Carol T • Senior Member • Posts: 1,626
DxO and Affinity Phot for me...
In reply to Humansvillian • 2 days ago
1
Questions:
1. Is Lightroom the best for a beginner like me to learn post?
2. What is DXo Deep Prime?
3. How much does the software I need cost?
4. About how long per photo does a good edit take?
Any help and advice would be much appreciated and sorely needed.
So first, I won't answer the question you didn't ask, but that might make the biggest contribution to your photos...
tl;dr: Make a list of potential software, do further screening through the websites, pick a few to trial. Some have far more training support than others, and since you are new to post, look into that, too.
============================================================
I am guessing you are getting answers across most of the software that is out there lol. Some people are suggesting trialing different software, and that is a great approach, but two difficult things are going to be entangled, unless you already know how to do post, which you seem to say you don't in question 1: learning post and deciding which software works best for you in terms of an interface that works for you, the results you can get, and the price, the last of which would include whether or not you want 'perpetual' or subscription.
Another problem with trialing software is knowing all the options to even try. You did ask which is best, but if you get a lot of answers to that, where do you start? If you are interested in a lot of options to try and a rough idea of the strengths and weaknesses, you might ask for that? With the question in the title of the post?
Deep Prime is a noise reduction feature in the DxO Photolab rawconverter. In the past there were two versions, regular and Elite, with the Elite far more expensive. IIRC only the Elite had Deep Prime, the regular version only had less capable noise reduction. However, I just went to the DxO site to get prices and the check the feature sets, and I can only find one choice for DxO now, and it is $230 US. In the past DxO has offered large discounts at the US Black Friday, but even at 40% off it will still be very expensive. Upgrades are not cheap, either.
DxO also offers PureRaw, which does give you the same advanced raw conversion as PhotoLab, including Deep Prime, but does not include any editing features, I think. That is only $120 US, but you would need to use a second app to do any parametric editing or image editing.
The raw conversion is most of why I use PhotoLab, and I also like the control system and the looks I can get. These days, though, I am more often just doing raw conversion and then moving to my photo editor, Affinity Photo.
Software can range from free (free and open software, or FOSS) through $299 for perpetual or $15/month for Capture One, which many people feel is the best raw converter/processing software there is. To me, the best bargain is the Abode Photo Plan, as people have said, for $10/month US. I feel that is especially true if you use Photoshop at all, compared with what the perpetual version used to cost, esp if you upgraded even every couple of years. Personally, I hate Lightroom, and despise Adobe, so I go a different route. Once again, having a list of options to investigate would be great!
As people said, the time taken to do post depends heavily on many different factors: level of experience, how much you want to change what you start with, and for me, how many photos I have; I tend to shoot only a few images and then spend a lot of time on maybe just, or a couple, so a long time per image. If I have taken several under the same lighting conditions and want to process several of them, I usually work on one a fair bit in DxO Photolab and then copy the changes to the others and make further adjustments to each as needed, so I don't spend a lot of time on each.
