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Photo organizers, locally installed, Windows:
Zoner Photo Studio
xnView
Nero Mediahome
Windows Live Photo Gallery
Media Pro (Not Freeware)
ACDSee (Not Freeware>
Corel Aftershot (Not Freeware)

Photo editors, browser based:
Pixlr
Polarr
Fotor
iPiccy

Image Hosting:
Piwigo (free to self-host; first party hosting available)
Zenphoto (free to self-host; third party hosting available)
JuiceBox (freemium; self-hosted only)
Flickr
Amazon Prime Photos (you have to be Prime)

Okay, I'm tired of adding links...but depending on what functions of Picasa you're looking to replace, there are plenty of alternatives.

Interesting that there's no mention of Nikon's top 36MP chip in their new D810.

However, even that's wimpy. Take look at any of Phase One's medium format digital backs in 50, 60, or 80 megapixels, with the world's highest resolution and widest dynamic range in any commercially available camera system. They're generally used with the world's best German lenses, like Schneider and Rodenstock This is what pro fashion, product, landscape, and repro shooters use when money is no object.

Yes. Microsoft Expression Media was a damned good product (no thanks to MS: the product barely changed after MS bought it, so I can't agree the MS destroyed it). We have no idea what will happen with the new owners, but it's definitely worth trying out: http://www.phaseone.com/en/Software/Expression-Media-2/Whats-new.aspx

I've done work for some government departments who have to create digital archives of artworks and old manuscripts and they all use very high end digital cameras and a controlled lighting environment.

Iff (if and only if) you have an environment where the camera is in a fixed position, and you have lights of a known intensity in fixed positions, then you can do a proper calibration on the camera, generate an ICC profile, and then scan away knowing that you're capturing an accurate representation of the colours in the artworks.

These cameras are $50k units - medium format with high quality prime lenses and digital backs - this will give you an idea of what can be done:
PhaseOne and Hassleblad

>>They simply don't make 4x5" digital sensors, period.

BS. They may not make practical 4x5" sensors for everyone's budget or application, but they DO exist.

Scanning sensors have been around for years (check out companies like Better Light), and even a few full-frame sensors are out there. They may be several orders of magnitude outside your budget, but they're available.

http://www.betterlight.com/

http://www.phaseone.com/Content/p1digitalbacks/Discontinued%20hardware/Studiokit.aspx

MadCow.

My 50 year old Crown Graphic takes pictures that the very best DSLRs can only dream about.

I don't know, I've seen some pretty nice shots out of digital backs like this one: Phase One P 45, 39mp, 4:3 sensor, medium/large format. That being said, my next baby is to be this: EOS-1Ds Mark II, 16.7mp full frame. That plus my slowly growing collection of L lenses (currently 17-40, 24-105, and 70-200) will keep me happy for quite a while (as I'd hope, for the investment).

That being said, I like the look of things like Phase One's P 45 digital back for medium and large format cameras. 39 megapixels, 4:3 sensor, 50-400 ISO, 35 frames per minute.

That being said, I like the look of things like Phase One's P 45 digital back for medium and large format cameras. 39 megapixels, 4:3 sensor, 50-400 ISO, 35 frames per minute.

http://www.phaseone.com/ Capture One Pro invalidates your registration if you replace the motherboard or the boot drive. Possibly esoteric software for this crowd, but I wanted to cite at least one counter-example. Definitely not an OS level problem, though. Strictly the boneheaded decision of the software company.

Currently, to get similar resolutions, you need to use a scanning back for a 4x5" camera (calm down, it's not that big of a piece of film, there are still cameras being made that take 20x24" sheets of film), and about the only ones I know about are the BetterLight scanning backs, http://www.betterlight.com/, up to 10200x13800 pixels (140 megapixel) for an 852MB file at 24-bit scanning. The operative word is scanning, these are like a very high-end small flatbed scanner in the back of your camera. Exposures take a long time, up to several minutes. Not so practical for field work, as they need to be tethered to a computer. They're also not a full 4x5" frame, but then, neither are Polaroids.

This new CCD at 4x4" (probably actually 100x100mm) is quite impressive. The largest medium-format scan back that I know of right now is the Phase One, http://www.phaseone.com/ P45 with a 39 Megapixel, 7216 x 5412 pixel, 49.1x36.8mm sensor. They call it "full frame" even though it's designed to be used with 6x4.5cm (actual film area 56x41.5mm) cameras. Not quite full frame, but damn close. It doesn't work like a scanner, but just like your crappy little digital p&s, but much MUCH better.

