As a result of a discussion on a software forum, I decided to do a comparison of applications that convert raw images using one raw file shot with my digital — an Olympus OM-5 E-M5 m4/3 mirrorless camera — to determine which is best at rendering an Olympus ORF raw file.

The test applications included products marketed as raw converters — Adobe Lightroom 4.4 (using Adobe Camera Raw), which I have adopted as my primary image converter and digital asset manager; DxO Optics Pro 8, which I believe to be the best at the combination of automatic color rendering, lens distortion correction and noise reduction; Photo Ninja, a new product with perhaps the best algorithm for highlight recovery; PhotoDirector 4, a poor imitation of Lightroom; AfterShot Pro, the remake of the former Bibble Labs application that now appears to be an orphaned product; Olympus Viewer 3, the latest in the line of applications designed for development of Olympus ORF images.

Also included were software packages promoted as editors which included raw converter capabilities — PhotoLine 17, which I use as an external editor with Lightroom; PhotoPlus X6, a product produced by Serif of the United Kingdom; Corel PaintShop Pro X5, once a favorite among the non-Photoshop crowd; and Sagelight Editor 4.4, a product acclaimed by a small group of users for its unique and unorthodox manipulation of light and color.

Using DxO Optics Pro 8, I also rendered an image using the default camera software settings.

Keep in mind that virtually all developers, with the right tuning of their controls, should be able to produce equal renderings of the same image. But who wants to spend the time making manual adjustments required by some applications to do that?

These test images have been reduced to 8-bit jpegs for the web, but you can still see differences — some drastic — among most of the test renderings. I have superimposed a screencap of the histogram produced by each image.

Adobe Lightroom 4.4

Adobe Lightroom 4.4 rendering

DxO Optics Pro 8:

DxO Optics Pro 8 rendering

Photo Ninja:

Photo Ninja rendering

PhotoDirector 4:

Cyberlink PhotoDirector 4 rendering

AfterShot Pro:

Corel AfterShot Pro rendering

Olympus Viewer 3:

Olympus Viewer 3 rendering

PhotoLine 17:

PhotoLine rendering

PhotoPlus X6:

Serif PhotoPlus X6 rendering

PaintShop Pro X5:

Corel PaintShop Pro X5 rendering

Sagelight Editor 4.4:

Sagelight Editor 4.4 rendering

Out-of-Camera Default:

Out-of-Camera default rendering

I have no knowledge of how these applications render raw images from other cameras. You can be the judge of which is best at rendering this Olympus ORF raw file.

There is certainly a wide range of options.

Adobe’s announcement of Photoshop’s movement to subscription on the cloud has a lot of photographers looking for an alternative.

PhotoLine is powerful, 64-bit and multi-platform. It handles layers and blends, records, plays actions and is compatible with virtually all modern 8b3 plugins.

PhotoLine was designed and is maintained by two German brothers. They are brilliant engineers but this two-person shop doesn’t have the time to deal with the marketing side. Thus tThe interface is clunky and looks obsolete, and the English-language manual and help file are error-riddled. But its price and potential make it worth the extra effort to master the application.

I hope these videos will help folks in their evaluation of PhotoLine.

A 30-day free trial copy can be downloaded from http://www.pl32.com/.

No more boxed versions of Photoshop. Following the lead of other big players like Microsoft, future Photoshop will be a cloud-based application available by subscription. The change does not apply to Photoshop Elements nor Lightroom. But many photographers using CS6 are extremely upset.

These negative responses are mostly emotional. However, Adobe’s justification is rational — this change must be made to accommodate the move to mobile computing. There’s an excellent discussion of the issues involved on The Grid.

While the move to CC may be logical for the professional photographer who can pass along monthly software subscription charges through customer billing, it’s not common sense for the enthusiast amateur.

Most of us are shooting in raw, and if we’re not already using Lightroom, we soon will be. With Lightroom we can develop, organize, publish and non-destructively edit our photos. The beta of Lightroom 5 adds heal and clone capabilities to the non-destructive list. The major plugins we use now come in Lightroom versions or with apps that allow them to be used in Lightroom.

We do need an external editor for those occasions when corrections using layers are needed. But it’s not worth spending 50 US dollars or 20 US dollars per month for the full Photoshop package or simple Photoshop.

Our two best alternatives available as 64-bit applications for either the Windows or Mac platforms are PhotoLine 17.5, sold for $77 US dollars or Photoshop Elements 11 currently available from Amazon for 60 US dollars.

PhotoLine’s significant advantage over Elements is the ability to record, not just run, actions and it works in 16-bit, not just 8-bit. Both of these applications will be adding users from the former Photoshop users rank.

