Digital BW, The Print

Aloha all from Hawaii, I've been participating as an avid reader of this group for several months now, this being my first post.

This topic is still controversial because very different groups of users are treated under the same rule and that creates the incompatibility.

Unfortunately Adobe owns the products, we only purchase the right to use a particular version and that's it. They do have the right to change the rules as suddenly and as often as they want to, no matter how much we cry and complain.

Several years ago I switched over from windows to MAC and I loved it … except that I didn't have Outlook anymore and I couldn't afford to purchase the mac version. I was pissed off and frustrated with both microsoft and mac and I felt stuck and forced to switch to Apple Mail which I found unfriendly, buggy, limited … and didn't like it at all. With the time I realized that the real reason for my anger was the fact that I had become a slave of outlook, got used to do things the "outlook" way … and was so stuck into this ways that found very hard to conceive different ways to manage my emails. A few years later, I love apple mail so much I wouldn't go back to outlook even if I got it for free. Actually I can't understand how could I have used it for so long.

I think many photographers might be experiencing the same situation with photoshop. We are so used to it that we can't conceive any other alternative, and we resist to accept the possibility of a change.

I have forced myself away from adobe products to break this dependency and have found great surprises, I still use Lightroom for cataloguing purposes but I don't use the edit module or I try to avoid it.

Phase One Capture One is not a replacement for photoshop, but it does not only replace camera raw or lightroom, I find it way superior. The color rendition, tonal range is much reacher and pleasant before applying any adjustment. It also has very unique tools not available in adobe's counterparts. This is my software of choice right now.

I'd like to mention two other great developments from the open source community,

LightZone is back and a very active community is bringing it up to speed. LZ also has unique tools, and all tools can be applied as adjustment layers with full blending modes as many times as you want … and this is photoshop territory. LZ is free and available for windows, mac and linux

http://www.lightzoneproject.org/

But my biggest discovery on the quest for photoshop alternatives was DarkTable (mac or linux)

http://www.darktable.org/

DarkTable is also free and provides access to pretty much any possible adjustment you can imagine. Some of its unique tools are revolutionary and very promising, like the equalizer. I can't say I find it user friendly yet because it is so different, but I still need to learn how to use it and become more familiar with it. It is the only software that gave me similar results to Capture One. It has a huge and very active community of users and developers providing advise and guidance.

I know changing software is not for everyone, but I've been much happier complaining less about adobe's doing and shifting my attention and focusing my time onto new horizons. I hope that helped.

I have no affiliation with any of the software I mentioned.

Aloha to all

Fernando ./




On Sep 6, 2013, at 2:59 PM, donsbryant@... wrote:

> Phase Ones Capture 1 Pro is a great alternative to PS CC. Also consider PS Elements used in conjunction with LR to get off the cloud.
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> The PS CC suite does include InDesign which maybe worth the subscription fee if you don't already own (license) the product.
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