Thought I did.. sorry

I would disagree on that statement. Depending on what ports he has on his mac either a thunderbolt or usb3 will be much faster than a optical hard drive but at a higher cost. I replace my root drive on an 2011 iMac with an SSD using thunderbolt and it is much faster than the internal HD ever was. The point is that I use the SSD for my applications not my data. The images are stored on the internal HD, are backed up 3 ways - time machine, full clone to an other external drive weekly and online thru back blaze. Living in Santa Barbara where we are the risk of being burned out at any time I can grab the backup drives in seconds and if I'm not home I can recover from the cloud backups.

If you are going to use a HD for storage using ones that work with your fastest ports (thunderbolt, usb3, firewire 800, firewire 400, usb2 - in order of speed).

Also I would look at backblaze.com. They do report on their drives every quarter and show what I consider to be the best information on the reliability of specific drives since they have thousands so it isn't antidotal information based on a review of 1 drive.

First question, are you on Mac or PC? If Mac - it has become my prime product to replace Lightroom but just like in Lightroom I use other programs to get effects. One of those is Luminar. If you are a pc user I'd wait. If you want to see my comparison go look at the string about luminar vs On1 Raw 2018. I just posted a long string there.

My two cents.. I use both On1 Raw 2018 and Luminar 2018. Each has its strengths and weaknesses so it really depends on what you are looking for. I tried Affinity but found it to be difficult to use only because it was so different from Aperture then Lightroom which replaced it for me. I do need a DAM so On1 Raw 2018 is quickly becoming my go to for that function. Then I use others as plugins as necessary. So in no particular order here are my thoughts on each:

1. On1 Raw 2018 -

Pros - overall - fastest app I use. A more expensive than Luminar. Has all the modules. Creates sidecars for the edits so is very good on not creating monster 1/2 GB images like Lightroom and Luminar can do. Very few bugs in latest release on Mac. 1. Easy to use DAM that doesn’t lose location like LightRoom always did for me. Put all your images in a folder and point On1 Raw 2018 at that folder. Create version, work on it and it is stored in that folder. That easy. 2. Some of the best masking tools I've seen especially the perfect brush. Look at some of their videos to see that in action. 3. Develop - very good Raw processor with all the normal bells and whistles. Also had built-in HDR and Pano which work quite well for me (thought Lightroom is a bit better at this point). 4. Effects - very good set of style filters - some of which are excellent like dynamic contrast. Also can do both overall and local adjustments very well. 5. Layers - easy to use and understand layering function. 6. Resize - something others don’t do as well. Great module for changing the size of images easily. Printing is probably 4 out of 5 (Lightroom better in my opinion). Lastly great support and videos.

Cons - expensive, doesn’t have some of the artistic filters others have for what I would call special effects (this is where Luminar and Nik shines).

2. Luminar 2018 - overall - inexpensive unless you need to do HDR which causes you to purchase their other product. Slower than On1 Raw 2018. Not quite as refined as On1 Raw 2018 but is easy to learn for about 75% of it. It has great creative filters - some not available in others like the Artificial Intelligence filter, Sunray, top-bottom, etc. Had more filters than any other app I know. Fun to play with BUT This actually could be the one downfall I see and it is user based. I find Luminar is too easy to create over the top images. You might want to go on Facebook and join both of their photo groups. Then look at the images being shown. I for one am getting tired of seeing over grunged old cars, cathedrals and sun rays out of every orifice (you will see what I mean if you look).

Cons - no DAM, no pano, no HDR - still a bit buggy - can create huge files if you save the work in their proprietary code (you can turn this off and only save the history file (which by the way is pretty cool. If you open an image you have worked on before the entire history step by step is available and since this is nondestructive you can go back in time.) and probably the worst con is their support which is a nightmare as they fostered beta releases out on the owners and releases. On their Facebook page they finally had to separate their photo page from their support page because of the negative comments. They are having massive problems with getting the PC version up to snuff which is kinda of affecting their Mac version because of lack of resources especially in support. On their support page they were deleting comments then denying them. Bottom line - it has been my experience of over 35+ years selling software that this is a sign of serious internal issues at the company. It would not surprise me to see them acquired for their technology or just fade away. I will say On1 Raw 2018 had some of those issues as well especially in transitioning from 2017 to 2018 but they finally got it right. Their president even formally apologized, gave us a way to contact him which I did. They did everything they could to appease their users then delivered with 2018.

So if I was in your shoes I would think about what I want a pp program to do based on my photography - I.e. do I shoot sports, landscapes, close-ups, portraits, etc. Then how much time to do you have to learn a new program(s)? Then what are you going to do with it? Print or just electronic. All of those should help you decide what you want. And remember software has a tendency to have companies leapfrog with releases. What is best right now , might not be in the next release. I actually loved Aperature but was forced to move from it when Apple put in the fireplace, I loved Nik, then Google bought them and stopped development (still love their - u point tech), I went to Lightroom but then they decided to stop selling perpetual licenses and I wont pay $120 year for just the use of Lightroom as I find PhotoShop way too hard to learn and use) and that lead me to look at On1 Raw 2018, luminar and others to replace it. In my opinion for me who shoots mainly landscapes and some sports it is the best option for me now.

No but they are promising it for 2018.

with feet on ground (rather than a plane) Mt. Whitney 14,505′ (Continental US) and Mt. Logan 19,551′ (Canada). Then base camps below K2..

Often you can get a free month or if you check your library may have access for free under what is called LyndaLibrary. I'm not sure they have classes on Elements but their Lightroom and PS classes are excellent.