PhotoLine is a cheaper, yet powerful, alternative to Photoshop for external editing in Adobe Lightroom. If you don’t want to spend big bucks on CS6, consider an evaluation of PhotoLine. PL lacks the snazzy look of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. But it has layer/blend power, records and runs actions, and contains just about all of the features you’ll need from an external editor for Lightroom.

Meanwhile, the beta version of Lr 5 continues to impress me. In the Develop module, the new Radial Filter and and automatic alignment of vertical and horizontal lines are significant improvements. Both of those, of course, work on the raw file with instructions stored in the image metadata. If Adobe continues to advance this product, the day may come when we’ll never need an external editor.

When Lr5 is released, Adobe could capture an even larger slice of the raw image development and organization market.

There’s no doubt Lightroom is already the big dog on the block. Capture 1 is almost exclusively high-end camera market. Photo Ninja, a new and excellent raw converter, appears to be heading for a niche share. The 1.1 beta includes a Photoshop plugin. All the other contenders for your raw-processing needs are far behind or have dropped out of the race.

First, John Cornyn, the state’s senior senator in the United States Senate, and our very junior — junior high would be more appropriate — senator, Ted Cruz, voted with the majority to kill an effort to require more thorough background checks for persons buying guns.

Never mind there have been 1,280 gun deaths in the United States since Sandy Hook. Never mind there were 32,132 deaths in the U.S. due to guns in 2011. Never mind guns are used in most suicides in the U.S. Never mind guns are used in most homicides in the U.S. Never mind guns take innocent lives. Never mind guns are typically used in mass killings like Sandy Hook. Never mind that the states with the most gun laws have the fewest deaths due to guns.

Cornyn and Cruz chose to ignore the facts and vote for the arms industry in this country and its public relations arm the National Rifle Association. Cornyn and Cruz chose to join the side using fear, smear and lies to scare voters and intimidate senators up for reelection next year. Eventually voters will get fed up with their tactics.

Back home in Texas, Governor Rick Perry took time off from his efforts to attract gun manufacturers to Texas to appear at a news conference with other state officials responding to the explosion of the fertilizer facility in West, Texas, just north of Waco on IH35. There were an unknown number of people killed and perhaps hundreds of people injured. Among the victims were members of the West Volunteer Fire Department who responded initially to a fire at the plant.

Perry, who will likely make another run for the Republican presidential nomination, made a statement, but let representatives from various Texas agencies take questions about lack of inspections and regulation of the facility. There was no information on why the state fails to maintain standards of training to deal with chemical fires and explosions like this tone. The news conference was timed to make the 6 p.m. newscasts in the state’s television markets.

Meantime, the man who hopes to replace Perry as governor, Attorney General Greg Abbott, was on the scene in West for a news conference, part of which was carried live by the Austin TV stations’ 6 p.m. newscasts. Abbott described what he saw in a helicopter ride over the area a little earlier in the afternoon. Abbott’s description was very bad and added absolutely nothing new to what viewers had already seen in video shot by the news media.

General Abbott’s official duties have nothing to do with response to a public disaster like this one. He was there for one reason — public exposure. The attorney general should apologize to Texans for attempting to use tragedy for political gain.

Lightroom does a good out-of-the-box job for some camera/lens combinations, but other camera brands require the addition of presets or the time-consuming task of producing custom profiles to get the best automatic effort from Lightroom.

That’s why some photographers choose another developing program before sending the image to Lightroom.

For owners of the Olympus OM-5 E-M5, here’s a comparison of automatic rendering of that camera’s raw files by three excellent external raw converters — DxO Optics Pro 8.1.5, Photo Ninja 1.10 Beta 3 and Olympus’ own Viewer 3. These are the default renderings to TIFs, no other adjustments applied, converted to 800×600 jpegs. Click on the image to see the full size.

First is a close-up of poppies of a somewhat subdued red color.

With that image, there appears to be little appreciable difference among the three products.

Next is a set of close-ups of a bulbine flower, featuring yellows, oranges and reds.

In this case, there is little or no difference between the renderings of DxO Optics Pro and Photo Ninja, but the Olympus Viewer 3 produces more intense colors.

The third image is a yellow aster.

Here, each product renders the colors differently. DxO provides more detail than the others, but is darker. The Oly developer renders a flower color that is warmer and more intense. A brighter yellow for the aster flower is rendered by Photo Ninja.

Finally, a close-up of Red Drummond phlox flowers.

In this matchup, there are definite differences among the three developers and a clear winner in rendering. DxO Optics Pro is the only one of the applications to mute the red blowout enough to render details in the flower pedals. Surprisingly, the default rendering of Olympus own product is unacceptable. The worst effort comes from Photo Ninja.

