AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

[bakubo]

For example, on the train shot, I had to straighten. With LR I used their straighten tool. with ASP I did it b eye with the straighten slider, then I found their straighten tool, which seemed more complex (but maybe more powerful).

The LR straighten tool is very hard to find and I had to go back and reread the manual to discover that instead of clicking on a straighten tool icon (which doesn't exist) you instead click on the crop tool icon which brings up a window that allows you to crop and/or straighten. The ASP crop tool has an icon at the bottom and it also has a separate straighten icon at the bottom so I didn't have to search in the manual. Of course, after you have used the LR tool a few times you will remember where it is hidden.

As far as ease of use after you have the straighten tool I would say they are similar. I like being able to draw a horizontal or vertical line and have the photo straightened since that is the way it also works in PSE and PSP. LR can do this too. Well, PSP allows horizontal or vertical lines, but PSE only allows horizontal lines. By the way, after straightening in ASP you need to click on the crop tool and then click on the Fit button to crop away the white space. With LR you don't need to do that extra step.

After a week or so of looking at LR and ASP I am starting to form a pretty good impression of both. What has occurred to me is that ASP is to Sony as LR is to Canon/Nikon. ASP has some interesting new features and works pretty well, but has some areas that have not been thought through well and has a few somewhat rough edges. LR is a solid, professional product and more refined. I would rate LR as better overall, but when you consider that it costs 3 times the price of ASP then that influences one's evaluation too. You actually got ASP for $20 so that makes LR 15 times more expensive. LR is certainly not 15 times better overall or probably for most people not 3 times better. They are actually pretty close with some areas LR better and some areas ASP better.

I think they need to think a bit more about the catalog/db area of ASP and refine it some more. As it is it can do just about everything the LR catalog/db can do, but in one or two areas the usage is not as refined as LR. For example, the ASP catalog view in the left panel they don't show a flat catalog view, but instead, incomprehensibly, they show the original disk folder tree view of the photos. Picasa does this too, but LR shows, IMO, a more logical flat view. This is a trivial change that ASP could make. If they or anyone thinks that the current display in the left panel is better then just make it an option to show it either way.

[twm47099]

I originally got LR1 as a free offer for those who had Raw Shooter Pro (when rawshooter sold itself to adobe). So it was a pretty easy choice, and I've gained a lot of experience with it. I've recently downloaded profiles for Minolta and Sony DSLRs for LR from:
http://www.piraccini.net/2011/02/profil ... be-lr.html

and they have made my editing faster. So no Minolta/Sony profiles in ASP gives advantage LR.

On the other hand, I installed the color channel mixer free plugin for ASP that lets me do my channel swap color IR shots without having to export to PSP. So slight advantage ASP.

I also installed wavelet sharpen on ASP. I find LR's "clarity slider" easier to use, but I assume I just have to become more familiar with the plugin.

I agree that LR seems a more refined product with a lot of attention paid to the UI and appearance of the UI. ASP looks a lot like I wrote it, starting out simple, adding features, and trying to shoehorn controls wherever I could make them fit, ending up pretty cluttered.

tom

[bakubo]

I agree that LR seems a more refined product with a lot of attention paid to the UI and appearance of the UI. ASP looks a lot like I wrote it, starting out simple, adding features, and trying to shoehorn controls wherever I could make them fit, ending up pretty cluttered.

Hmm, I think the ASP UI is pretty good, just a bit different than the LR UI. In some ways I like the ASP UI better, but this is really a subjective thing so different people will have different preferences. The LR UI seems to require more clicking, scrolling, etc. so it seems to be slower in use. As far as the UI is concerned I could be satisfied with either one though.

I am comparing LR 3.2 to ASP 1. LR 4 beta is out there already. LR has had more time and more releases to be refined. It will be interesting to see what ASP 2 looks like or even ASP 1.5.

[bakubo]

I think they need to think a bit more about the catalog/db area of ASP and refine it some more. As it is it can do just about everything the LR catalog/db can do, but in one or two areas the usage is not as refined as LR. For example, the ASP catalog view in the left panel they don't show a flat catalog view, but instead, incomprehensibly, they show the original disk folder tree view of the photos. Picasa does this too, but LR shows, IMO, a more logical flat view. This is a trivial change that ASP could make. If they or anyone thinks that the current display in the left panel is better then just make it an option to show it either way.

When I was typing that my wife interrupted me and when I continued I forgot to say something that I had meant to say. The reason I say that it is a trivial change is because ASP can already show you all the photos in the catalog without them being partitioned into the original folders. Currently you can highlight all the folders in the catalog and it will show the same thing that LR does normally. There is no reason for the catalog to be subdivided into sections based on the source file locations in the Windows file system since that is irrelevant. Bizarre, but very easy to fix. Until then just highlight all the folders and you get it the way it should be.