Even film bigots like myself acknowledge the 16.7MP Canon to be equal or better to 35mm film, and the P45 and similar to be equal or better than medium format film. This new sensor should be the equal or better than 4x5" film, maybe even up there with 5x7" (13x18cm) film, and possibly approaching 8x10" film. Of course, if it were available to the common peasant, it would probably cost in the range of a Bentley or so, so I'll stick with my film cameras for now.

That's interesting, but he is comparing a large format camera (4x5) with a 35mm digital...the age of the camera doesn't really matter as much in film photography as long as it's a decent quality camera. What he should really be comparing this to is one of these(39MP) or one of these(45MP)...as these are medium/large format digital cameras...

Well you are sorta of right and a lot wrong but what would I know I'm just a professional photographer. I pretty much ONLY use 4x5 but that does not mean I always shoot film. Sometimes I shoot film some times I used a Phaseone FX http://www.phaseone.com./ I can produce a 540M files from that back. Most product and still life photography is done with mono rail cameras (4x5 2x3 some still even 8x10) http://sinarbron.com/sinar/conventional/cameras.ph p I really don't think hard core documentary photographers will be giving up there leicas anytime soon. Most high end fashion photography is still done film. I could go into why but meh. The most common camera among the top guys that do fashion and people is probably the Mamiya RZ67. THERE IS A HUGE differnce between the quality of single capture 35mm SLR's and film. WHY? because film uses 3 layers of dye to caputure complete plates where as digital slrs have a stocastic pater of pixels. So the camera has to MAKE SHIT UP. 2/3 of every color from a DSLR is made up and personally I can see it. I do see it almost everyday. For many things its acceptable but acceptable does not make it better. Think about this. Hightend video cameras have 3 ccds to capture 3 full plates of color. A 4:4:4 3 ccd 1080P HDcam will produce a WAY better image then a DSLR its just smaller and WAY WAY MORE EXPENSIVE. Oh and god don't get me started on cmos. Lets just say this, there are no highend cmos cameras (no a cannon is not highend. Click the Phaseone link above) Persoanly I can't stand pamatures like you. I'll take the uniformed guy over you anyday. You probably don't even know what my nick means. OK that was a troll I admit it.

These "digital lightroom" applications are nothing new. Capture One has been around for years and is an awesome application.

http://www.phaseone.com/

I'm a reasonably heavy DSLR user who shoots on a Nikon D2H. I have shot for fashion and dance shows where I leave with over 1500 RAW photos (I attach my camera directly to a Powerbook which has a 250GB firewire drive attached). I've tried using iPhoto for managing my photos, as most of the professional workflow programs with databases are thousands of dollars to say hello. iPhoto essentially falls over and dies with those kind of numbers. iPhoto also doesn't actually handle RAW images, it converts them over to JPEG using a rather mediocre converter.

I used to use Photoshop CS for "developing" my raw images, but most of its capabilities are focused around working with the photo once you've imported it as a PSD, and not around manipulating the photo itself. Along with many other photographers I've discovered CaptureOne is incredibly useful for non destructive processing of RAW images, as well as doing a wonderful job on noise reduction, color noise, banding, white balance, exposure, and levels.

I was hoping Aperture could replace CaptureOne and iPhoto for me, while allowing me to contine to use Photoshop when I wanted to edit a photo rather than just process a RAW image. As far as I can tell, this is dead on what Apple intended Aperture for.

To start off, I imported 3 iPhoto libraries with a total of 45,000 images into Aperture. To my surprise, it also imported all album and roll data with it (I was expecting to end up with a flat photo space) as well as importing all NEFs and the jpegs iPhoto had created automatically as different versions of the same photo. It's clear that the upgrade path from iPhoto to Aperture was well thought out.

Aperture seems to be very good at handling a large image database. I now have 45,000 photos in a single Aperture library, and am not using more than 450MB of ram opening a window with all images in it (scrolling of course).

Aperture also claimed to be able to handle many of the non destructive RAW workflow duties I'd handled before with Capture One. That's a bit more of a mixed bag. The white balancing loupe doesn't work nearly as well as Capture One's and occasionally creates psychadelic white balances in the process. The sharpening and noise reduction algorithms are nowhere near as good as Capture One's, and color noise reduction seems to be almost non existant on high exposure shots. Before someone points out that this is what Photoshop or some other tool is for, Aperture only exports PSDs or TIFFs to other applications so it has to handle all RAW processing itself.

