What I’ve learned in the first 24 hours of ASP2

[GoremanX]

Here's what I've learned about AfterShot Pro 2:

- this is NOT a professional product. It's a toy for consumers who like to pretend at playing photography. A professional photographer who gets this level of service from their software provider would most likely fail at his business within a year. It's a good thing I have a variety of tools at my disposal for developing RAW files, because if I depended on ASP2 exclusively, I'd be out of business now.

- known bugs are NEVER resolved. All they keep doing is adding new "features" and re-factoring the existing code. Stuff that's been known to be broken for years is still broken today, and will probably never be fixed.

- Corel tech support is an unbelievably bad joke. My support ticket has seen NO activity for over a month now, no matter how often I add comments to it. I'm entirely ignored. There's NO phone number to call once the "exclusive" 30 day support window has ended (which happened in the middle of dealing with my support ticket). The only recourse is to BUY extended support.

Greg Wood is either full of hot air, or doesn't realize that his goals for this product will never be attainable within the framework provided by Corel. Run away from ASP2... run far, far away and never look back. Bibble has been completely and utterly destroyed by Corel. In fact, stay far away from ANY Corel products at all. There's nothing good left at this company. Everything they touch turns to excrement. It just happened faster than usual with ASP.

[rjforster]

As a ASP v1 holdout I still don't see any reason to upgrade, even for the current 27.99 UKP which is basically pocket change compared to my camera gear.
Still no G1X mk2 support after all this time even though ASPv1 can read the files if you change the exif in (a copy of) the raw and make it think they were from a G1X mk1 (admittedly some manual lens correction is occasionally required but it's not that hard).

[dagd]

My first hours of ASP2 were disappointing, and I think ASP2 is a huge step in the wrong direction. Corel have intentional made changes degrading usability and integration, just as an excuse for calling it a new version.
The so called upgrade comes with too many serious issues affecting UI and workflow, and currently I stick with ASP1 even when I already purchased upgrade. ASP2 brings nothing new to quality or usability, only breaking what was good. Without workarounds, reverting to ASP1 is the real upgrade.

The first I noticed was changes completely breaking the UI and adding show-stopping bugs, and still with 2.1.1.9 more than half a year later the issues with degraded UI and broken integration are showstoppers. Seems the target is to make toy for kids. Just adding whistles and bells, and even broken ones, is not what we need. Users in the forum ask for bug fixes and quality improvements, and this is what we get. Corel obviously not listen to users (read: paying customers)!
I’ve reported some issues to support, but honestly I don’t think they’ll ever do anything about it. My hopes for Aftershot Pro are fainting away.

Anyway, I’d like to report what I find most disappointing and serious with ASP2, and have put more details in this thread:
http://forum.corel.com/EN/viewtopic.php?f=94&t=55359

More bugs are likely to come to the surface when and if these are fixed and ASP2 is put into production, but that’s a worry for the future…

Regards
dagd

[baldrick777]

Wow, there are some harsh replies here - apparently a lot of bruised flesh with lots of blood out there!

Greg, as a relatively newcomer to ASP2, let me thank you for your honesty and desire to move ASP forward.

Me, well I ditched ASP1 a few months back, mainly due to the clunky, unintuitive nature of the UI. I favoured Pixeluvo, a recently new entrant into the photo editing world. I was (and still am) highly impressed with the simple yet intuitive UI layout, yet a pretty powerful engine underneath.

What Pixeluvo lacks though, which ASP has, is the ability to apply one's icc monitor profile directly into ASP, and has 16-bit TIFF and HDR support, which is why I've upgraded to ASP2.

There are a few things that I would suggest you (Corel) would need to resolve ASAP to make it more attractive...

[*]There needs to be cross-platform support for companion products to ASP. As a Linux user, it annoys me that I can't buy a native Linux version of Paintshop Pro7! This is ofcourse fine if you are a Windows or Mac user, but Linux users often don't get the same choice of software.
Adobe has made it quite clear they have no intention of adding Linux support for any of their products, so as the next biggest commercial vendor, YOU can have the the largest slice of that market. Make ASP and PSP two separate products which are both available on all three platforms. Your first PSP Linux licencee is looking at you now, with many others in tow!

[*]Make ASP recognise all TIFF files, no matter how they've been eariler processed. I have 100's of TIFFs that ASP doesn't even recognise because they had alpha layers added to them. Come on, whats with that!

[*]Allow Linux users to apply their own window manager's title bar. The one currently is butt ugly and doesn't assimilate well (it's designed for Windows OS users, I guess)

[*]Tidy up the UI. Make it more simple to navigate, and thus more appealing to the eye. Even GIMP has a UI that is easier to work out. Sorting the UI out would make it more difficult for new (or returning) users to turn away from.

I hope these help.

All the best!

[gareth]

As a windows user, I should be (almost) happy to put up with Linux style UI if the issues of highlight recovery and noise were to be fixed.
I think UI is small compared to getting good IQ easily.
I have now gone over to Capture One almost completely to get an image out quickly.
I really miss some of the manipulation I could do in Bibble/ASP and hope to return one day (sounds of porcine aviation...... oink flap oink flap )
With Bibble/ASP plugins and cloning I rarely went to an image editor.
I also much prefer the Bibble approach of the sidecar xmp - not least as I could edit them directly for some tasks.