There are two pieces to the DAM puzzle Obetz.
- Part one and the most important one for me is culling and triage and rating. I.e. choosing the photos for processing. What we don’t process, we should generally throw away (otherwise, you end up with terabytes of inadequate images going into triplicate backup). I’m working on becoming more ruthless and efficient myself. It’s a work in progress.
- Part two is managing the finished product, the managed catalogue.
DxO Photo Lab lies in between these two processes as the RAW processing engine with some limited local adjustment tools. Another missing piece is the pixel editor (depending on the kind of images one creates, a bitmap editor is either essential or occasionally needed or entirely unnecessary, I’m in the occasional category).
FastRawViewer only fulfills part one of the DAM mission, the culling and rating section. But FRV does culling, rating and moving of images superlatively well. There is some minimal amount of image pre-adjustment possible within FastRawViewer which gets passed on to Adobe compatible applications as Bridge processing instructions but pre-processing in FRV seems an superfluous waste of time to me. It’s supposed to help you preview the potential of your images. Anyone shooting and processing images for more than six months probably knows the potential of his/her image just looking at an uncorrected RAW. Pre-processing is a solution in search of a problem.
After RAW processing and pixel editing, a master image is created. If one builds elaborate images that master is certainly a multi-layered tiff file (commonly with a .psd extension). If one creates simpler images (usually my case) directly in the RAW processor, then that might be either a very low compression jpeg (100 or 12 depending on the scale used in the tool) or a single layer tiff. These finished images need to make it into the managed catalogue.
At this point, it’s time to rename the files very carefully, add additional metadata, keywords, labels, copyright info. These are your masters which are available for reuse, sale, publication, sharing with your great grandchildren. Ideally, the images themselves would not be inside a database where future generations cannot read or access them but in an OS level folder structure.
DxO is tinkering with adding part one of the DAM (a rating and culling system). It’s conceivable DxO might succeed in this ambition in the short term. The add-on would be slower and less capable for many years than the existing solutions on the market.
Solving part two - the long term catalogue - would take decades. That’s how long Adobe Bridge, Lightroom, Aperture, Apple Photos, iMatch, iView MediaPro, neoFinder were developed. Most of these programs have significant flaws as a long term cataloguing and DAM system. It may be performance, it may be database corruption, it may be limited export capabilties, it may be poor EXIF and IPTC manipulation tools. I don’t have a recommendation in this area as none of them have fully satisfied me. I do have a licensed copy of both Aperture 3.6 (runs on High Sierra) and Adobe Lightroom 4. Lightroom 4 does not require any login or
Adobe ID and can be blocked from the internet and intrusive Adobe spyware practices. Lightroom 4 may be fit for purpose as an image catalogue of jpegs, PSD and tiff files of long term masters. I like how easy it is to filter images based on lens or aperture. I also have a licensed copy of NeoFinder and lifetime Better Finder Rename/Better File Attributes (the latter two are very powerful for manipulating image metadata and can be used directly from the OS X finder, without depending on a cataloguing tool).
Eventually I’ll find a long term, stable, simple and non-intrusive system for managing my finished images. However it works internally that solution will rely primarily on folder structure within the OS and must leave its keyword and metadata directly within the files or via sidecar (EXIF, IPTC, keywords, any additional rating data).
For now, I’m very happy that I’ve found a solution for part one of the DAM issue (ingestion, culling and rating) in FastRawViewer and a suitable RAW processing engine with promising local adjustment extras in DxO Photo Lab and a stable and sophisticated bitmap editor in Affinity Photo.
Hopefully the very capable image processing software minds at DxO intuitively understand the
complexity of the image management task and just how very different image management (more like accounting or bookkeeping) is from image processing (more creative, more science, more like art).
For me, Obetz, like you, the less resources and limited developer time DxO wastes in chasing the Holy Grail of DAM, the better. DAM is a bottomless pit which brings nothing to users and little to its publisher. Monolithic applications like Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom have failed as RAW processors while they collapse under the load of regular ingestion. They are fit for purpose as neither RAW processors nor DAM. Lightroom’s performance is so lamentable (worse with every new version) that there are whole articles documenting how performance worsens with every version.
Performance with existing functionality seems to me the key area where DxO could win hearts and minds, both of existing users, and those outside looking in. Photographers want to be able to work with their images in real time and spend less time in the digital darkroom. What frustrates me most with DxO Photo Lab is that when I move a slider, in most cases, I have to wait between 5 and 20 seconds to see the result.
PS. I’m going to work on eliminating that lag (perhaps one needs only turn off all noise reduction and Lens Sharpening Tool while doing the a first pass, doing a second pass to turn on Lens Sharpening and Prime Denoise). It would be great if DxO had a simple toggle for real time performance (automatically turning off Lens Sharpening/Prime Denoise/whatever else is necessary) and full preview (re-enabling them).