Aftershot Pro: got that swang.
Since the early betas, my favorite raw converter has been Lightroom. However about a year ago, became disenchanted with proprietary operating systems and have since been using Linux and thus linux supported raw editors. I have been having some serious growing pains. I have devoted the time to become proficient in several raw converters like darktable and raw Therapee, but have found that while being feature rich they lack fluidity in workflow. While fine for individual image editing, slogging through a five hundred photo shoot quickly makes these issues as unbearable as a pair of tight leather sandals in a marathon. One linux supporting program that was famous for its decent workflow was despite not being free was pretty much crap, and called Bibble. Since Bibble labs was acquired recently I decided to give Corel’s Aftershot Pro a go, because ugly parents sometimes have cute offspring and I hate freedom. Right away the garish icon and early 2000's splash screen were rather foreboding. After about a week I had it pretty well sussed.
file management is very well implemented. You have the option of using a aesthetically painful file manager, but its much better to use make a catalog and use the library (just a database, and doesn't copy photos to itself) if you like to keep work and play separate you can make multiple catalogs. browsing files from the library is the familiar directory tree view with nice simple icons. importing is fast enough and soon you are up and running (ctrl-I imports folders from your hard disk). you can choose between a grid, preview and film strip or single image view. You can delete/move and rename photos to your hearts content. rating of photos is super easy and you can view pictures full screen (F6) and hit number keys to assign star ratings. Moving to the next/previous picture is done with the bracket ([ ]) keys. picks are flagged with the period key and rejects are flagged with the comma. Demosaicing is very fast and zooming is very fast and fluid on my amd A10-4600m machine. after rating, filtering is done with a pop-up menu accessed from a funnel icon much like Raw Therapee. You can choose equals, equals and greater than or equals and less than plus colors and flag options. This works very good for the three pass winnowing workflow I use. my one criticism is that there isn’t a button to get rid of all tool bars to eliminate distractions and maximize image size when rating.
The raw editor is both is strangely enough its greatest strength and its biggest disappointment. the controls while taking some getting used too, are pretty damn awesome. the basic adjustments tool set has almost everything you need to develop almost photo. white-balance, exposure compensation, blacks, straightening, highlight recovery, fill-light, sharpening, noise reduction, saturation vibrance, and hue. controls are responsive and easy to use. double clicking on the image brings you to 1:1 and there is a loupe view for an Apple Aperture like loupe view. There are two different algorithms for auto toning called auto level (by default clips 2% or pixels white and black) and a proprietary one called perfectly clear that... well i'm not really sure It appears to be some kind of colonel's secret blend of 11 curves and sliders. sometimes one works better than the other and occasionally they work in tandem. They can be quite handy in getting pretty close. Noise reduction is handled in three stages: impulse noise reduction, raw noise reduction and noise ninja. impulse is just on or off. a pity, because judicious use of impulse nr was quite effective in raw therapee. raw noise reduction I think is just copy/pasted from the dcraw feature of the same name, and noise ninja is a proprietary wavelet based algorithm developed by picturecode. the basic plugin is available by default but to get the advanced functionality (finer controls like separate chroma and luma sliders and smoothness) you can use your licence of noise ninja 2.2 or picture ninja ($120) if you have one. Sharpness is a single slider and has been the single source of disappointment so far. as it turns out pixel peeping reveals that ASP photos are have noticeably less resolution and micro-contrast while having more moire than pretty much every other raw converter ever. This is however pixel peeping and I am skeptical as to whether this will show up in prints. In fact I'm pretty sure it won't. Using downloadable plugins you can access wavelet based sharpeners and usm ones but nothing really address the underlying problem which I think is, a very fast but rough demosaic engine. possibly something like AMAzE from Raw Thereapee it would be both much sharper but possibly excruciatingly slow like RT.
Exporting is like nothing I have ever seen in raw editing. often a photo can be exported in two or three seconds. the program must be editing full sized photos in realtime nd just writing them o disk on export. its still really cool though. exporting fifty pictures from a 5d took less than two minutes, remarkable.
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update
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there has been an update since I wrote this and the new version is 1.1.0.30 new features include slightly better image quality, more cameras and most importantly opencl support. open cl is AMAZING now exporting 50 eos 5d raw files takes 34 seconds. we have gone into plaid!
