New Opportunity for PhotoLine

[OldRadioGuy]

There was reference to this on another thread, but for clarification I thought I would start this one.

For those who don't know, PhotoLine's major competitor in the photo editing field has announced future versions of their software will be available as a cloud-only product for a monthly or annual subscription fee. Photographers are furious over this decision. Check the Digital Photography Review for their response and some of the comments: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/05/08 ... shop-users.

This is a major opportunity for PhotoLine to pick up new business from amateur, enthusiast and even some professional photographers. Let's hope some of the review websites will give PL a closer look the next time they write a review.

Bob

[Juan]

Agree, better to keep it here

Now there is something interesting in another forum you can check it here http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f ... 886&page=9, scroll until the attachment and you will see the reason to make this move from adobe... profit

Cheers
Juan

[greenmorpher]

PhotoLine's major competitor in the photo editing field has announced future versions of their software will be available as a cloud-only product for a monthly or annual subscription fee. Photographers are furious over this decision. Check the Digital Photography Review for their response and some of the comments: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/05/08 ... shop-users.

This is a major opportunity for PhotoLine to pick up new business from amateur, enthusiast and even some professional photographers. Let's hope some of the review websites will give PL a closer look the next time they write a review.

It certainly is a major opportunity -- ACDSee is all over the place with discounts for its photo editors and photo management software. PhotoLine should be doing stuff too. But that is marketing which the brothers don’t really do -- sigh!

I believe you are incorrect in saying Adobe CS will be cloud only. That is for corporate buyers, I believe. The big news is that they are going on to a lease model instead of outright sale, so users will have to pay rent every month. I have seen the figure of $50 a month mentioned which means the user would be paying $600 a year. They would still have the software on their HD, however it could be turned off any time.

How this would work for someone like me who does not have much connection to the Internet, I don’t know. But then, Adobe wouldn’t care given the lack of Adobe software (except fonts) on my computer.

So the real killer is the lease model. That's where PL should aim its pitch.

The cloud? ACDSee is actually offering cloud storage as a free extra. Personally, I believe anyone who relies on the cloud for storage just doesn’t understand the ramifications of that. I wouldn’t touch it myself. Why would you want to put your stuff on someone else's computer when you can keep it on your own, totally backed up on pocket size HDs (plural!!!).

Cheers, geoff

[OldRadioGuy]

There is an interesting video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVzcicQi00w offering some perspective on future direction of processing of digital photography. One could infer it leaves open a nice niche market for PhotoLine.

Bob

[Wayland]

First of all can I say how impressed I am by the trial I have downloaded. It looks like very comprehensive piece of programming.

Since the announcement of Adobe's move to subscription only licensing for Photoshop I have been looking for an alternative to move my photographic editing to and Photoline is by far the best I have found.

Like many other photographers my prime concern is for the longevity of my back catalogue which at this point consists of layered TIFF files written from Photoshop.

I have perhaps a couple of years use left in my currently licensed PS CS6 so long as my machine and OS continue to support it.

By the end of that period I need to find a suitable replacement and I think your program looks like the best contender.

I have a couple of questions which I will ask as my exploration continues but possibly the most important for me is, wether are there any plans to improve the level of support for layered TIFFs in the near future?

[Gerhard Huber]

I have a couple of questions which I will ask as my exploration continues but possibly the most important for me is, wether are there any plans to improve the level of support for layered TIFFs in the near future?

PhotoLine has full support for layerd TIFFs.
What you mean, I think, is Photoshop-TIFF support. It doesn't save layered TIFFs, but includes a full PSD inside the TIFF.
We don't support this at the moment.

Gerhard

[Wayland]

Thank you for your reply, I didn't realise that was how it worked.

I see that you already have good support for PSD files so it looks like I will need to start converting my Photoshop - TIFFs to PSD first and then migrate them to PLD.

For my collection that is perhaps a manageable task using automation but I know of a lot of other photographers looking for a solution which does not include having to convert thousands of images.

Is there any way to access the PSD in the PS-TIFF to take advantage of the PSD support your program already has?

[TaiChiJohn]

I've come over to Photoline through a post that Wayland made in another forum; and I really like what I am seeing with this program.

I am ready to give up on Photoshop, too: my biggest concern is running my photo editing computer without an Internet connection, to keep viruses out of my very large color laser printer's hard drive but also to keep my archived writing projects safe. I do a lot of photography, which I really enjoy, but my writing projects are more important to me than using Photoshop for editing images.

