Topaz Studios - free editing tool

[Steve B]

I see that Topaz are launching a competitor to Lightroom - it goes on general release on Tuesday. It is free to download and works as a standalone imaging editor or as a plug-in to Lightroom or Photoshop. They will make money by selling additional tools, but after looking at a couple of videos the basic package looks powerful and intuitive to use, and includes some functionality that my version of Lightroom lacks, in particular masking tools.

No doubt it will have its limitations, but potentially it is an option for anyone who doesn't want to pay a monthly subscription to Adobe.

http://web.topazlabs.com

Steve

[Mike Farley]

Thanks for the heads up, Steve. This is the second recent launch of a Raw conversion tool, so it is good to see Adobe getting some competition. It needs it. There are some tools on offer which do not currently exist for Lightroom, the compositing/layer tool looking to be the most useful. That said, