Too many swamp shots lately, I needed to mix it up a bit. The most opposite environment to photograph here is the shore, and everyone’s favorite the Pelicans.
This series also seemed like a good place to work in a new editor for image processing. For probably close to two years I have tried various different software to use as a backup to the usual Adobe Lightroom industry standard.
This series was done using ON1 and Topaz. As an editor ON1 has the ability to work with just about any RAW format as well as any other image file format. That’s a requirement for me. I like to use other systems as plugins. Lightroom always has interfaced with most other systems, ON1 does too. Most RAW editors don’t. Theres a reason Adobe owns the market. I love Lightroom, I just get frustrated with how sluggish it gets. ON1 is certainly not slow.
Nerd stuff aside; Brown Pelicans breed on the small barrier islands off the coast of the Lowcountry. They are one of the smaller Pelicans, but also one of only two that catch fish by diving from above.
Brown Pelicans off the Stono River inlet, South Carolina.
😍🤗🩵💚🍃
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Hey Ted, have you ever tried RawTherapee? 😁 Combined with Topaz, I think it makes for a very powerful RAW editing workflow. It also supports Adobe DNG camera profiles, just like Adobe Camera Raw, so you get a familiar starting point, without having to pay for subscriptions anymore. 😁😁
No, I have not. I tried GIMP and a few other open source. At one point I had several Linux servers. I’m an old coder, have had teams, etc. when I sold off our software companies I swore off anything that wasn’t close to main stream 😂🤣. The subscription model doesn’t bother me. There’s a reason Lightroom has so many tools. What I really want is a set of tools that works, are easy, stable, and fast. Oh yeah, I’m now 78 so patience is not something I don’t have much of 😝.
More than happy to sit back and watch you figure things out though 😄😄
Well… starting with GIMP was unfortunate. 😄 Contrary to what its most enthusiastic evangelists sometimes claim, both GIMP and darktable can be gloriously complicated if all you want is to process a RAW file.
RawTherapee takes a much simpler approach. No layers, no masks, no scene-referred rabbit holes. Just get the exposure right, make the colours sing, reduce a bit of noise, sharpen, export, and go outside to take more photos.
Around here we have a saying: even a child could do the laundry. 😉 – or in English : You’d have to work pretty hard to make it complicated. 😄
I think simple is why Lightroom became what it is. No layers, make a change, screw it up, deleted the last change.