It should be remembered that all three of these raw converters are very good and can produce essentially the same rendering with manual adjustment.

Photo Ninja is a brand new product that has already gained significant respect for its ability to recover blown-out highlights, and perhaps soon the problem handling reds from Oly raw files will be resolved.

Viewer — free to owners of Olympus cameras — is just out in version 3. It’s clunky, but usually spot-on in its rendering of ORF files. Maybe there will be a patch to fix the red intensity problem.

DxO Optics Pro provides excellent automatic corrections, not only for light, shadow and color, but for lens/camera combinations, too.

A preference of one of these three is usually a photographer’s personal taste.

The list of enhancements include:

• Support for PNG file format,
• Use of the F key to produce a true full-screen view of the image,
• Use of a black and white mask to make spot identification and removal much faster
• Changes to the Healing Bush, enabling it to deal with shapes, not just circles,
• The addition of an intelligent Upright tool to straighten images and resolve problems with skewed horizontal and vertical lines,
• The addition of a Radial Gradient tool to assist the photographer in focusing the viewer’s attention to the important part of the image,
• And a long set of other minor changes to the application.

Lightroom 5, now in beta for public trial

The release of Adobe Lightroom 4 more than a year ago — with a much lower price and many new features — brought numerous first-time users to its customer base. It also had an impact on competitors.

By pricing the application at the same level of Cyberlink’s PhotoDirector, released at the same time, it ruined that product’s chance of picking up a bigger share of the raw deverloper/digital asset manager market. The features made PhotoDirector look like a toy in comparison.

In my opinion, Lightroom 4 also played a role in Corel’s decision to stop development of its AfterShot Pro product, also released at the same time. The Lr features and competitive pricing attracted enthusiast photographers using Windows and Mac computers, some of those moving over from Bibble/ASP. (Shame on Corel for its continued  marketing of ASP despite loss of the right to use Picture Code’s Noise Ninja filter and no additional camera/lens support for months.)

Lightroom 5 is likely to have a similar impact on plug-in filters. The radial gradient tool appears to be able to do the enhancement available in some onOne and Google Nik filters. The intelligent Upright tool will likely eliminate the need for a third-party perspective adjustment filter like DxO Optics’ ViewPoint.

The new features coming in Lightroom 5 appear to make Photoshop CS6 an extravagance as an external editor for Lr for most photographers. The German published PhotoLine and Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements are much better — and cheaper — alternatives as an external editor for Lr.

I have been producing a series of short YouTube tutorials to assist English-speaking photographers evaluate PhotoLine.

The tutorials available now are:

1. How to include Topaz filters in PhotoLine actions
2. Introduction to the PhotoLine interface
3. How to customize PhotoLine
4. Part 1 of an explanation of lassos, selections & masks in PhotoLine
5. Part 2 of an explanation of lassos, selections & masks in PhotoLine

Hooray for Google!

The package includes Color Efex Pro 4, a powerful set of filters and presets for easy alteration of your color images, and its black-and-white companion, Silver Efex Pro 2, which performs similar adjustments to produce stunning black-and-white photos.

HDR Efex Pro 2, an application for producing HDR images from multiple or single exposures, is part of the package. Also included is Viveza 2, an app designed to adjust color and tonality.

Rounding out the suite of plugins are Sharpener Pro 3 and Dfine 2, a noise-reduction utility that works by profiling your camera. The plugins in the Google NIK Collection utilize control points, an innovative approach for precise local adjustments.

These 8b3 plugins are marketed to users of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture. Adobe Photoshop Elements, the stripped-down companion to Photoshop, will run all of the plugins in the package, too.

In Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2 appear to generate actions which run when the plugin returns control to the host application. Thus, they will not run in other photo editors compatible with 8bf plugins.

With one exception, the other Google NIK plugins worked in the alternative photo editors I tested — PhotoLine, PhotoPlus and SageLight Editor. Viveza would not run correctly in Sagelight.

In addition to restructuring the marketing strategy of the NIK plugins, Google has changed the look of the NIK website, adopting the minimalist look of other Google products.

NIK software has long been held in high esteem by professional photographers. The new Google pricing now makes the NIK plugins affordable for more amateurs. Let’s hope Google will extend the universality concept by recoding Color Efex Pro 4 and Silver Efex Pro 2 to run on non-Adobe editors.

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I’ve finished another YouTube video designed to help English-speaking photographers learn how to use PhotoLine.  The topic of this one is how to customize.

This German-produced image editor has long-held the reputation for being a bit “geeky” and difficult to learn. However, it’s a great external editor to use with Lightroom and other raw converters and digital asset managers and about one-tenth the price of Photoshop CS6.

