Every now and then a new software product emerges to fill a vacuum left by another one. I believe OnOne Software's Perfect Photo Suite 8 is that package.
Adobe's decision to refocus the target of it's entire product line on the needs of the "corporate graphics department" has left such a vaccum. All aspects of their product line - from product functionality and features right down to its delivery vehicle - has left a substantial number of photographers in a lurch. Unwilling to go along with Adobe's move to CC for political, philosophical or economic reasons, many smaller studios and freelancers, along with students and hobbyists have opted to stay with previous versions of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. While viable options exist in the form of GIMP, Photoline, and Corel's line of graphics and photo editing products, many have decided to stay with the devil they know, rather than switching to the devil they don't know and having to learn a whole new way of doing things.
Let's face it. Until now, Photoshop has enjoyed it's mostly unrivaled position as THE software choice to use to edit photographs - even though it is much more than that. And therein lies the catch. For the average photographer, Photoshop is way much more than you need with its 500-plus commands and intimidating and often unintuitive processes and cryptic terminology. Adobe's alternative, non-CC, entry-level Elements unfortunately is targeted at hobbyists and beginners, and often falls short of the needs of the professional. A;though the interface is familiar, there are many "photo-editing-oriented" tools and procedures that are missing from Elements. Adobe has clearly positioned it as a hook to get users involved in order to upgrade them to their industrial-strength product line.
That was the bad news. The good news is that Perfect Photo Suite 8 is positioned to fill in the gap between the two applications - offering a photographer-centric set of tools, streamlined procedures, module-based aggregation of commands and operations that deliver results as good as what can be achieved in Photoshop CS or CC, without all the clutter of 500 commands, and in a common sense, organized work environment. It is developed with the busy photographer in mind - one that has limited time to spend in front of a computer screen to either work in an application or learn one.
It's biggest benefit is it's ease of use and common-sense approach-ability. Challenging operations that often take considerable time on Photoshop to get right, such as masking, color balancing, portrait editing, local contrast, color, and tonal adjustments, hdr, and others - are reduced to a matter of minutes. Saving effects to be used in the future, creating favorites, browsing for files, adding borders and textural overlays, literally take seconds.
This is a professional quality product that provides the photographer with an extremely powerful set of tools to enable the realization of creative vision, without having to take hours of courses and seminars to learn. Mastery is finally at the photographer's fingertips.
The new version 8 offers content aware operations, a more streamlined Effects module, which now includes Focal Point, their lens effects module. A new Enhance module uses a combination of powerful filters and adjustment, masking, retouch and eraser brushes to easily make your images pop with eye-catching beauty. A redesigned Browser is now available to all the modules, making it easier than ever to find exactly what you are looking for. Batch processing further extends the feature set, automating operations that require multiple steps, without the need to record actions.
The only function that is missing is noise removal - as it stands, you will need to go to another application to do noise abatement, then open Perfect Photo Suite -
As in previous versions, Perfect Photo Suite 8, work either as a fully functional stand alone program, or as plug-ins for Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. The target date for final release of version 8 is November 26, but you can download the public beta right now at http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/suite8/beta.html , or you can take advantage of the current special, where OnOne is making their current suite, v7.5 available for $180 for the full standalone/Lightroom/Aperture/Photoshop plugin, and $130 if you don't need Photoshop capability and only $80 if your needs are entirely served by OnOne, and you don't need any plugin capability. In any configuration, you will get a free training video and v8 on its release date.
