Railfan Technology > Lightroom / Photoshop alternatives

Guys,
looking for suitable options to the Adobe on line solution for Lightroom and Photoshop. I am running a late 2009 27" iMac, currently running the "Lion OS", but may switch up to Yosemite with a new hard drive upgrade.

Thanks in advance,
John B

How about Photoshop Elements? Has a lot that Photoshop offers, enough for most amateur photographers, at a fraction of the cost. It does not directly process RAW files but it is very comprehensive aside from that. It also does not require a "Creative Cloud" subscription. It is a stand-alone user-side install and it's available for both Windows and OS X.

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements/faq.html

Adobe still makes Lightroom available by itself.  Currently Amazon has it for about $149.  For those of us who have absolutely no need for Photoshop, it is--in the long run--a cost-effective alternative to Adobe's Creative Cloud $9.99/month plan.  I still believe that when Adobe has a large enough customer base, that $9.99 price for CC will go up significantly.
 



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/16 17:18 by lanewsman.

I use stand alone Lightroom and it works very well. 

 lanewsman Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Adobe still makes Lightroom available by itself. 
> Currently Amazon has it for about $149.  For
> those of us who have absolutely no need for
> Photoshop, it is--in the long run--a
> cost-effective alternative to Adobe's Creative
> Cloud $9.99/month plan.  I still believe that
> when Adobe has a large enough customer base, that
> $9.99 price for CC will go up significantly.
>  

Bob Wilcox
Charlottesville, VA
My Flickr Shots

I'm running Lightroom 3.6 on Mac 10.6.8.  I too will eventually have to upgrade both my machine and software.  But for the time being I'm ok.

KG

I use ACDSee from ACD Systems.  Does most of what the latest PSE does, and does it better!.  Try a free trial.  You might really like it.

Ed

onOne is a full featured photo program.

Posted from iPhone

I will second the votes for onOne and ACDSee!  I use both programs.

​ACDSee has some great features - such as the LightEQ feature and I really appreciate the new Dehaze tool, which helps Kodachomes from 40 years ago taken on gray summer days in Western PA.  Noise reduction / smoothing is great as well.  ACDSee is where the Kodachromes go first from the scanner - workflow is scan as a .dng file and then to ACDSee.

​onOne has great color to B&W tools, as well as a multitude of presets to correct/adjust/save colors.  You can click on them to try them instead of trying this, that and the other.  Filters are also easy to apply.

​I am (very slowly) scanning Kodachromes (and some Ektachromes) from the late 1970's onward, and both have been indispensible in salvaging slides from the days when I really didn't know what the heck I was doing.  At least I had the foresight to save the bad ones.

​Last tip from my perspective: if you can scan to .dng, do so.  Adobe Camera Raw is sometimes the first step for those images when I really blew the exposure.

​If I had to choose one or the other for working on older material, it would be ACDSee.

​If I had to choose one or the other for working with new material, given that I have better equipment and skills now than I did 40 years ago, it would be onOne.

​(And now you know why I have both)

Press25
 

onOne is announcing a RAW tool coming this fall. So much of my processing is done in PSCS6 using Adobe Camera Raw I have kept a Windows 7 laptop running for that. When I got the Win 10 laptop I got a great deal on the current Lightroom. I thought I could use Lightroom to access ACR in the normal way. Unfortunately that is not the case. You need to set up the image file in your file ID system before Lightroom will even look at it.

Posted from iPhone

trainjunkie Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> How about Photoshop Elements? Has a lot that
> Photoshop offers, enough for most amateur
> photographers, at a fraction of the cost. It does
> not directly process RAW files but it is very
> comprehensive aside from that. It also does not
> require a "Creative Cloud" subscription. It is a
> stand-alone user-side install and it's available
> for both Windows and OS X.
>
> http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements/f
> aq.html
Does PSE 14 Still come with ACR for processing RAW files? That is the combo that I use and it is so seamless that it acts as one complete package!

Old Bob out in Lost Wages