Discussion

James Baker

zecg: This FLOSS RAW editor works really well, btw: http://www.rawtherapee.com/

rickdg: I just use Pixelmator Pro for a quick workflow. There's a nice feedback loop between taking the shot and editing it later.

Copernicron: It works well provided your needs are simple. I rely on a lot of features in LR that simply don't exist in any open source tool. Even a lot of closed source ones lack them. As much as I would like to move to something else I'm kind of stuck.

kvgr: I started photography this year, i shoot raw because i dont like sony colors. But I have very quick process: "auto", little fidgeting with sliders, one in 10 photos gets a mask for sky and then i apply some preset that i like most for the photo. I just cant spend 30minutes on one photo.

nozzlegear: That URL and product name have a real expertsexchange thing going on that's a bit unfortunate.

graemep: I agree, but giving up editing photos rather than using a different editor seems bizarre though.

rr808: Me too, I figured I spent more time on the computer than taking pics. Now I shoot jpg and if I have some spare time I go out and shoot. If I take a good pic I share it with basic editing if any instead of waiting to get it "perfect".

anta40: Whatever floats the boat.Even back to film/analog era, taking a photo is just the 1st step. Then apply some darkroom work (dodge/burn/use some filters to adjust the highlight/shadow etc etc). Image editing softwares like Photoshop simplify the process.I mostly shoot in black & white (both film and digital). Since once of my biggest inspirations is Ansel Adams, then no I don't adhere to "SOOC" (straight out of camera) philosophy. Fine tuning in Photoshop is a must.

rpgbr: I mostly try Apple Photos’ “magic” editing. It’s hit and miss, but when it hits, the photo gets way better. When not, I adjust a couple sliders (contrast, brightness, saturation). In both cases, only when I’ll use the photo. Otherwise, editing tools will be there for when (and if) I need them.

alexalx666: I had the same experience, I mostly import b/w photos after editing in Capture One, the magic stick raises brightness, sometimes adds sepia. I always check proposed edits for new photos that I think look dull in Photos.app grid

calebm: Pixelmator Pro is great and affordable.

arvinsim: My process is to take a lot of photos, then ruthlessly cull them before I do any editing.I usually keep around 10% of the total photos for editing. After that, I do another round of culling and keep only the best.I also follow a philosophy of "good enough". If left to my own devices, I would probably endlessly edit photos.I edit a single photo for around 3 minutes. That way, I will not feel stuck.

some-guy: This is how I use my Canon t3i. Once in awhile everything will align perfectly, require very little editing and I feel a huge sense of accomplishment.

CarVac: I got tired of in depth fiddly editing and wrote Filmulator to minimize the decision-making and streamline editing. I rarely spend more than 20-30 seconds per image.You get a clean, basic look, no weird colors or overly creative "looks", but with adjustability and great highlight handling that JPEG doesn't get you.https://filmulator.orgThe current builds there are quite old but we've got new ones coming.

sanitycheck: This is great, I discovered it a year or two ago - nice work! Excited to hear there might be more development happening.

bix6: I’m almost done moving from Lightroom to Darktable. Lightroom is amazing but I don’t edit enough these days to justify $20/mo.

wesleyd: I admire what this person is doing, but some reasons I prefer raw + lightroom over eg camera jpeg are:* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)

fainpul: You probably know this, but shooting in color and then converting to b/w afterwards gives you more artistic options than letting the camera do the b/w conversion.

chromacity: I don't want to dunk on people who are discovering the charms of retro tech, but as someone who started with film and spent a fair amount of time in the darkroom, I was delighted to discover the hassle-free simplicity and dependability of digital photography, so it is a bit mind-boggling that people want to go back to that for casual use cases.It reminds me of people buying vinyl, using VHS filters on social media, etc. I think it's more about signaling some cultural identity than any objective benefits of the "retro" process. It's not like digital cameras make you give up creative control. If you want to limit yourself to 36 unreviewed shots, you can do that with digital too.That said, I agree with one thing: you shouldn't be paying for an Adobe subscription. Use Darktable, Capture One, or some other equivalent that you're not just renting for life.

asow92: For me, trying film after growing up in the post-digital world was more about exploring the experience of the medium and why we ended up where we are. It's given me an appreciation for why slowing down with your subject can increase "keepers".

Topgamer7: I tried rt, but it was really slow. I typically am taking pub league sports photos. So I try to get through them fast. Dark table really scratched the itch there.There are some bugs, like batched styles seem to be... order dependent. But its been suiting my needs for a few years.

dobladov: There's also RapidRAW https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW

10729287: Thanks for the link, this is exactly what I'm looking for as i've never been able to work with cataloguers like Lightroom or iTunes.

asow92: I've come to the same realization after shooting digital, film, and back to digital again.I've found that if I apply "recipes" or "presets" to my camera and shoot jpg I get roughly what I want straight out of camera. In fact, I find that shooting jpg exclusively with a preset _almost_ scratches that film itch: there is a kind of permanency to the rendered output, and that forces me to slow down and think about what I want to render with this subject like one does with film.Once I'm done shooting I simply import to Apple photos and make very light edits from there if any before sharing.It's liberating to embrace constraints and reduce tooling. You might even have fun.

