did, I had 300-400 exposures that the clients wanted to pick through. With LR it took just a short while to pump out all those proofs.

As a production system it's hard to beat. I have not yet figured out how to do this kind of stuff with C1, and it's FAR easier to apply changes to a lot of photos at once with LR than it was with PS batch operations.

G

Godfrey,

need your advice then ....

I always had the impression then I applied changes to one photo in LR (I usually do this via "Copy Settings" of the one photo I edit and then select the other photos and do a "Paste Settings"), it copies ALL the settings as done for the first edit candidate and does for example not individually apply exposure etc.

This then reduces my initial edit I want to apply to all photos to a minimum like lens profiles and camera profiles etc, while I have to edit all photos individually for optimal exposure or WB.

Would that be different is I used Auto Sync or something else?

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for your answer in advance!

Peter

 

[hcubell]

C1 Pro 8 doesn't list specific Sony FE lens profiles in the lens correction tab. My understanding was that, if the tab listed "Manufacturer's Profile" as the profile, C1 was applying a specific lens profile for that FE lens. I have noticed that my files with the Zeiss Batis 25 and 85 lenses show "Manufacturer's Profile" in the lens correction tab. Is it possible that Phase has already included specific profiles for those non-Sony lenses?

 

[Godfrey]

I'm not sure I understand your question, Peter. But I think you're asking, "Does Auto Sync do something different from Copy Settings—Paste Settings?" It does nothing different. It simply applies the same adjustments to all the exposures selected, as if you had copied and pasted your settings one image at a time.

That's why the basic premise is to get the exposure and such as right as possible in the camera. Then all the adjustments, including exposure and tone curve, can be applied to all exposures at once. There are invariably a few photos that need a little bit of tweaking. I find most of the time I can do this in Quick Develop, selecting smaller groups of images. I only rarely work on one image at a time for more than a few seconds.

G

 

[Pradeep]

I'm not sure I understand your question, Peter. But I think you're asking, "Does Auto Sync do something different from Copy Settings—Paste Settings?" It does nothing different. It simply applies the same adjustments to all the exposures selected, as if you had copied and pasted your settings one image at a time.

That's why the basic premise is to get the exposure and such as right as possible in the camera. Then all the adjustments, including exposure and tone curve, can be applied to all exposures at once. There are invariably a few photos that need a little bit of tweaking. I find most of the time I can do this in Quick Develop, selecting smaller groups of images. I only rarely work on one image at a time for more than a few seconds.

G

I think the other advantage of 'auto sync' is that you can select which settings are applied, for example you can uncheck/check all or simply pick and select. So you wouldn't want the crop settings to be the same for all images, and can easily uncheck that. It is indeed a very powerful tool to adjust multiple images at the same time.

I've grown to like LR quite a bit over the past year or so, although I still have trouble accepting its 'modal' interface. A few other things are annoying too, like the need for 'synchronizing the folder' every time you add an image to it. Overall, it is very usable though.

 

[Godfrey]

if you add files to folders by importing them and telling LR where to put them, you don't need the synchronize folder command.

G

 

[ptomsu]

I'm not sure I understand your question, Peter. But I think you're asking, "Does Auto Sync do something different from Copy Settings—Paste Settings?" It does nothing different. It simply applies the same adjustments to all the exposures selected, as if you had copied and pasted your settings one image at a time.

That's why the basic premise is to get the exposure and such as right as possible in the camera. Then all the adjustments, including exposure and tone curve, can be applied to all exposures at once. There are invariably a few photos that need a little bit of tweaking. I find most of the time I can do this in Quick Develop, selecting smaller groups of images. I only rarely work on one image at a time for more than a few seconds.

G

Thanks, that answers my question. So I have not missed anything.

 

[Pradeep]

if you add files to folders by importing them and telling LR where to put them, you don't need the synchronize folder command.

G

True, but then you have to go through the 'import' dialog every time. Even then, the program does not remember which folder I had imported into the last time. When I export a finished version of an image into the 'finals' folder through LR, the images do not show up unless I 'synchronize' the folder again and again. The huge flexibility of Aperture in terms of having different versions of the same image in different folders (as long as the original RAW remains in one place) is also something I miss. The import process too is not as flexible. Keywording was better in Aperture too.

Like I said, the DAM capabilities of Aperture are superior to anything else but it falls behind in other areas and I don't like the idea of jumping from one program for cataloging and then use another for RAW conversion and then use PS or a plug-in for final work. That becomes too cumbersome.

Minor annoyances, but the current incarnation of LR does other things much better, so I have learned to live with it and like it.

 

[iiiNelson]

I seem to recall a way to save and apply settings from one photo to another in Aperture, but as long as I've had it, I've only rarely used it.

With LR, you can select a whole bunch of photos, turn on Auto-Sync, and then all your edits to the one photo are applied to all the others as well. You can also do one, then select a whole bunch of others as well, and apply the same edits to them. You can also do a bunch of edits, save it as a preset, then apply the preset to whatever photo you want. As a production system, if you shoot consistently and get most of your exposures close to the money, you can edit and output 10,000 photos as fast as your computer can process them. I never had a call for that many, but for some of the jobs I did, I had 300-400 exposures that the clients wanted to pick through. With LR it took just a short while to pump out all those proofs.

As a production system it's hard to beat. I have not yet figured out how to do this kind of stuff with C1, and it's FAR easier to apply changes to a lot of photos at once with LR than it was with PS batch operations.

G

There's a copy/paste settings function in C1P8 that works similarly to LR (represented by the arrows in the toolbar.) There's a few small differences but in essence it works the same.

Even still it is my opinion that LR is more user friendly, tends to provide faster support/profiles, tends to be a lot more stable (although in fairness I haven't had many issues with C1P8,) and the pixel level results of LR + 3rd party external editors/plugins produces a comparable to superior final product in most cases. To each their own and choice is for us all good.