Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Cheers Merc. I bought all the Topaz stuff a few years back but soon found that I wasn't using it. For the things I do (mostly wildlife and natural landscapes, both done in a naturalistic style) Topaz was doing way too much - over-saturating, over-sharpening, over-everything. Sure, you can dial all that stuff back manually, but I prefer working with useful presets which are fairly close to what I actually want to use. *Real* PP people just do everything manually starting from scratch. I mostly start with some sort of canned recipe and adjust from there. I've been using the Nik Collection for about 15 years, originally as a Photoshop plug-in, more recently stand-alone.
I finally cancelled my Adobe subscriptions about a year ago. I never liked Lightroom and mostly only kept Photoshop for the once-excellent ACR raw developer. One day maybe two or three years ago they threw away the well-established ACR UI and moved everything around so that it was difficult to find and unpleasant to use. Seeing as I had to learn a new UI anyway, I figured I might as well make a clean break and get rid of Adobe completely.
I can't remember now how I ended up with the DXO package. I vaguely remember trying a few so maybe I started with a 30-day trial version and went from there. It has bugs but nothing I can't live with. It is much faster than Adobe stuff ever is and much easier to use from the point of view of achieving a look I like without a lot of fiddling. The structure (PhotoLab + individual Nik add-ins) is weird and some of the add-ins are a bit broken. Nik Sharpener muddles your EXIF information if you save a TIFF file, for example. But that doesn't really matter: I mostly use Color FX, occasionally Silver FX or Viveza, and those three mainstream apps work just fine. I look afresh at Topaz just this week with a particular job to do and the Black Friday sales on, but they didn't seem to be offering anything I didn't already have.
The only other app I use at all regularly is Affinity Photo. I'm sure it does a heap of other stuff but the only thing I use it for is dodge and burn (which DXO doesn't do, instead you use control points which are far more flexible, but sometimes and old-fashioned dodge and burn is exactly what I need).
I believe that Capture One is very good. It certainly seems to get good reviews.
I finally cancelled my Adobe subscriptions about a year ago. I never liked Lightroom and mostly only kept Photoshop for the once-excellent ACR raw developer. One day maybe two or three years ago they threw away the well-established ACR UI and moved everything around so that it was difficult to find and unpleasant to use. Seeing as I had to learn a new UI anyway, I figured I might as well make a clean break and get rid of Adobe completely.
I can't remember now how I ended up with the DXO package. I vaguely remember trying a few so maybe I started with a 30-day trial version and went from there. It has bugs but nothing I can't live with. It is much faster than Adobe stuff ever is and much easier to use from the point of view of achieving a look I like without a lot of fiddling. The structure (PhotoLab + individual Nik add-ins) is weird and some of the add-ins are a bit broken. Nik Sharpener muddles your EXIF information if you save a TIFF file, for example. But that doesn't really matter: I mostly use Color FX, occasionally Silver FX or Viveza, and those three mainstream apps work just fine. I look afresh at Topaz just this week with a particular job to do and the Black Friday sales on, but they didn't seem to be offering anything I didn't already have.
The only other app I use at all regularly is Affinity Photo. I'm sure it does a heap of other stuff but the only thing I use it for is dodge and burn (which DXO doesn't do, instead you use control points which are far more flexible, but sometimes and old-fashioned dodge and burn is exactly what I need).
I believe that Capture One is very good. It certainly seems to get good reviews.