[bakubo]

I have been playing with ASP and LR for over a week and just 5 minutes ago I noticed a little icon in the catalog window in the left pane of ASP. I hovered the mouse pointer over it and it said: Show Subfolders. I wasn't sure exactly what that might mean, but I highlighted the catalog name and then clicked the icon. Voila! It shows all the photos in the catalog just like LR does! I can't find any mention of this icon in the ASP documentation. I wish I had found this a week ago!

[bakubo]

ASP has some interesting new features and works pretty well, but has some areas that have not been thought through well and has a few somewhat rough edges. LR is a solid, professional product and more refined. I would rate LR as better overall, but when you consider that it costs 3 times the price of ASP then that influences one's evaluation too. You actually got ASP for $20 so that makes LR 15 times more expensive. LR is certainly not 15 times better overall or probably for most people not 3 times better. They are actually pretty close with some areas LR better and some areas ASP better.

Now that I have discovered the undocumented ASP feature (at least, I think it is undocumented since I haven't yet found mention of it in the manual) in my previous post I want to withdraw the above comment. This one issue was the main thing that I disliked about ASP, but now that I see that ASP allows you to see both a logical view of the catalog and a view of the catalog that shows the source folders for the photos then I am happy with this area.

I am still looking at both LR and ASP and now that this issue is resolved they are both back on more or less near equal footing. Since I installed and started looking at both of these programs at the same time without prior prejudices based on long experience with one of the programs, I think, I am able to be fairly objective and unbiased. I am trying to be since my goal is to find the one that would work best for me. I am not just looking at the current moment. I am looking at how easy it would be in the future when I get a new computer or new disk. I don't want to lose my whole catalog and have to rebuild it, which would mean losing the photo ratings, keywords, etc. Also, I am looking at what would happen if in the future the folders containing the photos were to be in a different path. Can LR and/or ASP handle that? I am reading and experimenting. Some of the stuff is not well documented for either program to tell you exactly what would happen in a few scenarios I am thinking of so the best thing to do is to try it on small test catalogs.

[UrsaMajor]

Also, I am looking at what would happen if in the future the folders containing the photos were to be in a different path. Can LR and/or ASP handle that?

I'm not familiar with ASP, but I know from personal experience that LR can handle this situation. As long as you use the file manager built into LR to relocate the files, LR tracks them automatically.

However, if you relocate files using a file manager other than the one in LR, it will show the catalog thumbnails with a ? mark. You can then click on the file(s) and tell LR to search for them. As long as the relocated file is on a drive that is currently connected to your computer, LR will find it in its new location, enter that location in its catalog, and remove the ? mark.

The next time you double-click on the preview thumbnail, LR will retrieve the file from its "new" location.

BTW, for anyone who is using LR on anything other than a trial basis, IMO one of the best investments you can make is to invest in "The Lightroom FAQ" by Victoria Bampton. It is not a traditional manual, but is organized as a FAQ file, and has answered every "How do I . . ." question I've ever had about LR. It's in a PDF file format, and makes good use of the hyperlink capability that PDF files can provide.

With best wishes,
- Tom -

[bakubo]

I'm not familiar with ASP, but I know from personal experience that LR can handle this situation. As long as you use the file manager built into LR to relocate the files, LR tracks them automatically.

However, if you relocate files using a file manager other than the one in LR, it will show the catalog thumbnails with a ? mark. You can then click on the file(s) and tell LR to search for them. As long as the relocated file is on a drive that is currently connected to your computer, LR will find it in its new location, enter that location in its catalog, and remove the ? mark.

The next time you double-click on the preview thumbnail, LR will retrieve the file from its "new" location.

Thanks for that info! I have been meaning to look into this further for both LR and ASP, but I have been busy. Taking lots of photos and going to various places recently. I will get back to this though.

[UrsaMajor]

LR is a solid, professional product and more refined. I would rate LR as better overall, but when you consider that it costs 3 times the price of ASP then that influences one's evaluation too.

FWIW, B&H are selling Lightroom for $69.95 for today only. Additional information is in my posting at

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... =25&t=6358

With best wishes,
- Tom -

[bakubo]

FWIW, B&H are selling Lightroom for $69.95 for today only. Additional information is in my posting at

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... =25&t=6358

Tom, thanks for that info. Yes, $69 for LR 3 is a really good price. If I was not in Japan now I would be tempted to buy it, but since I am not it would be shipped to my address in Texas and I probably won't be there for several more months.

Also, thanks for the poke that reminded me to come back to this thread and update it. This is not necessarily a final update since LR 4 will be out soon and I read a post by an ASP developer who said an ASP update is coming too. About 2 weeks ago I lost much of my interest in both of these programs after using them for a few weeks and, at least for the moment, have decided to use neither one of them. I may revisit them both when new versions are available.

