Which one?

Jan 16, 2014
73
0
Among following what is the best for PP

I have DPP of Canon and PS-CS6 and recently installed trial ver for DXO mark.

Can you please advise/ share your experience?

What I do in PP are
Crop
Exposure color contrast correction
Sometimes Noise reduction and sharpening
Photo stitching
Rarely converting to B&W

I do not like and do
HDR [most on the time looks unnatural to me]
and removing/ adding scene objects [clone stamp]

Thanks in advance
 
Jan 29, 2011
10,675
6,121
For your modest needs pretty much anything will be fine, I'd recommend downloading a few free trials and seeing if one is more intuitive than the others, but the truth is you already have 'the best' available (arguably), CS6, that does everything you want in one package. People might say DXO is a fractionally better RAW convertor, or that any number of stitching programs is 'better' then PS at stitching, but as a rounded package PS is tough to beat for a casual user unless you are doing very specialised high quality work.

What are you not getting out of PS that has made yu look at DXO and further afield?
 
Upvote 0

Marsu42

Canon Pride.
Feb 7, 2012
6,310
0
Berlin
der-tierfotograf.de
mukul said:
I manage manually, Very few.. I do not need management program

Take a look at dxo pro optics. Though I'm a big LR fan and dxo is more expensive, the latter has more "one click" appeal and might suit you better if you don't need extensive library management features. Or, the alternative, PS with ACR import ... but I feel PS is way over the top for most everyday purposes, ymmv.
 
Upvote 0
Feb 15, 2015
667
10
Re "correct" workflow, whatever works for you and gets you the results is good. It will evolve with what you get into. Re reading, what do you want to do, and what questions/problems do you have, that will tell you what to read. There are libraries of books on PP. I'd start off with a PS book, read it cover to cover, whether interesting or not. There is a book on sharpening if that is something you care.

I use PSCS5.5 and DxO. I assume you don't want to go PS CC and pay monthly, that is a major turn-off for me. The PS RAW converter is not backwards updated with new lenses, which is the reason I went to DxO: stand alone (no subscription) where lenses/bodies are updated. However, not all my Zeiss lenses have associated modules in DxO. Given that they are spectacularly well corrected, that is not a big problem.

I just started in DxO, so have not explored too much in terms of automatization, but seems to permit quite a few things with the pre-set features. I also like the export pre-sets. I do use PS for batch processing quite a bit.

For printing, I use PS with soft-proofing and good color management workflow. For that, it is critical that your display/monitor is properly calibrated. I use Colormunki design. If you have any interest in printing, read up on color management (e.g. the Real World volume).

For sharpening, PS is OK, but I also like Nik Sharpener (either as plug-in to PS or stand-alone. Has also a bunch of pre-sets.

Canon DPP IMHO is just annoying. Particularly the limit of importing 200 files before it crashes, is a non-starter. For that reason, I have not further looked at it.

Re image management, I developed a stand-alone database (FileMaker). Sooner or later you will have to face the music. Started that back in 1993 before there was anything available. I also use various camera systems (35 mm slides, B&W, 4x5 chromes, dSLR, microscope camera, SEM), therefore LR and alike are not cutting it. My db also permits to do customized data exports, pdf generation, and generates invoices. Takes a bit of work, but has paid off.
 
Upvote 0

Marsu42

Canon Pride.
Feb 7, 2012
6,310
0
Berlin
der-tierfotograf.de
Zeidora said:
Re image management, I developed a stand-alone database (FileMaker). Sooner or later you will have to face the music. Started that back in 1993 before there was anything available. I also use various camera systems (35 mm slides, B&W, 4x5 chromes, dSLR, microscope camera, SEM), therefore LR and alike are not cutting it. My db also permits to do customized data exports, pdf generation, and generates invoices. Takes a bit of work, but has paid off.

Oh my, sounds like you have put as much work into this db as I did into my custom watermarking script that does some metadata juggling, too :-o

That being said, imho LR can take anything you can throw at it, you can even add custom metadata fields if you need 'em (with a plugin). The beauty of LR is that all metadata is xml-based and the scripts are in lua, so if you happen know that language you can do everything you like right in LR (either call a script directly in LR, or run an export).
 
Upvote 0