After nearly twelve years away from the Adobe megalith I at last found post capture software that I like and does what I need in simple straight forward and yet thorough way.
In this intervening period I have tried just about every image processor in the App Store and also many that arn’t. DXO 8.5 has evolved into an excellent balance of file management and image processor that the Light Room / Photoshop combo could learn much from. I first used one of the early DXO versions when I used Canon equipment along with NIK’s wonderful tools also since their inception.
In 2012 because of the attraction of Fujis wonderful colour science and a long familiarity for their original film stocks I switched to the magnificent but ploddingly slow X-Pro1. I loved and fitted with that camera and learned very quickly to process its images in Affinity Photos version 1. This came about as a result of not being able to use the ill fitting Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom combo which had been in my arsenal on since the late eighties plus a few years diversion into the amazingly fast Aperture. Photoshop and Lightroom murdered the brilliance of the Fuji files, they came good eventually but not before Affinity had treated Fuji’s quality with tender respect. When Adobe switched to the horrible (for independent artist photographers) subscription model, after thirty years of regularly paying Adobe’s inflated A$ prices enough was enough…
BUT what to do about a file manager. The only one that fitted with Affinity and Fuji files was PhotoMechanic which is brilliant in the file handling department but tedious when it comes to metadata especially when I had something in the order of 305,000 files. Re modifying that lot was a job that never really was completed.
However, I made this combination work for another four years. Stark financial reality struck again earlier this year when Camera Bits software the good people who authored PhotoMechanic decided to go down the Adobe subscription route I might have suffered this But DXO vers 8 was discovered and found to be a brilliant combination of everything I needed plus a lot of features that adobe have yet to understand. I put it down to the fact that DXO is European and are more understanding of subtlety.
If Camera Bits had stuck to a paid version upgrade model I would likely stayed with the Affinity Photos Photo Mechanic combination but the meta data issue was still a lingering rose thorn in the thumb.
Affinity also produce Affinity Designer and Publisher both of which walk all over the bloated Illustrator and In Design combination and I will still continue to use the very polished Affinity products as they are a lovely informed fit with DXO.
The approach that DXO has taken in basic image processing is a very different approach. Indeed I would go so far as to say unique from anything that I have spent days wading through in the last ten years. Affinity Photos will continue to be used for compositing multiple layers when needed as it is in many respects ahead of Photoshop in its functionality. So there it is a twelve year trip back to a point where as a craftsman I am happy with my tools again… And what has all this got to do with our wonderful Tamar wetlands you might ask… Well it’s very simple Dxo has got me to a place where I can process Infra red very quickly and better than any other software I have ever used…