As my frequent reader knows, I have been grappling with my RAW workflow for as long as I have had a RAW workflow. I’m hardly a pro or even much of an enthusiast, and I find dealing with all these files exhausting (it also consumes a stupid amount of disk space, etc.)
A user of Photoshop since it was called Barneyscan, and Illustrator since it was 88, I’ve been ambivalent about Adobe’s products ever since they started renting them; this was actually before they switched to monthly fees — the Creative Suites essentially forced you to upgrade on a constant basis simply to not have your software mysteriously stop launching when Adobe’s authentication servers were down.
Today, despite paying Adobe’s tax (albeit the lesser “Photographer’s” tax of $100/year) I remain unhappy with their products. Lightroom is slow, constantly wants patching, requires me to sign in (often more than once) to Adobe’s stupid services just to launch, and on and on. But, until recently, I had no credible alternative that was fast and produced even vaguely decent results.
But now there are two inexpensive, lightweight products that together may mean I don’t need Adobe’s crap any more (I’ll get back to you!):
FastRawViewer — endorsed by no less than Thom Hogan and Nasim Mansurov — is a terrific program that does exactly what it says on the can. It’s simple and lets you browse and rate photos really, really fast. You can customize its keyboard shortcuts to your pleasure (e.g. I have ratings mapped to the 0-5 keys, and P toggles high pass filtering so you can see exactly what, if anything, is in focus without pixel-peeping. Rather than having its own proprietary catalog system, it leverages your file system and XMP metadata (“sidecar” files that are compatible with Lightroom if that still floats your boat). It costs $20, you can get it here.
RAWPower — developed by former Aperture engineers (or a former Aperture engineer; I’m not sure) — gives you most of Aperture’s non-destructive RAW processing in a fast, lightweight app that also provides the same functionality via Apple’s Photos app. I like the Photos app except for the whole slower-than-treacle-in-a-walled-garden thing, so there’s that too. It costs $15 in the App Store. My only issue with RAWPower is that its crop-and-rotate tool is clumsy if you want to both crop AND rotate, which I usually do (and I’ve been told that addressing this issue is a priority).
(If you’re a Windows user, FastRawViewer is still great, but RAWPower is Mac only.)
FastRawViewer lets me view a folder with thousands of RAW files with no waiting (just dragging the folder info Lightroom, Photos, or Aperture would be agony), and RAWPower lets me adjust exposure, shadow recovery, straightening, and so forth faster and just as competently as Lightroom. (Photoshop still wins for any major surgery, obviously — RAWPower has no dodge, burn, layers, healing brush, perspective correction, stitching, etc.)