I had put off upgrading Photoshop beyond CS4 until I invested in a 64 bit computing system; and now that I am almost ready to upgrade, I find that I will not be running Adobe products on my new machine. Is Photoline configured for 64 bit systems?

I don't think there is much in Photoshop I would miss if I switched to Photoline; most of my editing involves Jan Esmann's "Power Retouche" plug-in filters anyway, so as long as those are supported I won't have any trouble moving over to Photoline.

[Twindaddy]

PhotoLine comes in 32Bit and 64Bit "flavour" which can be installed simultanously (supporting 32-Bit and 64-Bit Plugins). Since Mr. Esman states that "CiEBV Photoline 32 (Version 5 or higher)" is a tested compatible host, it's very likely that PL17 is too . But it's easy to try out. PL leaves no mess on your computer if you finally decide not to use it. There is no risk in trying it.

[Wayland]

Hi John.

Load up an evaluation version on to a USB stick by following the instructions here.

You can check it out with any virus checker you like, mine was perfectly clean.

Plug that into you workstation and give it a go, I think you'll be impressed.

[Wayland]

Just in case you haven't seen it yet there is an interesting thread on Luminous Landscape that might contain a few ideas here.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum ... ic=78240.0

Seems a shame to let all that brainstorming go to waste...

[StephaneB]

I have a couple of questions which I will ask as my exploration continues but possibly the most important for me is, wether are there any plans to improve the level of support for layered TIFFs in the near future?

PhotoLine has full support for layerd TIFFs.
What you mean, I think, is Photoshop-TIFF support. It doesn't save layered TIFFs, but includes a full PSD inside the TIFF.
We don't support this at the moment.

Gerhard

Hi

Well, not quite. If I save an image with layers in TIFF, the layers are rasterized. I cannot go back and change a curve because the curve is not there anymore, as it is with the native photoline format.

I find PhotoLine actually better than PhotoShop for my photography needs, but until we can save tiff files with full layer information and full metadata preserved, PhotoLine files will not be compatible with the DAM applications (LightRoom, ACDSee, CaptureOne, etc...). This renders PhotoLine much less useful and is the show stopper for me to buy it.

And there is an annoying bug with the gradient masks, but that can be corrected later

Regards,

Stéphane

[Gerhard Huber]

Well, not quite. If I save an image with layers in TIFF, the layers are rasterized. I cannot go back and change a curve because the curve is not there anymore, as it is with the native photoline format.

TIFF is a raster format only. PhotoLine supports this fully. But some applications store application specific data inside a special TIFF tag to get other information then raster. But this is not standard TIFF.

Gerhard

[bkh]

I find PhotoLine actually better than PhotoShop for my photography needs, but until we can save tiff files with full layer information and full metadata preserved, PhotoLine files will not be compatible with the DAM applications (LightRoom, ACDSee, CaptureOne, etc...). This renders PhotoLine much less useful and is the show stopper for me to buy it.

I guess that the real problem isn't about opening PS TIFFs with embedded PSDs, but rather how to handle PhotoLine files with your DAM?

Of course, PL could just do the same trick as PS and embed a pld file in a TIFF (PDF might also work, since LibreOffice seems to embed odt documents in PDFs). However, this results in TIFFs which are only editable in PL (much as editable PS TIFFs are only editable in PS).

There's also another approach currently in beta testing: save a .pld file as a sidecar file to a JPEG image (which can be seen by the DAM), and use the .pld file instead of the JPEG within PhotoLine. A similar approach should be possible with TIFFs.

Btw., seems that one can get MediaPro to work with PL (see
http://www.pl32.com/forum3/viewtopic.ph ... t=MediaPro, in German, though).

Cheers

Burkhard.

[StephaneB]

Thanks for your inputs and the link. I tried the codec pack (very good !). It would almost make me think of just using Windows Explorer . This opens a lot of possibilities for photo management.

I tried iMatch briefly. No good, it does not even show Photoline files. It does fully support PaintShop Pro files, though.

Next tests : Windows Live Gallery, Phase One and Picasa.

I like PhotoLine RAW treatment a lot, especially the idea of having the equivalent of ACR implemented as a layer over the RAW. So elegant!

Stéphane