AfterShot Pro 3 as a Lightroom competitor
|AfterShot Pro 3 a Lightroom competitor, this is the full-bodied announcement from Corel releasing the software last week.
Introduction
This was a powerful announcement from Corel last week, mainly because doing batch exports 4 times faster than the main competitor Lightroom. AfterShot Pro 3 was developed from the former RAW converter Bibble, which is available for 64 bit operating systems only in the most recent version. Supported operating systems are Windows, Mac OS and Linux. A list of the system requirements and supported cameras is available here. Versions for testing purposes are available for download after registration.
A comparism table made by Corel comparing Lightroom and AfterShot Pro 3 in features and in terms of costs, Corel result is that AfterShot has a more attractive price compared to Lightroom CC. Comparing the prices of AfterShot and Lightroom CC isn’t fair at all, because it doesn’t consider that you’ll also get Photoshop CC with Lightroom CC.
Usage
The control elements are positioned like in the most programs, on the left hand side the catalog view or the file browser. In the middle you have the selected image or a grid view and on the right hand side you’ll find the controls for processing the image. Processing controls are devided in a couple of panles like for color, details, metadata and so on.
No catalog
Compared to Lightroom Corel promotes the fact that there is no necessity to import the images into a AfterShot catalog. For this you’ll switch to file browser mode
On the left side the filesystem is shown, so you can select a folder with your images in it. After selection you’ll get a hint on the screen about previews being generated. This is pretty fast and you’re able to view a single image. Switching to a 100% view sometime will lead into the following error message :
This error will pop up from time to time and even worse you’ll get it sometimes in the catalog mode.
Comparing with Lightroom
Most interesting to hear was the Corel statement claiming to be up to 4x times faster on batch exports compred to Lightroom. I would have loved to present you a table with the times for JPEG and 16-Bit tiff batch exports for Lightroom and AfterShot Pro 3. But i didn’t make it to export a timelapse sequence shot with a Canon 7D consisting of 207 images or a huge panorama shot with 5D MK II consisting of 149 images completely. AfterShot Pro 3 shows the needed time like 2:46 min for 207 images and a meaníngless message, that 147 exported images ran into errors. Even the logfile only states undefined decoding errors in the Canon RAW files. Naturally exporting the images with Lightroom could be done without any errors and completely.
Conclusion
Both bugs viewing an image and not doing a batch export export completely disqualify AfterShot Pro 3 and are annoying. Processing features are satisfactory, if you’ll get an image. But to be a Lightroom competitor Corel has to do a big job. Missing lens profiles for a Tamron 2.8/28-75mm or a Panasonic 45-150mm aren’T excusable, because both lenses are arround for quite some time. The export functions seems to be faster compared to Lightroom and i’ll do a batch export pretty often because of my favour for timelapse sequences, but because of the severe errors i would never switch to the Corel product.
And the comaprism made by Corel is very weak, considering a simple graduated filter plugin to be sold 12,99 €. In addition the Aftershot application is 64 bit only, but the plugin still is released for 32-bit systems only.
All in all Aftershot Pro 3 downs’t leave a good impression and Corel is far away from being a serious competitor to Lightroom. Now i’m interested do you use AfterShot for your image proecessing work-flow? I’m looking forward to your comments and questions.
ciao tuxoche