I compared functionality pretty carefully and they match up pretty well with each doing some things a bit better than the other. ASP is a bit more flexible and allows more local non-destructive editing so that is a point in its favor, IMO. LR is more refined, as I said before, so that is a point in its favor. I found a few bugs in ASP so that was disappointing. ASP has some really nice features, but is currently let down by a few bugs and also a few areas which need more refinement and thought put into their design. As I used ASP I was struck how much my feelings toward it match my feelings toward Sony cameras: interesting ideas that are unfortunately matched with quality problems and a few areas which need more refinement and thought put into their design. If you can't wait for ASP to fix bugs and refine things then go with LR and forgo a few of the more interesting features of ASP.

I also kept thinking as I used these programs more and more the old saying about being a jack of all trades, master of none. That is a bit too strong, but is a general feeling I have. The workflow is pretty nice as long as you don't need to send the file to an editor because then you lose many of the LR/ASP workflow advantages. I think that probably if you want an excellent non-destructive editor/raw processor then the latest Photoshop/ACR is a good way to go. I have PS CS2, but it has a very old ACR that Adobe hasn't updated so not only does it not support cameras from the last few years, but features and quality are much behind the current ACR. I use PSE 9/ACR these days and it meets most of my raw processing/editing needs pretty well, but the ACR controls are stripped down compared to PS/ACR so the ACR non-destructive editing is more limited. PS/ACR is preferable as long as you don't mind getting on the Adobe money train where you regularly will make big monetary contributions to stay on board. Some are willing, but I am not so PSE/ACR is acceptable for me. I also discovered that RawTherapee 4 has even more extensive non-destructive editing than PS/ACR and I was pretty impressed when I tried it out. It can send its output to the editor of your choice for further editing so workflow is not too bad. For the time being though I will continue to use PSE/ACR since it is a bit faster and smoother to go from ACR to PSE even if RT might actually be a somewhat better way to go. If you need a photo db then you can also use others that are probably better than the built in ones in LR and ASP. For example, I have heard good things about Imatch and it is inexpensive. I haven't tried the trial version so I am just going by what I have heard. I discovered recently that the Photoshop Elements Organizer is surprisingly powerful too. I had never even run it once since installing PSE 9 over a year ago, but a few days ago decided to investigate it. I haven't decided if I will use it yet, but it is an option.

Now we get to the what I see is the fatal or near fatal flaw in both LR and ASP. It is a flaw that would be trivial to remedy, but I don't know if either program will be fixed. I mentioned this earlier in this thread and after using them both it turns out to be a rather serious problem, IMO.

With both LR and ASP you can set the capture sharpening parameters in the non-destructive editing stage and you can see the results in the preview, but you cannot for output sharpening.

Both LR and ASP allow you to save/export the file and a window comes up with many options. In this window two of the things you can do is resize and output sharpen. Neither program shows you the result of the resize or sharpen so you can't see if it looks like you want it to. The LR output window just has a very simple sharpening section where you tell it whether the output is for screen, matte paper, or glossy paper and then select low, standard, and high for the sharpening amount. The ASP output window allows you to select amount, radius, and threshold for usm. In both cases all you can do is have the program save the file and then you can go look at the resulting file to see how it looks and then return to LR/ASP and change it if necessary and repeat. In PS/PSE/PSP and every other program I have used you can preview the sharpening result in the window before saving. With those I vary my sharpening depending on the image so I don't sharpen all of them the same.

This area is a hole in the LR/ASP functionality. The choice they both give you is to resize and output sharpen blindly and then open the resulting file separately to decide if you like the results. If not then you have to repeat it all. Another possibility is to send the full file to your editor (PS, PSE, PSP) and do the resize and output sharpen there before saving the final file. Of course, if you do that then you have significantly worsened your workflow and partially defeated the purpose of using LR/ASP if all that was needed was a resize/sharpen.

It seems to me that LR/ASP in the export/save window should preview the actual results so that you can fine tune it before actually writing it to disk or sending to the printer and the window should be full size so you can see the preview well. I say put the preview in the export/save as window to make it clear that this is a separate type of thing than the normal non-destructive editing that was done earlier.

Also, recall, that in PS/PSE/PSP you get several choices when doing a resize (bicubic, etc.), but LR/ASP give you no choice. For output sharpening PS/PSE/PSP give you several choices (smartsharpen, usm, high pass, etc.), but LR/ASP only have one kind of output sharpening.

This is a step backward when it comes to the final output. I used the capture sharpening in both programs and then used the export/save as window to resize and output sharpen. I also saved a full-size tiff file with no output sharpening and opened it in PSE where I resized and output sharpened. I think the result was better than the blind, blunt tool type of resizing/output sharpening in LR/ASP.

There is a difference between capture sharpening and output sharpening. Output sharpening is done after resizing (if resizing is done) and is dependent on the size, is dependent on how the resulting photo will be used, and finally is also dependent on the photo. Possibly different sharpening parameters depending on all of those things.