If Apple can figure out how to handle RAW images better, Aperature could really become an incredible product. As it is, the workflow management, versioning, and just plain dealing with tons of images seem to be really nice.

The way I look at it I would use Aperture as a virtual light table. I really like that loop tool and the intelligent stacks organization aids (See the Quick Tours)This is software is meant for the professional to serious photographer and this program is metadata crazy. Great for photographers for stock photography, as well as ones who do weddings, sports, photojournalism...etc. After selecting a handful of images from hundreds to a thousand + images using Aperture, I can see using Photoshop at the end of the of workflow. Where I need Photoshops large array of filters, brushes and text tools. graphics artists won't care about Aperture but professional photographers who now shoot digital will probably love this application.

On a side note I'm glad there is finally a workstation class graphics card for the Mac. I can forsee that stereo based projections, Powerwalls, and even CAVEs aren't so far off in the future once you add the genlock/framelock daughter card to the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 board.

This has nothing to do with adobe and photoshop.

This has everything to do with companies like Bibble Labs, Phase One, iView Multimedia who all make 'raw workflow' software.

For those of you who are new, or don't care, or don't use RAW workflow it's about the post processing that most enthusiast, semi-pro, and pros doin once the pictures are taken and before they're edited in Photoshop (if needed).

Photoshop has something included that has been showing up in the last few versions, they call it adobe camera raw but it is rasterized out of camera RAW and then you edit it like you would any other image.

What Aperture, and the others let you do is 'pre-process' your image to do lossless corrections to things such as white balance, color cast, cropping, etc. If you make any of these types of changes inside photoshop once you import in the RAW file you are doing it with data loss.

This is a step before photoshop, not a slap in the face and replacement.

This is condiments to the burger. The burger is much more filling than just the condiments, but the condiments aren't all that by itself

you are just blabbering verbal pollution. did you read anything?

its not at all a competitor to any adobe product. it is a competitor to this product.

Why bother participating in a discussion if you cant be bothered to inform yourself in the slightest.

It's a different piece of software. The most similar thing I can find is Capture One which is in exactly the same price category with a much shorter feature list. This is pro software for photo professionals. If its organizational tools (and that really is a possibility) save a pro 5 hours (at $100/h) of work or a single reshoot, it'll be worth it.

Aperture isn't competing with Photoshop, it's competing with things like this:

PhaseOne's Capture One

Yes, and the world is flat.

Let's take a look at a small sample of what Adobe has been doing with Photoshop lately that appeals to professional photographers.

1. Great improvements have been made to the image browser, known as Bridge. Also, many improvements have been made to The Adobe RAW Conversion plugin (known as ACR) . The improvements in these two pieces of the program put it on par with the powerful but buggy Phase One, Capture One What Adobe does that C1 does not is that it integrates flawlessly with Photoshop and it eliminates the puchase of a $500+ piece of software. I've used both and I think Adobe's converter is better, provided a custom calibration is performed with the camera to adjust ACR's color output.

2. Sharpening. Smart sharpen has been added. It does not replace Unsharp Mask (USM), rather is supplements it. It uses complex math to perform something called deconvolution. It can correct small levels of incorrect focus and motion blur. It can also be used as a general sharpening tool. Some photographers will still prefer USM but I like using Smart Sharpen. Previously, one had to buy relatively expensive plugins to do this. The thing is, smart sharpen is better than the best deconvolution plugin available. It allows the operation to be included in actions (similar to macros). It's faster, it can be performed with fractional radii, and it can be turned down in shadows and highlights to avoid needless amplification of noise. One of the few popular deconvolution plugins available, Focus Magic does not have these features. Normally when big companies borrow features only available as add-ons, they are lacking in many areas. Not so in Adobe's case.

These are just a couple of examples of recent Photoshop improvements. There are also lens correction filters, perspective based cloning tools, spot healing tool, and many other features that are NOT considered bloat by many photographers.

The D2X is nice, but I think we should save the title of "Holy Grail" for another camera. And it's not a Canon.

I'd choose the Contax 645 medium format film camera with a 39 megapixel digital back.

check this sucker out:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/ contax645.shtml
http://www.phaseone.com/Content/p1digitalbacks/Hot news/Ultimate%20range.aspx

application for the Nikon SDK is possible for bona fide software companies that send Nikon a written application for the SDK. Once approved, the SDK is provided to the developer at no charge and they are authorized to use it.

