Well let's be honest, I wanted to try it out despite the cons and see if there is anything in for me. My photo workflow has been based in the past on (mainly) JPEG tools : Gthumb, then F-Spot and since a number of years I have settled down to using Shotwell, a great and fast catalog/edit/publish all-in-one tool. Pretty limited for retouching but I don't like to do that much anyway so never a problem for me at least. I can use the Gimp from within Shotwell when I need to remove some dust spots but for the rest it is fine to adjust exposure, contrast, saturation (and I don't do much of anything else 95% of the time).
That being said, last month I tried Corel Aftershot Pro 2 (Linux install; amd64 package downloaded from Corel's site) and started the 30 days trial. Soon after the install I got an update from Corel. Don't know exactly which version I have tested but it must be whatever is current as of July 2014.
I quite liked using the program, here are my main conclusions:
Pros:
- it is MUCH more powerful than Shotwell for retouching photos (including while doing the RAW conversion of course).
- The GUI is pretty sleek after you get used to it (took a couple of days maybe).
- The program is pretty responsive even when working on RAW files. There is clearly a lot of caching and performance improvements behind the interface (and I have old hardware)
- Can use hardware acceleration when available (I installed OpenGL to try that, not sure it helped a lot on my old hardware though)
- Good coverage of the entire workflow (but not entirely all-in-one)
- I could work with IPTC metadata and tagging in a way that was compatible with Shotwell (hierarchical tags are supported with semicolon separators).
- It was pretty easy and fast to convert RAW images to JPEG and the different adjustment modules are well organised.
Cons:
- workflow completeness is not 100% : I didn't find how to import photos from the camera or card. Not a problem during the trial because I worked mostly on photos that were already in my Shotwell library anyway.
Again, workflow completeness is not 100% : when finished you can export photos to different places and formats but not directly publish (to social media) - Camera support is not bad but far from complete. DNG is OK (tried with both my K-m and K-r raws). Fuji EXR doesn't work (tried with some .RAF files downloaded from review sites as samples of RAW images from compact cameras that I was investigating to possibly add to my arsenal, like the F600EXR). Even worse, the Olympus ORF format from my old Pen Mini 1 is supported but not more recent cameras (e.g. the OMD E-M10 that is still on my list and almost in my shopping cart, and the XZ-10 that I eventually bought last month).
- Some irritating behaviour from the GUI : when flagging an image for reject and having a filter to not show the rejects, the image is removed from the view but it is still selected. Pretty annoying. I would like it so show whatever the next image is but couldn't configure it to do so.
- Not free, not open source (but at least Linux is a supported platform).
Even though I quite liked using it, I decided against buying a license. At least until my (current and future) Olympus RAW formats are supported. During my testing, I also started using Rawtherapee and found that it had better support for more RAW formats so that might be my future way of working with RAW under Linux.
