Bye Bye, ASP. I never loved you.

andrewj · Post by **andrewj** » Sat May 25, 2013 7:12 am

Well, I'm off...

If there's no prospect of a RAW processor being updated then it's effectively dead, and I can no longer allow the death of ASP to control my camera buying decisions. After a bit of investigation, I've concluded that CaptureOne is the best solution for my personal requirements, and I've made the switch. If you're interested, I've posted some notes on my blog: http://www.andrewj.com/blog/2013/whats- ... -software/

(Your Mileage May Vary, as the Americans say, so please don't reply just to tell me you have a different preference - I'm not interested).

ASP with it's ghastly interface was never as good as B5, and I will retain B5 (which does support all my old cameras) for those occasions when I need the power of some of the plugins, like Tintin's excellent zPerspector.

Bye!
Andrew

madsec · Post by **madsec** » Sat May 25, 2013 10:11 am

Seems so that ASP isn't dead after all, for now at least:
http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=50739

andrewj · Post by **andrewj** » Sat May 25, 2013 11:14 am

Oh well... Timing is everything, and this is too little, too late. PhaseOne have had my £200.

Andrew

andysalay · Post by **andysalay** » Sat May 25, 2013 2:56 pm

andrewj wrote:PhaseOne have had my £200.

You surely won't be dissapointed.

C1 has excellent quality, especially regarding demosaicing, and noise removal.
There is very good automatic (adaptive) counteracting of denoise induced softening.

I have made very careful comparisons especially at detail level,
of PhotoNinja, ASP/Bibble, and CaptureOne.
I was focused on denoise quality and detail retention on heavy shadow lifting.
Guess what I found?

C1 (process version 7) wins by a huge margin.

worst Shadow quality ASP
in-between Shadow quality PhotoNinja 103
best Shadow quality C1 v7

Look at the details in chroma channel. (Colour is well retained even in a very small objects).
Competition of C1 has much greater colour smearing.
The areas with lower contrast are much better defined, especially in comparison with ASP.

Sadly, I have a feeling, that even if ASP will wake up from ash, it will never catch up the quality level of competition.

Though, I prefer colour (saturation) response through whole luma range better on ASP, over C1.
Often dark regions seems more saturated than I would like, on C1.
If I lower the saturation to my taste on shadows and lower midtones, the higher midtones and highlights lose saturation too much.
There should be some kind of tool to control the saturation selectively according to luminance. And I miss selective WB on a layer. Apart from this there is very little to complain. Even the (crippled - in comparison with Bibble/ASP) layer functionality works surprisingly well.

But I miss the approach of Good-old Bibble with excelent plugins, and the TOTAL control over the image. Sigh.
So I am waiting for some discount on C1.

Regards,
Andy Salay

andrewj · Post by **andrewj** » Sat May 25, 2013 5:21 pm

Hi Andy
Thanks for the notes. I agree about shadow and midtone saturation in C1 - I've noticed the same thing, but I'm hoping that selective colour adjustments will work well for most of my images.

If you Google for Capture One discounts there are a few 10% off offers until the end of May if that helps.

Andrew

afx · Post by **afx** » Sat May 25, 2013 6:53 pm

The frustrating thing with C1 though is, on my D700 files HR is still way behind bloody LR ;-(

Over Xmas I did loads of comparisons. The engine introduced with LR 4 just delivers more detail and cleaner HR without messing up saturation totally...
And PN is still way too slow for me. LR and C1 are barely acceptable...

cheers
afx

jknights · Post by **jknights** » Sat May 25, 2013 10:05 pm

Well I too have moved to Capture One but the prospect of ASP being updated to support all/some of the new RAW camera formats is very tempting to run them in parallel. Especially as money has already been committed to purchase of Capture Pro.
I have always maintained that RAW processors are like B&W chemical developers. One is not good enough for all occasions.
I also want the Fuji XPro1 and XE1 RAW support which is a difficult new sensor but it is growing in popularity.