Shooters who are serious about RAW files don't use Photoshop as their RAW converter. Photoshop may be the number-one image editor, but when you've got 300 RAW files to process it's totally unacceptable for that task. Not only is the output merely good rather than great, Photoshop just isn't engineered for smooth high-volume workflow. If you shoot weddings, catalogs, fashion, or the like; you've got too many files to use Photoshop time-efficiently.

The kind of shooter who needs a D2x will be using something like Capture One. I once used it to convert 300 RAWs under difficult stage lights in two hours. I grouped photos under similar light, fine tuned the converter for one group, set it batch converting the group in the background while I moved on to the next group. This would have taken a loooong time in PS. Once your RAWs (NEFs ORFs CRWs, whatever) have been converted to TIFFs, THEN you move to Photoshop, if necessary.

PhaseOne has already announced that C1Pro 3.7.release.candidate supports the D2x, so I guess the SDK is available to 3rd parties. The overlap of [D2x owners} and {Adobe Camera RAW users} will be a relatively small group.

Well, more and more people are switching over to Canon. Nikon is starting to fall behind. Though their bodies are a bit cheaper, Canon has a better line up of lenses. (I hope Nikon steps it up a bit. Competition is good for all of us.)

Yes, Canon RAW is supported in Photoshop with the Camera RAW plugin. Photoshop CS2 is coming out very soon and should have some major improvements over PS CS.

Very few people use GIMP professionally I've found. Photography is the sole reason I've switched back from Linux. Try as it might, digikam and GIMP just can't keep up with professional grade RAW Converters such as Capture One Pro. GIMP supports RAW with the appropriate plugin, but sorry, it's just not Photoshop.

Exactly, I am still waiting until digital can allow me do to what a 4x5 view camera does.

Why wait? There's several choices in digital backs for large-format cameras, and Sinar even sells a complete, turn-key setup.

• http://www.betterlight.com
• http://www.phaseone.com/
• http://www.sinarbron.com/sinar/digital/p3p1.php

no, i meant canon RAW files (.crw). this is the data as the camera's sensor recorded it.

each type of digital camera requires different processing on the raw data to form a TIFF or JPEG image. not just between different brands, but even between model's in a manufacturer's lineup.

is there software available on the linux platform that has the capabilities of something like Phase One's Capture One?

without a good RAW converter, pros who have made the jump to digital and who have seen the light of shooting in RAW mode will not use Linux for their workflow.

First, that's not new by any definition.

Second, these Kodak cameras have larger sensors (although in this particular case larger != better quality).

Finally, there are such things as digital backs for larger format cameras. Check this one out.

Canon is nice, but it's not an end-all-be-all in photography.

Medium and large format digitals are everywhere. For example, see this one.

The Foveon is smart, takes pretty photos, The Sigma X3 based camera is nice, but so far it is also not very light sensitive and so many conventional CCDs can easily outperform it in practical use. Besides, it still only measures light in three wavelengths like regular CCDs, so the net results are nearly indistinguishable.

Anyway, back to the Discovery article : The featured sample picture with the butterfly is plain ridiculous : The 'magnified detail' views purports to show how a segment of an image would look like as photographed by different cameras, but as any professional [digital] photographer would tell you, the Nikon Coolpix 2500 sample is as ludicrously fake as the "Nikon F5" picture below. First off, the CP2500 "sample" looks more like a photoshop pixelated version of the image above it. The sample certainly looks nothing like the interpolated pixels digital photographers are used to seeing in close-up due to the nature of Bayer matrix CCDs used in nearly all digital cameras, including the Coolpix 2500.

Since each pixel in such cameras, as the article actually points out, can see either red, green or blue, neighboring pixels in the finished picture cannot be entirely different, because the hue of each pixel is determined from the brightness of the neighboring red, green and blue monochrome CCD pixels. Therefore a magnified image is always a little "soft" and true distinguished color detail are only possible over spans of two or more pixels. In the sample, however, the neighboring pixels shown are clearly completely unrelated, and as such the magnified sample is FAKE.

As for the third sample : For those who might not know, the Nikon F5 is a box like many others, onto which can be attached a lens, any lens of hundreds to choose from, through which light may be projected onto a piece of film. The camera's computer will most competently help the photographer focus the lens and decide proper aperture and exposure settings, but a film camera is just a BOX. One SLR does not take better pictures than the next, if both use the same film stock and correctly focused lens. This means, that it is patently ridiculous to point out that the sample is alleged to come from a F5. If they had aimed for anything resembling credibility, the sample would have been identified in terms of film stock and lens type.

