Corel Draw Suite - monthly subscription

[melek]

I don't do vector illustrations, but Corel is moving its CorelDRAW Graphics Suite to the cloud and making it a monthly subscription.

At the moment, this will sell alongside the installed non-cloud version. I don't know if Corel plans to offer both or eventually do away with the standalone version.

Personally, I try to limit the number of companies reaching into my account on a monthly basis.

[PFMcFarland]

I'm going to drop PS Elements and switch to Affinity, that is if Verizon can get their act together and fix my DSL line properly.

PF

[jamesmck]

I'm going to drop PS Elements and switch to Affinity, that is if Verizon can get their act together and fix my DSL line properly.

PF

Have you made the switch, Phil? What attracts you about Affinity.

[PFMcFarland]

I'm going to drop PS Elements and switch to Affinity, that is if Verizon can get their act together and fix my DSL line properly.

PF

Have you made the switch, Phil? What attracts you about Affinity.

Not yet, James. It took Verizon until the middle of last week to fix my line, and I haven't caught up yet on everything. Then I get sidetracked with other projects.

What attracts me about Affinity is first, it's not Adobe. I've gotten tired of the way they have dumbed down Elements, taking some features away, hiding others in places I wouldn't normally think of looking in, and crippling other features. Secondly, Affinity would be a big step up for me at a budget price. I like what I've seen of the program, and the fact you can try it for free to see if it's what you want is nice. They also have two other programs that can be purchased all three together if I want (a movie editor, and I forget what the other one is), or add them later on as I find a use for them.

PF

[Brazile]

The other is a layout editor, similar in function to InDesign. Useful for things like chapbooks, I hope. I intend to try it use it for that, anyway.

I bought Affinity when the last update of MacOS killed my copy of Photoshop (CS6, the last non-subscription version, killed because although the application is 64-bit, Adobe was still using a 32-bit licensing module that keeps the whole thing from working. I really hate Adobe these days.)

My view so far: Affinity is capable, and has many useful features. It seems to be plug-compatible with some things intended for Photoshop (curve files, some plug-ins, I believe) and obeys many of the same keyboard shortcuts, which is handy. Its UI is a bit odd to me, although I always felt the same about Photoshop, which started out semi-sane for the early 90s, but grew like Topsy into something ridiculous) but I can generally find what I need with a bit of poking around. Affinity's auto modes aren't as good as Photoshop, so my usual quick and dirty stuff actually requires me to think. Probably not a bad thing, but inconvenient sometimes. That said, I think I can get anything done I need to in Affinity, it will just take a while for me to figure out where to find things.

As Phil suggests, the price is very good for the capabilities it provides. And since I still refuse to join Adobe's subscription model, it's worth it for me. The real question is what I will do when my licensed version of Lightroom stops working. Luminar has a DAM capability now, but it's not really up to snuff yet.

Robert

[PFMcFarland]

You know, I've never understood opening up an image in Photoshop, importing it into Lightroom to make changes, then exporting it back to Photoshop to put on the finishing touches. They make it sound so freaking easy, but it's three steps to do what I do in Elements only. I don't get it.

PF

[Brazile]

I think it's intended to be the other way around: you import the whole set of photos into Lightroom, tag and rate them if you like, then modify them there. After all, Lightroom started as essentially a fancy front-end to Adobe Camera Raw, intended more for asset management and workflow. A fancy Bridge + ACR if you like. Then, if you have more localized or sophisticated edits you want to do to a particular photo, you can just select "Edit in Photoshop" on the image, and it will make a copy for you, put you into Photoshop, and then wait patiently for you to finish your work, after which you're back in Lightroom with all edits non-destructive and metadata (tags and ratings) complete. It's pretty clunky as UI (IMO) but does work as billed.

I adopted Lightroom originally as a means of keeping track (i.e., being able to find again) of my (what became) tens of thousands of photos, both digital and scanned film/plates. I tagged photos, allowing me to search for them, and when I had the patience, I rated the good ones, so when I wanted to do printing or had some other use, that would factor into my searches as well. It's extra work, but it's helped me be able to find things in that enormous pile when I needed them on multiple occasions. Made it slightly easier to do interesting print layouts and the like as well. It's also good at letting me review a bunch of photos and building up a collection to use for a purpose, whether uploading or printing.

