Liv and a New Workflow
January 25th, 2016
I recently did a new shoot with the lovely and wonderful Liv Sage. Since I’ve been experimenting with alternatives to Adobe Photoshop for my editing, I decided to use different software for processing this new shoot.
The starting point for my new workflow is DxO Optics Pro. It does the file conversion from the original raw files. After playing around with DxO for a while I’ve settled on generally just letting it do the conversion at its default settings. That seems to provide a very good file with very little time expended by me. I then export those files as dng files for additional processing. I started out exporting the files as tif files, but found that created some problems when working with them in ACDSee. Also, by using dng files I have the option of opening them in Adobe Camera Raw if I want to use it to tweak the files further.
For the photo above I did just that. After initial processing in DxO, I opened the dng file in Camera Raw, applied the “Camera Standard” profile and opened it in Photoshop to adjust levels a bit.
But I want to get to a workflow that does not usually include any Adobe software. So, for most of this shoot I did the additional editing in ACDSee Pro 8. I open the dng file in ACDSee’s raw processing mode, make some adjustments and then continue processing in the ACDSee editing mode. That seems to be working pretty well. Here’s a shot that was processed that way:
For this shoot I was also playing around with some of my fun lenses. I did a few shots with my fisheye. Here are a couple of those, processed with DxO and ACDSee like the one above:
I have a lot more from this shoot to share, so there will be more coming. But I think this is a good start to freeing myself from the tyranny of Adobe.
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