FURTHER, film is not neatly arranged in square PIXELS as the alleged sample shows to contain, sprinkled with yet smaller red noise pixels. This is nothing like what film grain looks like - film under intense magnification shows a clouded and decidedly irregular mass of particles.

FURTHER YET, different film stock have different qualities! A Fujichrome Velvia 50 slidefilm will take longer or more light to expose correctly, but you'll be hard pressed to find more beautiful colors or spectacular detail on a color photograph. A 800 ISO supermarket brand on the other hand, will produce comparatively less remarkable results. So which was the sample shot with?

ALSO, what was used to scan it? How on earth did the scanning program fuck the image up like so? It must have been an insanely low resolution, grainy imager to produce such pixelation. Any garden variety hobbyist negative/slide scanner can scan film so you can nearly see the grain of the film. Here, we just see chunky pixels, with smaller red pixel grain on top : why? Who was the retarded clown operating photoshop?

GRRR.

If you think you are getting ~3000dpi out of any film, then you need to look again. Get your drum scanner moving and then load up your 3000dpi image and zoom in to 100% to compare it to a digital image from a recent back.

The image detail in the digital capture has cleaner, sharper edges, is better defined and less "muddy" and has much better contrast than the film scan. If you zoom in to 100% on a 3000dpi scan, what you will see is... grain. Something which is blessedly absent in digital shots! It will be hard to make out any detail at all at that level of magnification, even with the best film.

With regard to absolute resolution, this back will give large format (even for a moment assuming an analog resolvable 24,000x30,000) a run for its money.

I have a Contax 645, and the digital backs available for that camera [ Kodak and Phase one ] are 16 megapixel. That is more than adequate to rival film resolution, but no digital solution will rival the contrast range of film and the low light performance and shadow detail of film.

• Better Light. Prices range from $10000 to $20000.
• Fuji Film. See this distributor's page on one model. Prices run from $13000 up.
• Kodak Digital Camera backs. $12000 to $25000 range.
• Leaf digital backs. $10000 to $25000.
• Megavision. $25000.
• Phase One. $12000-$25000.

I have some experience in this, so i will interject.

Home scanners and digital cameras are definitly not suited for the task if you need very near digital reproduction of an object. The reasons for this are many, but mainly, the all interpolate colors between what imaging elemaents they have. And not that accuratly.

When you move up to the midrange of scanners/digital camers (~$2000), the problem can still be there, but its less pronounced. I worked on a project requireing digital photos of a very hard to photograph subject, and tthis range of cameras produced sub-par results for the task (the shots look incredible, but zoom in and youll see fuzziness and interpolated color).

Then, you have the ~$20,000+ cameras and scanners. This was eventually what we had to go with. One camera delivered particularly good results, and achived it through actually moving the CCD so that there were no interpolated pixles. It was accurate enough that if you shot a Greytag/Macbeth chart, right from the camera, the greys would be the same value for evey pixel.

As with all these [camera] setups, You need a very controlled lighting situation (ie. photo studio), but you can shoot just about anything.

As far as scanners, the same applys. You will need to get in toe the pricy professional line to get accurate pixles, and from that, better analysis.

Your test for any product should be if you scan a greyscale, if you go in to photoshop and look at the pixle color values, are they all the same value (like 125,125,125) and, is it consistant across the swatch (if you move your mose a few pixles over, does the value change?)

The other aspect you have to contend with is your computer and monitor and its interpretation of what your seeing. Again, if any amount of accuracy is needed, you will need a controled lighting setup. No direct sunlight, try not to wear clothing that will project a color cast on the monitor, a lightbox to properly illuminate the scaned subject for proper color editing, etc.

This is where you buy a macintosh. you dont need to do all the ColorSync stuff, just keep your monitor and scanner/camera in line.

So based on the three levels in imagry equipment (home, semi-pro, pro) you can determine what level of final output you need and judge your costs from there.

For full setup, id guess:



Home 5-8k Semi-Pro 10-15k Pro 20-40k

Some useful links:

Greytag Macbeth
Apple:ColorSync
Imacon 3020 is camera i mentioned above
megavision
leaf
Sinar
Phase One
Betterlight

This is mostly high end stuff, but, you should be a good starting point in findieng the mix of price/performance you are looking for for the overall project.

PhaseOne's PowerPhase FX has the highest resolution, at 10,500 x 12,600 pixels, file sizes from 380 M at 8 bit to 1 GB in 64 bit. That, plus the cost of the medium format camera gives you this choice: a house, or digital photography.