I really do not like supporting Adobe. Adobe are monopolists abusing their position to force subscription software down our throats as well and/or upgrades on every upgrade cycle. Everything awful one could write about Microsoft in the dominant Wintel Office days one could write about Adobe, despite the very talented people they have on staff.
Adobe is a company run by the bean counters without vision and without empathy for its customers. There is a single agenda: squeezing us for all they can get while making certain no one else can make any inroads into any of their markets. It doesn’t help that Apple did break the lock on reasonably priced professional video editing (Final Cut Pro) and visual fx (Motion) only to drop the ball with their Pro Apps at the same time as imposing an iOSification of OS X on their pro customers. Even when it looks like there’s sunshine, then there isn’t.
In any case, my company owns many thousands of dollars of Adobe software but I’m always looking for a chance to support the underdog. In this case, I bought a copy of Corel AfterShot Pro during their winter sale as AfterShot Pro will work on OS X, Windows AND Linux. Might be just the trick for us to move more of our computers to Linux. AfterShot Pro used to be known as Bibble (through version 5) before the Corel purchase.
First impressions: AfterShot Pro suffers a bit from the Java cross-platform look in comparison to the sharp lines of Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom. On the other hand, AfterShot Pro is actually fast and lightweight. Unlike Lightroom, Aftershot Pro is fun to work in. You can rate, review and develop pictures at all times without switching modules. Photos seem to load faster and I feel much more in control of my pictures, more like they are in my hands than with Lightroom.
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