For months I’ve been searching for a Lightroom replacement to remove the Adobe subscription millstone from around my neck, trialling loads of different photo editors. Always it has been the lack of a decent file organiser that has put me off.
I’m currently trialling Luminar 3 which is showing great promise having brought out their file organiser in December. Organisation is easy and very quick and fully integrated to their photo editor which in ways is better than Lightroom and in others not so good. It plugs into Topaz Studio which is good and passes files to and from the editor very quickly - much faster than Lightroom which sometimes has to be restarted.
It lacks the ability however to connect to an external editor such as Affinity but it will connect to Photoshop which is rather strange seeing how it is being marketed as a replacement, an oddity that hopefully will be addressed in future versions. But otherwise, so far so good.
@Mond I hope it fits your needs! I dumped LR years ago because it drove me crazy to have to import a shoot before I could cull it LOL. I’ve been searching for a replacement too but found that with only 2,000 photos in the Library L3 took forever to start. Be careful as I found it lacking many of the features that I want in a DAM. I didn’t notice until I went to find something (a feature) and it wasn’t there haha. As with many others I think they released it a bit too soon and are planning to add features as they go along but it was a gamestopper for me that once photos were loaded in the Library the start time was severely impacted. Good luck!
I’m curious if the light rays in the image are on their own layer. If so, it might be interesting to mask that layer on the mannequin’s arm and hand. That would add to the effect of the light source being inside the sphere.
I still believe Capture One DAM is very good. While mainly a RAW converter nothing stops you to create catalogs of jpeg or tiff or other file formats. The import of large image libraries is fast. keywords, rating from 1-5, smart albums containing virtual copies of images that meet criteria you can set up without moving images from where they are etc. etc.
You can call PS, Topaz Studio and other programs direct from CO.
Catalogs can be backed up if you want either on your computer or any other media including cloud, NAS etc.
I am quite happy with this, even though my main motivation to use C1 is still the excellent image quality it produces plus the fact that you can create up to 16 layers for RAW files.
Strange, I have over 11,000 images in the library and it loads very quickly. I was advised to up the image cache in preferences, maybe that’s the difference?
I have a Surface Pro 4 with an SSD. I never liked LR because of the month of Sundays it used take to compile a catalog - until I got an SSD that is! Now it takes just a few minutes to catalog over 11Tb of photos!!!
Picasa…now there’s a blast from the past Jack! Sometimes the legacy programs do just what we want them to do. I have a few of those too.
Speed aside, it just annoyed me that I had to create a catalog with photos I was not going to keep and found using Bridge to cull first suited me better. To each his own workflow LOL. I actually keep LR around because I like the flexibility when I want to print. So I have a “temporary” catalog and will move what I want to print into LR, then remove them.
