Verdict: 3 stars Paint Shop Pro 2023 offers a lot of features for not much money, but only on paper. In use it’s clunky, dated and often counterintuitive – to me, at least. The image organization tools are adequate and no more, while the RAW processing, courtesy of the ‘integration’ of After Shot Lab, is a similar story. The editing and effects tools are all right, as far as they go, but it’s clear that Corel is pitching Paint Shop Pro at a beginner/crafting/value market rather than serious photographers.
Featured posts
Welcome to the Life after Photoshop archive of 'Featured' posts. These are favourite articles or tutorials that appear in the carousel at the top of the home page.
Don’t just accept Lightroom’s default Adobe Color profile
It’s easily done. You view a RAW image in Lightroom, it applies the default Adobe Color profile and you don’t even bother to question it. You can see what you don’t like, you do some editing – sometimes it takes a while – and you fix it. But often you’re fixing an issue introduced by the default Lightroom profile, and not something that actually needs fixing!
ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 review
Verdict: 2.5 stars ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac 8 is the MacOS version of ACDSee’s all-in-one Photo Studio application. From its features, it looks like a strong rival to Lightroom or ON1 Photo RAW, for example, but the reality is very different. It’s both basic and technical at the same time, it’s missing features many might take for granted, and it looks like a Windows program ported on to the Mac, even if it isn’t.
Can you create digital bokeh, and is it as good as the real thing?
If you want the short answer, it’s yes and no. Yes, you can create digital bokeh, and no, it’s not as good as the real thing. You can, however, create a reasonably convincing bokeh ‘look’.
Adobe Lightroom: what is it, where do you get it, what does it cost?
Adobe Lightroom is not one program but three. You could easily call it an ecosystem. At heart, it’s a tool for both organizing your photos and editing them. So how do you get it, what does it cost, and which version do you need?
ON1 Resize AI 2022 review
Verdict 4.3 stars: ON1 Resize AI 2022 is a tool for upsizing your photos so that they can be viewed or printed larger. It adds more pixels to make a larger, more detailed photo than you had before. There’s no hype or resizing ‘magic’ here, just a very good implementation of the power of AI.
Lightroom locks you in, in ways that other programs don’t
Lightroom exists in two versions. Lightroom (the web version) is the big villain of this piece, but Lightroom Classic isn’t entirely guilt-free. Both use a one-time import process that copes badly with subsequent external changes. This effectively locks you into using them as your sole digital hub from then on.
What kind of photographer are you – literal, emotional or graphic?
Photography isn’t just about taking pictures of things. Very often you’re trying to capture something deeper, like a metaphor or an emotion or simply a graphically satisfying image. The trouble is that what you see isn’t necessarily what other people see.
How to use DxO PureRAW in Lightroom Classic
DxO PureRAW 2’s processing is better than Lightroom’s, but it can also be used from WITHIN Lightroom. So how does that work, and are the results (a) really worth the effort and (b) as good as regular RAW files to edit?
The one great strength of non-destructive editing – it remembers what you did
Have you ever browsed your back catalog of images, re-discovered one with some edits that you really love… but you can’t remember how you did it? For someone like me who uses all sorts of software for all sorts of different techniques (and has a memory like mine) it’s a real issue.