I also continue to be disappointed by how it is often panned by Photoshop-centric reviewers who never seem to spend enough time with PhotoLine to find out how it really operates. In short, I think  the program’s interface and the publisher’s website — both with outdated looks — turn off potential customers.

With that in mind, I produced a couple of YouTube videos about PhotoLine.

The first was to explain how PhotoLine will record actions containing Topaz Labs plugins.

The second, just posted, is intended to demonstrate important features in the PL interface.

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I’ve been reading on the Corel AfterShot Pro User-to-User forums about AfterShot Pro dropping Picture Code’s Noise Ninja, a significant third-party feature of the software, with the release of the version 1.0.1.30. Curious, I asked for verification in an email to Picture Code and received this reply:

We terminated the license agreement to Bibble Labs (purchased by Corel) for our noise reduction technology.  The effective end date of the license agreement was this past February 16.

Corel, owned by a venture capital outfit and tight-lipped as always, never offered its customers an explanation. The product seems to have been downgraded on its website, yet AfterShot Pro continues to be marketed with a slick new video released on YouTube about a month ago.

However, I now believe the product is dead.

Late yesterday I received an email request from Corel to participate in a survey which was to take from 30 to 45 minutes.  Curious, I took it.

The questions began with efforts to ascertain my use of still-image and video hardware. Next came a series of questions about use of software, including specific questions listing all of Corel’s photo editing and video products and their competitors. AfterShot Pro was on that list. Scattered among these questions were questions about sources of purchases and sources of information.

Then came a list of questions about pricing of these generic products and the effect of bonus offers. Finally a group of questions about future pricing of specific Corel picture editing and video software. AfterShot Pro was not on that list.

If Corel intended to continue to publish ASP, it certainly would have been included in their questions about future products.

RIP AfterShot Pro.

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Picture Code, meantime, seems to be doing well without any ties to Corel. Picture Code made available Photo Ninja 1.0.5 pre-release late last month, and the company indicates that version is expected to be promoted to release status very soon. Their Photo Ninja, replacing Noise Ninja, is not only a noise remover but an exceptional raw developer. A 1.1.0 beta Mac version which includes a plug to process images directly from Photoshop without intermediate images has been released. The Windows version is expected soon after resolution of some compatibility issues.

Photo Ninja has received high praise from professional photographers who have used it.

The 60mm 2.8 is extremely sharp, and with the correct distance option selected on the side, the lens finds focus quickly. DxO Optics Pro 8 is now supporting more than 2/3 of the m4/3 lenses on the market.

This 1:1 crop demonstrates the sharpness and the bokeh potential of this small m4/3′s lens.

Optics Pro 8 makes a long list of manual corrections and adjustments, but for camera-lens-supported modules, Pro 8 provides automatic correction and adjustment for distortion, vignetting, lens softness and lateral chromatic aberration.

From Optics Pro, processed images can be sent to Lightroom for digital asset management, additional tweaking and publishing.

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Topaz Labs appears to have fixed an EXIF-loss problem occurring in its plugin hub, photoFXlab. A number of users had reported corruption of keyword and/or EXIF data when photoFXlab was called from Lightroom or as a plugin. A fix sent to some users last night works correctly. If these preliminary results are verified, there will likely be an updated version issued for all users very soon.

As a plugin, photoFXlab provides an excellent way to access and tweak the Topaz plugin suite without returning to the host application to call another Topaz plugin. As a standalone, photoFXlab can work on an image and save to an external file, including the new photoFXlab extension to save the project.

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Even though it was mentioned in the January/February issue, readers of Adobe Photoshop Elements Techniques may have missed the subtle changes in the magazine. Since 2008 the publication and its associated website have been aimed at providing education and support for subscribers to get the most from Photoshop Elements.

The magazine is now called Photographic Elements Techniques, in recognition that Adobe Lightroom, not Elements, has become the primary tool in the photographer’s work flow.

The original design had “Elements” in large fonts with “Adobe Photoshop” above and “Techniques” below — both in a much smaller font size. Now it’s “Photographic” above the word “Elements.”

Published by Photo One Media, a sister company of onOne Software, the magazine has added sections on shooting photographs and photo gear.

Gone is the regular back-cover ad for onOne Software plugins for Photoshop Elements. Instead, there’s front-cover branding for B&H Photo, which is now offering free shipping for paid subscribers of P.E.T.

A subscription to the website and magazine remains an excellent buy for an amateur photographer because they continue to be sources of ideas and valuable techniques that can be applied not only to Photoshop Elements but to other photo editors as well.