Monday, August 18, 2014

The Anatomy of the Corel Aftershot Pro Workspace

This is a wonderful little program (it is about 1/8th the size of Lightroom) that is a repackage version of the popular raw image enhance post/processing program Bibble. It is very much in the shadow of other non destructive photographic management programs, particularly Lightroom. However I think it deserves better exposure particularly for less committed and/or new photographers. It is also worth considered as a fast pre-processing of raw photos (ie before loading into Lightroom Catalogue). As well as being fast it is easy to pick up. Hopefully a quick walk around the workspace and you’ll be ready to use the software in earnest,
anatomu of aftershot pro main screen with labels
The biggest difference with Lightroom is that everything is referenced from one screen, there are no different modules to move between. This has its good and bad points but screen real-estate becomes very important because a lot of options are available on the screen.
anat aftershot basicHowever editing a single or group of photos is very simple. Click on the file system tab on the left hand side and the browse through the file system navigation, to select the folder (sub-directory) containing your photos. Then scroll through the thumbnail and select your photo which will be displayed in the centre of the workspace. Now you can use the tools on the right hand side of the image and the standard Tab. Which contains most of the basic adjustments is normally display at the top of the list of tool tabs, there are a few extra tools to crop and rotate the photo on a toolbar below the workspace and some metadata and ranking tools on the tool bar above the works space. You can also easily add keywords (and keyword sets, found over on the tool tabs), making sure your photos are easy to find. You can easily save this in standards XMP file to load into other programs like lightroom.
anat aftershot colour plug inIn the example here I have just used aftershot pro to do a very of very standard enhancement (well my preferred ones) which involve a little bit of tonal adjust to lift the highlights a little and deepen the shadows, then ticking on perfectly clear and a touch of vibrance, Because the sky is a little washed out I have use the colour equalizer (a free plug in I’ve loaded, found at the end of the tool tabs) to reduce the luminosity of the blue (which deepen the blue sky). All done with a few clicks on a single screen.



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