SoftTalker: I went one step farther and quit taking photos. And this is after many years of hobbiest photography in the film era, had a darkroom at home, SLR with several lenses. Early digital cameras were underwhelming, basically the equivalent of a 110 film snapshot camera. By the time they got good I had started to reflect on the fact that I almost never went back and looked at any of the photos I'd taken, so I just stopped. Now although with my mobile phone I have a quite decent camera in my pocket all the time, I rarely use it. The "ohh I should take a picture of this" impulse just never enters my mind anymore. I enjoy the moment, and have the memories.

actionfromafar: I'm sure there is "signaling some cultural identity" around the retro stuff like actual film etc but if you think that's all there is to it, and to everyone doing it, I think you're missing the mark for a lot of what's going on out there.I can only speak for myself but when I have only 36 unreviewed shots, I feel oddly liberated. Once I'm out of the house, I don't have to renegotiate in my mind over and over to take 36 unreviewed shots or to "cheat" and look and/or delete.

postalcoder: Fuji made love photography again. Cant believe it's been ten years now since I got my first modern Fuji camera (X100F) and I've only bought Fuji cameras since then. The worst part of digital photography (for me) used to be shooting JPEG + RAW, knowing I'd never actually edit the RAW files and yet feeling too anxious to delete them.

spinningarrow: Personally, I’ve spent a lot of time on both film and digital and currently I’m a lot happier with the results of my film work. Is it a combination of the camera, lens, medium, and process? I’m sure it is. Could I get similar artifacts out of digital? Probably but the key difference is that I don’t and the medium for me doesn’t make me want to. In the end creative work like photography has as many manifestations as people and your comment reads as rather dismissive than curious.

neogodless: A few lessons hidden in here:Perfect is the enemy of good: Don't obsessively edit. Cull obviously bad photos. Find a few pretty good ones. Pick one at random. Edit lightly.Photography can focus on captures or edits: analog photography necessitates a focus on the capture. Be in that moment, frame the shot you want, and your only edit might be some color correction.While the above might not make you a 99th percentile photographer, that probably isn't a goal you need concern yourself with. I always find photos online that blow me away. Artists with the patience to plan and wait for the perfect shot, possibly for hours. Artists that meticulously cull until they find an exceptional photo. Artists that spend a half hour editing a single photo adjusting sliders.If that's not you, you still don't have to give up editing photos if you like the result better than the camera's JPG. You just have to focus on the parts you enjoy, and find balance in the quality of the end results.(And personally I love DxO PhotoLab. Purchased once on sale, no subscription. Fun to use, and I love the results!)

ageitgey: The dark truth no one wants to say out loud is that 'real' cameras are dying to cell phones not just because phones are more convenient to carry, but because phones take 'better' photos for 99% of people than they can manage with any other camera - and that's without any editing. It's all software.Yes, enthusiasts here are spending hours editing RAW files and most think cell phone pics are over-HDRed messes. But phone software is so advanced now that it takes real talent and skill to replicate the perceived quality of what users get with their cell phone's software automatically. Most people are at a disadvantage with a DLSR/mirror less, not an advantage. That leads to ever-declining sales.Why can't someone make a traditional camera with modern software instead of something that looks like it is out of 1994? The software on a Sony DLSR, for example, looks like the on-screen menu of a VHS player, but is somehow slower and dumber to use. The number of overlapping, incompatible picture adjustments on a Fuji is just as ridiculous.

alistairSH: It reminds me of people buying vinyl... signaling...It's absolutely partly this.But, for me today, as a sometimes hobbyist, it's also about the process...Digital is too good. The cameras are too good. The results are too good. There's no anticipation.The analog experience is, to be trite, so much more analog. A good vintage film camera (and probably new Leica too) feels so good in the hand. Like a nice watch, it's a piece of mechanical art. It takes time to focus and set exposure. Sometimes is goes horribly wrong, but sometimes whatever went wrong produces an unexpectedly delightful result. There's also something to be said about receiving the negatives and scans weeks or months after shooting the film - the delayed gratification is something that's lacking in today's instant-everything world. Plus, the cost of film and processing makes me slow down a beat and think about what I'm doing - no spray and pray when a roll of Portra 400 + processing is $25 or more.

TehCorwiz: This looks right up my alley. Does it properly support true monochrome raw DNG files? I.E., cameras that don't have a bayer filter and don't require a debayering pass. I'm shooting a Pentax K3 Mark III Monochrome, although Leica has a couple true monochrome cameras and there are services that will de-bayer cameras and modify the firmware to achieve similar ends.

CarVac: Yes, it properly supports monochrome DNG and disables (and hides) tools that are not applicable such as demosaicing, CA correction, highlight recovery, white balance, etc.I didn't know such firmware hacking was available. I'd been waiting for the GR Monochrome for years but it's a bit expensive for me.

TehCorwiz: Thanks for the quick reply! I'm sold. It's punching way above its weight class with those features. Have to try this out tonight.

vladvasiliu: I'm also a LR classic user. I think it's pretty terrible by certain aspects, but I haven't found anything better. No idea why the UI lags on a pretty high-end machine, even with test catalogs. And I'm talking about scrolling, or showing and hiding panels. Plus, the worst offender is making me use Windows (on this point, only Darktable is better – no, I won't buy a mac, it's way too expensive for my needs).Price-wise, it's kinda expensive, but the buy-it-for-life alternatives aren't exactly cheap, either. You should hold off updating for multiple years to save money compared to the LR subscription.Now, I haven't used the alternatives for more than just a short test-drive, but the recent improvements in LRc would have made me upgrade anyway. I'm thinking specifically about the noise reduction you mentioned, but there's also all the object detection in masking which saves a ton of time, and the ai object removal which is pretty great when I need it – saves time compared to fiddling with the old healing brush.I think the alternatives have also gained similar features recently, which would have likely required a new (expensive!) purchase. But, I guess if you figure we've reached some kind of plateau and don't expect to have a new camera in the next 3-4 years, going for Capture One or similar may be a better bang for your buck.

CarVac: It really depends on the person.I do not take photos for the memories, I take photos for art and I do go back and look at them.