These programs do virtual editing until you leave the virtual editing world inside LR or ASP and create an actual instantiation of the resulting photo. Then you reenter the real world with a jpeg or tiff file. LR/ASP at this stage creates a real file (not just a preview in a window) by incorporating all the non-destructive, virtual editing you have done to make a destructively edited output file. It is at this stage where LR and ASP are quite deficient since the last part (resize/output sharpen) is done blindly, IMO.

[bakubo]

I took a look at a few notes I wrote while looking at these programs and I realized that some things I discovered about ASP might be useful for anyone using it so I will mention them here.

I didn't do extensive testing and comparison of the raw conversion of LR 3.2 and ASP 1, but I did convert several routine photos and they both seemed to do pretty well. I also wanted to see how they did with high ISO photos so I used an A700 ISO 6400 photo and Canon 60D ISO 6400 photo to take a look. At first I thought that LR was significantly better because the noise, particularly chroma noise, was much better with it. I then realized that by default LR sets color noise reduction to 25, but ASP by default has noise reduction turned off. When I turned off NR in LR the result was pretty similar to ASP. ASP has several raw noise reduction choices. The normal choice was okay, but not great since it reduced luminance noise more than I wanted and chroma less than I wanted and you couldn't adjust them separately. ASP also includes a basic Noise Ninja (an advanced version can be enabled if you have a NN license) and the basic NN had the same problem. I then tried the free Wavelet Denoise NR plugin and it allows separate chroma and luminance NR. That worked well and the result was just a bit behind LR. The same for the 60D photo. Wavelet NR is the way to go.

I also sometimes used the free Wavelet Sharpen plugin and it is pretty good too. Here is a good explanation of the differences between USM (and Smartsharpen) and Wavelet sharpening:

http://keithwiley.com/astroPhotography/ ... ning.shtml

[Winston]

I understand your frustration but there is a reason you can't preview print sharpening.
The reason is that you can't assess the result of 600 dpi print on a 100 dpi monitor.

Can you see a difference on your monitor? Surely.
Can you pick the right one? Not likely.

This isn't a super critical processing step and is a meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it adjustment.

[bakubo]

I understand your frustration but there is a reason you can't preview print sharpening.
The reason is that you can't assess the result of 600 dpi print on a 100 dpi monitor.

Can you see a difference on your monitor? Surely.
Can you pick the right one? Not likely.

This isn't a super critical processing step and is a meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it adjustment.

I see what you are saying, but you seemed to miss the point about resizing and sharpening. Not all use of photos is to make a print. I get your point though and that is why PS CS6 has eliminated preview of output sharpening and now it is all done blindly with no preview and also they have removed all the sharpening control and replaced it with a few blunt settings like in LR. Clearly PS CS5 and earlier was the unprofessional software choice since it did things in such a ridiculous, amateurish way.

Seriously though, I think that LR and ASP are deficient in this one area. It is a strange oversight and could be very easily rectified with no damage to the virtual editing philosophy of the programs since it is only when you leave the virtual world and return to the real world that the resize/sharpen/save step is done.

[agorabasta]

Henry,

Lr has the viewing zoom control that really lets you see the effect of sharpening at a res close to your output resize. Although it's limited to 1/4-1/3/-1/2 (adding 1/8 and 1/16 ratios in Lr4) output downsizing, it's still working really well. So you may do all sharpening in Lr before export to JPEG and never use the output sharpening.

You also may control the edge acuity by using the Lr scaling control. Scaling the image down really increases the acuity much more than the output downsizing does.

[bakubo]

Lr has the viewing zoom control that really lets you see the effect of sharpening at a res close to your output resize. Although it's limited to 1/4-1/3/-1/2 (adding 1/8 and 1/16 ratios in Lr4) output downsizing, it's still working really well. So you may do all sharpening in Lr before export to JPEG and never use the output sharpening.

Yes, that is a good thought. If I understand what you are saying though it means that I would use the capture sharpening as also output sharpening so I would have to go back and vary it for each use of the photo. With only the limited size reductions viewable in the LR preview and it is unknown whether the same resize algorithm is used as the one used when exporting it is a bit of a blunt instrument, but not nearly as blunt and blind as the one in the export window. It probably would work okay, but the unfortunate side-effect is that rather than have one set of non-destructive editing settings for the image I would have to vary this one. That isn't so bad, but it does sort of muddy the philosophy of LR, I think. Of course, I am pragmatic and not dogmatic about this sort of thing.

You also may control the edge acuity by using the Lr scaling control. Scaling the image down really increases the acuity much more than the output downsizing does.

Thanks for this suggestion. My LR trial ended some time ago so I can't try your suggestions at the moment, but after LR 4 is officially released I will probably install the trial and check it out.