Wow , how about off topic discussion.. Hurts my head. As said On1 Raw 2018 has lens correction. They are using some "standard" database which is pretty good IF they have your lens. If not you can go to the standards site, send them a set of images based on a process they have and they MAY add your lens. Missing lens for me are ones I have had for 40 years..

I feel On1 Raw has the best masking tools for this type of composite change. Matt KLOSKOWSKI has a great video which shows how to use it. Regardless it will take some patience with this image. http://mattk.com/on1-system-bonus02/

Well put it this way, IBM moved from supplying only pc's to their employees until about 2 years when they started recommending Mac because the MTBF (mean time before Failure) was over 2.5 times higher for PC (and we only bought the very highest end PC). While I will give you that pc laptops are both less expensive for the initial purchase and have gotten better just to give you an idea, we have 4 Macs and MacBook Pros which the oldest is over six years old and still running like a top. My wife teaches computer science classes for which she needed a pc laptop for because the teaching software they use is only on PC (I ran it on parallel on the 2010 MacBook pro and it worked fine). So I purchased a high end laptop using windows 10. I put all the apps you need to protect a pc from malware, etc on the machine and got it totally up to date and safe. Then 10 days later my wife was saying it was running significantly slower than before. I took a look at it and spent 4 hours cleaning all the crap it gathered in just 10 days. Now every Saturday I'm forced to spend at least an hour working on it. I've never had to do anything like than on any mac.

So you pay more initially but you get what you pay for with a machine that lasts longer and cost much less to maintain. But hey if you have an hour to kill every week go for it.

By the way I do agree the latest macs are a bit harder to upgrade except for memory which you can install yourself quite easily. I run all my macs off external SSD drives thru thunderbolt and use the internal drives as storage. Works great and super fast.

both aperture and lr 6 are still working but both are eol with no new development or fixes. I can't figure either will be around for long.

I already looked at raw power but have no interest in using Photos as my base product.

i kind of wish all of these comments were in one thread as lots of this has been discussed before. Unfortunately I've had to move from Aperature to LR as my primary workflow engine using lots of plugins from Nik (again someone that went away), topaz, On1 and macphun. Each has something the others didn't have. I loved the way Aperture worked, kind of had to put up with how LR worked (lost a lot of catalogs until i understood how they worked). Now with Adobe's decision to I've been looking for a different solution. There are things in LR I hate to lose like lens correction and the automated functions of Transform. I saw the handwriting on the way when Adobe bought out CC and stopped development on LR 6 so I've been looking at a number of products finally narrowing it down to ON1 Raw and Luminar. Both have had some growing pains but On1 Raw is getting there pretty quickly and quite openly. MacPhun is having a lot of issues especially around making the decision to release a PC version with 2018 which is pretty limited. Lots of issues and lots of upset users on their private locked support page in FB. But I feel they are trying and at least for me the standalone version on the Mac is quite a bit improved over 2017. With all that said if Adobe would just price classic only at a reasonable subscription price i would just use them with exports out to the others. However i will not pay $10/month for PS when I wont use it ever.

Its worth taking a look at On1 if you are looking for a DAM and Photo Editor or MacPhun if you are on Mac and dont need a DAM. They are promising a DAM in 2018 but time will tell.

Which version 2017 or 2018 and mac or pc?

I've never had a problem loading on1 thru 2017, and 4 betas of 2018, and the public release of 2018. On an older iMac and it runs great.

don’t know if you are mac or pc user but if mac here are my current feelings (changing day by day, laughs). On1 2018 was just released about a week ago. It is a serious competitor for Lightroom in my mind as it is both a DAM (based on a browser workflow which is much easier than Lightroom or any cataloged product) and a photo editor with much of the power of Lightroom plus somethings it doesn’t have. I've been testing it quite a bit and it seems stable and is the fastest product I use. I think the user friendliness would be about 6 or 7 out of 10. It has both HDR and Pano built in and a great community of users and pretty honest customer service. A weakness to me compared to Lightroom is it doesn’t do transformations any way but manual. It has a great masking tool called the perfect brush. It is certainly worth a look at.

MacPhun (whose name is going to change to Skylum) just released Luminar 2018 and Aurora 2018 (a month ago). Luminar is currently only a photo editor with no DAM capabilities. They say that will be added in early 2018. I've only been playing with it for a day as it was released on the 16th. It does not have pano or HDR (you have to buy Aurora for HDR). It is an easier to use product say 8 out of 10. By the way I figure Lightroom is about 5 out 10 or worse and PS is about 3. It has a slightly different approach to pp but you can create workflows with all the filters you normally use including Raw. It is a bit slower than ON1 with about the speed of Lightroom on my iMac. There are many things to like but it is still a version 1.0 release with some bugs. I would rate their customer service about a 3. If you are a pc user I would really wait on looking at it as the pc version is pretty basic without much of the functionality of the mac version.

An interesting new possibility is to use Apple Photos with a new extension created by the old head of development for Aperature. It is called Raw power and it adds raw processing to Photos. You then could use plugins to Nik (though I've heard some issues with Nik free plugins from Google working with High Sierra), on1, macphun etc for stylized images.

One other mac product you might be interested in is Pixelmator Pro which is due out soon. If you are more of a graphic artist type of photographer it may be of value.

Lots of choices and as you said many may not last especially if their customer service or pricing is poor. That includes Adobe with its changes to Lightroom. I would be using it as my DAM with extension but I won't pay for a subscription license which include Photoshop as I don’t use it at all and shouldn’t have to pay for it.

Right now I think On1 will become my product of choice.

I strongly suggest you do a trial first , especially if you are on PC. 2018 was released yesterday with a ton of issues especially on PC. There is a support page on Facebook and it is blowing up.