PeriFromIL Loc: Illinois

All,

I am a newbie to post processing and workflow. Never owned photoshop or Lightroom etc. Just bought Fujifilm XT-1 and re-learning photography after 20 year gap.

Saw a post few days ago about Alienskin Exposure as a possible replacement for Lightroom. Being not familiar with post processing and workflow am I better of with just buying and learning Alienskin exposure or start with Lightroom and learn it.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Peri

rmalarz Loc: Tempe, Arizona

Peri,
I'd recommend going with LR and PS. The learning curve is steep, but taken a bit at a time, it's very doable.

If you try this, try that as an approach, you'll be in a constant learning curve, that can lead to frustration. Save that for later on when you are comfortable with the basics.

LR and PS, as you well know, are industry standards. Oh, and no, I don't work for or represent Adobe.
--Bob

bobmcculloch Loc: NYC, NY

I'd recommend Paint Shop Pro X8, 30 day free trial, much easier learning curve and on the budget, if you need heavier duty editing then you can invest at that time, not likely though. Bob.

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Could have fooled me!!!
:shock: :mrgreen: :XD: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Seriously, LR is for those who have a need for organization and quick edit. PS CC is the RR post processing. If you want something less expensive and really capable try GIMP (free). Only trouble, you need another program to open/save raw files (if you shoot raw). That would be raw Therapee (free)

Note that everything mentioned means you have to learn quite a bit before being proficient at post-processing.

KTJohnson Loc: Northern Michigan

I went through that same process a few years back. I chose LR & Scott Kelby's book on it. I read that a couple of times & made notes, very helpful. Then I bought an Epson V600 scanner to digitize 30+ years of slides. LightRoom was very helpful in keeping things organized. I've never used any other type of PP, but from what most people say, it can handle about 95% of everything you'll ever need to be done (unless you go pro).

I have to admit, I love it. It can do wonders once you're familiar with it.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

As others have stated, the BIG strength of Lightroom is organizing all your photographs. The database that you build by using Lightroom pays off after you have a large collection of images. You use metadata to organize and search for your images instead of a manual file name/folder system. You also get excellent raw editing capability, and coupled with Photoshop, or pretty much any pixel level editor you have a complete system.
I have a small collection, of about 30,000 images, but never worry about needing to search for a file by name, instead, I list images by keywords or locations and can pinpoint the one file out of 30,000 that I want within a second or two in most cases.

Does Alienskin just edit or is it an image manager as well?

Billyspad Loc: The Philippines

I use Photoshop but have Alien Skin 7 as well. its not really a photo editor as such, more a one click solution to giving a photo a certain type of look of which I admit there are hundreds and to some extent they can be adjusted.
Depends what type of editing you wish to do. Thats what you have to decide first of all. Is it just to titivate your snaps or are you wanting to do things like completely change backgrounds etc.
Lightroom is a superb cataloging system if you feel the need for it. You can put dinky little stars and flags on your snaps. great huh. Its got a sort of editing suite tacked on but I personally do not entertain it. For serious photo editing its like taking a poo wearing an overcoat. Its intrusive and does not let you store your photos in the way you like.
So the choice if your going to get properly into photo editing is Gimp free but with an awful interface that defies intuition. Paint Shop Pro Superb and worth a look and Photoshop Elements again superb.
I would guess your unlikely ever to need full blown Photoshop the learning curve of which is pretty steep.

blackest Loc: Ireland

There is a raw front end preprocessor to GIMP called ufraw (it also can batch convert). It and other free raw processors tend to be based on dcraw. Rawtherapee is more extensive than ufraw although probably uses the same initial conversion routines as ufraw.

malawibob Loc: South Carolina

From personal experience and a non-pro photo geek. I use Lightroom as my major PP program mainly because there is a ton of instruction videos on You Tube to help navigate the program. (It doesn't do it all, but it does a lot)!

Rongnongno Loc: FL

Thank you for the info.

I am not savvy on GIMP as I do not use it but seeing the result posted by experienced user I cannot but respect the output presented.

I know, because I tried it, that GIMP does not import raw directly. I recommend raw therapee because I also tried it. It is a bit too powerful for me because I have the habit to simply open the raw file, leave it as is, import it at its maximal capacity w/o modification in PS CC where I can control every pixel if needed. Now I am a pixel peeper nut case so my opinion... Debatable.

blackest Loc: Ireland

gimp is supposed to be moving to deeper than 8 bit processing but only the development versions (2.9.x) have 16 and 32 bit per channel depths and the current release versions are still 2.8.x One of the problems with a free project with unpaid developers.

Work is ongoing with the latest commit in October or September Maybe Version 3.0 will be the next release with the major rewrite.

mallen1330 Loc: Chicago western suburbs

I just discovered LightZone a couple months ago. It has a unique approach I’ve not seen in similar tools. Here’s a summary:

Non-destructive RAW editor

Versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux

Free, open source, originally developed as commercial software by the now-defunct Light Crafts.

The unique Zone Finder and Zone Mapper analyzes images by an Ansel Adams type zone system.

Each adjustment you make is kept separate in a stack list that you can easily rearrange, change, turn off.

The Relighting tool does a great job changing the lighting of all or portion of an image.

All effects can be localized with vector-based regions and masks with adjustable feathering.

Use the pre-made styles or save your own. A style or “preset” is simply an adjustment stack that you can apply to a batch of images and then individually adjust as necessary.

Reviewer at http://www.noupe.com, says: “All in all, LightZone is much more flexible than Lightroom, even more powerful than Photoshop in some areas.”

There’s a bunch of LightZone tutorial YouTube videos — that got me to try it.

mallen1330 Loc: Chicago western suburbs

And, after using LightZone, I use Paint Shop Pro to fix lens and perspective distortion, size and crop, apply Topaz Adjust to some (5% or so).

latebloomer Loc: Topeka, KS

If you don't need the heavy organization functions, you might want to consider Photoshop Elements 14. The learning curve is not as steep as Photoshop. There are lots of tutorials and books to help you. The price is $79 ($39 at Costco if you are a member). PSE has some good organization functions and if you later need to organize a lot of pictures, you can get Lightroom

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

Lightroom has lots of organizational features; Exposure doesn't.

Lightroom has "some" pixel editing features; Exposure doesn't.

In a basic way, they are both very similar, but it depends on what you want to do.

I'd say try Exposure, see if you are "missing" something after a few weeks. If you aren't, then you are good to go, if you are, and those features are part of Lightroom, then you know what to do.