clyx studios

Earlier this year I blogged about digital photo cataloging software.  The past month or so has seen a number of new releases so I thought it was time for an update.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

Adobe recently released Beta 4.1 of Lightroom.  This product is really shaping up nicely as it nears launch.

Although targeted at the "professional photography community" working primarily with RAW format files, a serious hobby photographer / semipro using TIFF or even JPEG would also benefit from it.  It's clearly designed as a competitor to Apple's Aperture.

There's a lot more power than Photoshop Elements, and it's a lot less complex than Photoshop CS.  Metadata support is extensive with the usual EXIF and IPTC together with XMP Sidecar.  It does need a reasonably powerful PC to make it feel snappy.

I'm a big fan of its user interface finding it both highly functional and attractive.  It has five workspaces - Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print and Web.

If you're interest in it, try out the latest beta while you still can.  (It expires in February).

On the technical side, there's some unusual aspects to Lightoom.  For instance, over 40% of has been written in the open-source language Lua.  And it uses SQLite for its library database.  It is a cross-platform product, having first been released for MacOSX. These factors should go some way to encouraging the development of addon software.

The likely price is not yet known but it will be more than Elements and less than Photoshop CS... and Apple's Aperture is A$449.  So my guess is A$399.

I'm looking forward to its release.

Tip: try the "Lights Out" mode... press L a few times.  I love it.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5

The annual update to Adobe's Photoshop Elements (and Premiere Elements) has been released.  Elements has been my favorite digital photo application, particularly since Version 4.  The question is - is it worth the upgrade?  The upgrade brings a number of new features to the product.  Some look intriguing... such as animated photo galleries, flipbooks, automatic photo stacking, and distortion and bluring correction.

The Flash-based animated galleries are actually quite cool.  There are about 15 different templates, and there will probably be more once it catches on.  Tagging has been enhanced with geotagging support and import/export of tags via XML.  Geotagging uses Yahoo Maps so you'll need a broadband internet connection.  Adobe have said this is only suitable for USA addresses, but it will actually work anywhere in the world that Yahoo Maps goes.  (eg. in the pic above, I've tagged my photos with an Australian location)

Of particular interest is the reference to new services.  I was hoping that we'd see a lot more integration with online sites such as Flickr and Webshots.  There are a couple of new services added to the list such as SmugMug, and Adobe's own free Photoshop Showcase.  Plus hidden away in the sharing options is a rather nice new feature - the ability to use FTP to transfer your creations to your own server.

The upgrade path has always been a little frustrating with only a minor discount allowed for upgrades.  In fact, it's actually cheaper to buy the discounted full version (seen advertised for A$169) than the upgrade ($A189).

If you don't already own Elements, it's a highly recommended purchase.  But I'm not yet convinced that it's worth paying to upgrade from Version 4.  At least we can take it for a test drive before deciding.

Corel Products

Snapfire is a recent addition to Corel's range.  There's a free version and a US$39.99 version, Snapfire Plus.  It's a simplistic cataloging tool that is designed to be family friendly.  It has very limited tagging support and seems to be more of a way for Corel to advertise its other products.  If you anticipate using other Corel products later on then Snapfire may be a good choice, but I think Picasa is way ahead of Snapfire and it's free too.

Snapfire seems to have been built on the Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI platform (try saying that quickly!), which is also a new update to a product that has been around for years.  Paintshop started life as a freeware and shareware product and earned wide respect.  The inbuilt organiser is quite limited (eg. it doesn't read IPTC tags from JPEGs) in comparison to other products (one suspects Corel still wants its Photo Album software to have some market share), but this update adds some quite impressive photo editing capabilities.

 Photo Album 6 is Corel's dedicated photo cataloging software.  It's reasonably powerful and reasonably priced at US$39.99.  You also get some handy bonus software such as PhotoRecovery for recovering accidentally deleted photos from memory cards.   Collages, scrapbooking, backups, and organising with phototrays seem to be Photo Album's strengths.

Windows Vista Photo Gallery

It might be late, but it's a safe bet that Windows Vista will be released before the next round of Elements updates.  Vista includes a new application, Windows Photo Gallery, that offers basic cataloging and image manipulation, output and network sharing options.  It's likely this is based in part on the next generation of Microsoft's Digital Image Suite - if you take away the Vista gloss, it has a similar feel.  (A giveaway is that the cataloging database in Digital Image Suite 2006 is Pictures.pd3 and in Vista it's Pictures.pd4)

Whilst the gallery format is not yet open and there's no API I know of, I suspect we'll see new addons and products based on the gallery.

 Photo Gallery includes tagging (apparently XMP based), captions, ratings, filters, and a photos screensaver.  It can output to printer, email, CD, DVD and has a basic set of image adjustments such as cropping, red eye removal, and automatic level adjustment.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that the photo upload / import feature isn't winning many friends.

Adobe needn't be worried about Windows Photo Gallery, but smaller players with low-end products like Snapfiles may now have a more limited future.