I am happy to use ASP/Bibble5 and Capture Pro 7 as my main RAW developers with Lightroom and Photoshop as second strings.
With Adobe playing fast and loose with Creative Cloud I have also decided to drop future purchases of Adobe products and will use Acorn Editor http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/
For $30 it is a great backup product and if you dont like it (it is Mac only at present) then there is also GIMP.

ferdinand-paris · Post by **ferdinand-paris** » Sun May 26, 2013 9:11 am

andysalay wrote:I have made very careful comparisons especially at detail level, of PhotoNinja, ASP/Bibble, and CaptureOne. I was focused on denoise quality and detail retention on heavy shadow lifting. Guess what I found? ... [snip] ... But I miss the approach of Good-old Bibble with excelent plugins, and the TOTAL control over the image. Sigh.

And therein lies the danger of this period of ASP's slow decline. Many of us have been forced to look elsewhere, and once you start that process it's amazing what you find. But even before I started that process of looking I was increasingly dissatisfied with the colour rendition of ASP compared to B5 for Nikons. While Jeff may add new cameras, I doubt that his assigned task is to re-look at existing cameras. And like Andy, I've also become a little disillusioned with its rendering of fine detail, and I doubt that this is part of his mandate either, although the new NR engine will have some bearing of this.

Did I ever love ASP? Like with a teenager, my relationship with ASP (and also B5) has been conflicted, part love and large measure frustration, and not something that I could unreservedly recommend to someone else despite the attractions to me. I suspect it will always be like that. But for the sake of the Linux crowd I hope it continues in some form.

F_P

jp_wieseth · Post by **jp_wieseth** » Sun May 26, 2013 12:14 pm

I changed to DXO Optics Pro 8. This program have a very very good automatic camera and lens corrections. It is very indensiv maintained. I miss some features of AfterShot Pro, but overall I am very satisfied. Bye Bye AfterShot.

tundraquad · Post by **tundraquad** » Sun May 26, 2013 12:56 pm

jknights wrote:Well I too have moved to Capture One ....

No thanks!

Since Phase One consider linux users as a bunch of kids that shouldn't be using a camera, but just play with a Game Boy, it tells me 1 thing: Being narrow minded.
Therefore, what's their future is going to be while having a such attitude?

So long,

afx · Post by **afx** » Sun May 26, 2013 1:09 pm

tundraquad wrote:Therefore, what's their future is going to be while having a such attitude?

The more interesting question is, what will happen when the fat digital backs are less and less necessary for the areas of photography that they now dominate. Plenty are switching already to the D800E.
This is a small team that depends on the digibacks....

cheers
afx

tundraquad · Post by **tundraquad** » Sun May 26, 2013 4:02 pm

I more than aggree.
They are in a such specific area of photography (fashion photography, medium format, mac world).
Even such great photographers like Elizabeth Carmel are little by little switching from medium format to the D800. The quality is there and keeps improving. I predict a better future for software companies having a good development team and very open minded.

So, "Corel", if you are listening, you still can take your chance!

cheers

Clari · Post by **Clari** » Tue May 28, 2013 9:16 pm

afx wrote:
tundraquad wrote:Therefore, what's their future is going to be while having a such attitude?
The more interesting question is, what will happen when the fat digital backs are less and less necessary for the areas of photography that they now dominate. Plenty are switching already to the D800E.
This is a small team that depends on the digibacks....

cheers
afx

Well, if nobody buys digibacks anymore, they still could sell c1 to Corel. This guarantees at least, their software won't die...

lundbech · Post by **lundbech** » Tue May 28, 2013 10:51 pm

"Bye Bye, ASP. I never loved you." you write?

Then why are you here, why not just walk silently off into the night? Do you really think the world cares about your loves, each of us has his own.

If your love lies elsewhere, then go there, be there, instead of wasting your precious time here.

andrewj · Post by **andrewj** » Wed May 29, 2013 5:45 am

lundbech wrote:"Bye Bye, ASP. I never loved you." you write?
Then why are you here, why not just walk silently off into the night? Do you really think the world cares about your loves, each of us has his own.
If your love lies elsewhere, then go there, be there, instead of wasting your precious time here.

I was hoping that those who were part of the Bibble community at its best might appreciate an update. I believed that those who used my plugins my appreciate an update. Judging from their very positive responses above that was correct.

If you cannot appreciate this gesture please just ignore this thread.
Andrew

Alludo USER to USER Web Board

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