All that said, once they abandoned the licensed product, which forced me to rent my usage of it (and threatened me with loss of access if I ever wanted to back out of that arrangement) I knew the writing was on the wall. I haven't figured out what to do about it; Luminar is not really quite ready yet. I've heard Capture One is not bad, but expensive. For the time being, LR6 still works, and I'm still using it. Mostly just hoping something I can live with comes along before something causes it to stop working.

Robert

[PFMcFarland]

So, Lightroom is Photoshop Lite? Even that way is still two more steps than having one program do it all. I'll do some more research before I jump at something, but Affinity is the front runner for now.

PF

[PFMcFarland]

Okay, here's an update on my software excursions. I kind of let things go for awhile since I wasn't doing much in the way of photography, so the issues with PSE2019 were far from being on the radar. Then I saw an article on Boing-Boing about Luminar, and all the wonderful things it can do, so I took a chance on it. Not worth the $36.00 I spent on it.

For one thing, I was hoping it would be a replacement for PSE, but when it installed the only option I was given was as a plugin to PSE. But it works as a stand-alone program, and when in PSE there is no "Send to Luminar" function. So now things aren't looking good. Then I realized the very reason I got Luminar (Panorama stitching didn't work as intended in PSE) wasn't even a feature in Luminar. Plus, every time I started the program it wanted me to go through the Start-up Tutorial. So I uninstalled it.

Then I took another look at Affinity, and it was half priced now, with three add-ons included. I went ahead and installed it, and right off the bat I was impressed with layout and functions. There are lots of shortcut buttons arrayed along the top eliminating the three-to-four steps I used to have to go through in PSE for some of them. In Crop mode the Free Rotate function is live on the cursor so I can immediately do horizon corrections as the Grid View comes on automatically when you start the rotation. That saves me three steps right there. I can see my workflow getting much better now.

Anything I can't figure out how to find or use, there is an extensive selection of videos in the Help section to explain how to do things like Panorama Stitching. I found that my way of saving the processed photos isn't the same in Affinity, since the "Save As" only does it in "Affinity File Photo" which the viewer in Windows does not recognize, nor does the Flickr Uploader, and when you click on an AFP file it automatically opens Affinity. When I want to put my finished images in their respective folders on my computer I have to select "Export" instead, then I can save them as a JPG. Just one of the little quirks of the program, but since it doesn't make me take extra steps to complete I have no issue with it.

Should be a very helpful addition to my computer. Now I can free up the space that PSE is hogging.

PF

[GrahamS]

Just a note: Lightroom isn't "Photoshop Light" as Phil puts it. LR is designed primarily for the busy commercial photographer to apply colour calibration settings for specific camera bodies on importation, RAW conversion, index, sort, edit basic things such as resize, apply a preset filter effects, tone balance, and print, all as a batch process. The image editing features are not as powerful as Photoshop. Now here's the gotcha - it is a non-destructive editing system. Once an image is imported into LR and edited, the edits will not show if the same image file is opened in any other program. Not even in Photoshop. The edits will only be visible if the same file is opened in LR. However, if a RAW file is opened in LR, it automatically opens in Adobe Camera Raw, from where the file must be saved as a DNG with a different name, a Tiff or a Jpg file, or opened in Photoshop itself and saved in similar fashion. Therefore, if you have started out with Lightroom and you have sorted and edited your imported files in Lightroom, none of your edits or indexing will be visible if you then use any other editing software such as Infinity. Only files that have been edited in LR or in PS and then EXPORTED AS A Jpg, Tiff or DNG will be visible to Infinity with all of the edits. I edit in LR or in PS and then export the file as an uncompressed Jpg with the filename XXXX_Master.Jpg in a folder called "Master Negs" (just using familiar old terminology - it should be "Master Files but that doesn't sound right.) If I import an image into LR and then want to do a particular edit in PS that is not available in LR, such as convert a B&W negative image to positive, I simply hit (iMac OS) cmd+E, cmd+I, cmd+S. the E opens the image in PS, I inverts the image from neg to positive, and S saves the result in the same location as the original as a copy with the file name XXX-Edited Master.Jpg. Closing PS then reveals the converted image in LR. Very quick, very simple. I use LR 5.5 stand alone and PS CS5, for the same reasons that Phil does - I refuse to be beholden to Adobe for access to my tools.