Hi all
Using Photoshop and Lightroom via Creative Cloud for almost a year now. Personally I find it is more complex and advanced than I personally need. Therefore Im looking at alternatives.
I'm halfway through a trial of DXO Optics Pro 11 Elite and I like it a lot. However, before I commit to paying £150 for a piece of software and want to know if there are any others for the Windows platform that people can recommend.
Google brings up many alternatives but I want real user experience!
Thanks
As background, my main user experience is (currently) with DXO Optics Pro 10 Elite and Lightroom. I use them in combination - but only for editing. I don't use the cataloguing functions of Lightroom as I prefer to use the plain Windows file system. I have explored several other editors to varying degrees, most recently Photoshop Elements, Silkypix, Helicon Filter and Paintshop Pro. Before using Lightroom (and more recently in combination with DXO) I used Photoshop CS2 and before that Photoshop Elements.
Given your needs, have you looked at Photoshop Elements 14?
Elements is a one-off cost of (currently) £66 (at Amazon UK).
Elements does cataloguing, although if you are considering just using DXO Optics Pro then that presumably isn't too important to you at this stage.
Should you decide to use raw, Elements handles that quite nicely with a built in version of Adobe Camera Raw. This is reduced in functionality compared to the version that comes with Photoshop but is very good at what it does do (IMO the core, basic stuff) and is very easy to use. You can actually use it with JPEG images too.
One major advantage Elements has over DXO Optics Pro is that you can do local adjustments with it. You may not want to use local adjustments just now, but at some point you may find it rather useful, and having it available gives you "room to grow" with your post processing.
Elements presents its functionality at three "levels":
- Quick - which gives very easy access to basic functionality through point and click panels.
- Guided - which is more task oriented, and gives you "hand-holding" help panels, guiding you through the task in hand
- Expert - which gives you access to all the functions, and is more like using Photoshop, accessing a lot of the functions through the menus.
You can switch between these three approaches by simply clicking on one of the three tabs presenting them, so you can use whichever approach you are most comfortable with for a particular task (although of course what you can do is more limited with the Guided and, especially, the Quick approach).
One limitation of Elements compared to both DXO Optics Pro and Lightroom (and Silkypix for that matter) is that it does not have batch facilities, where you can make changes to one image and then apply the same changes to a lot of other images in one move.
There is a free trial of Elements 14 available
here.
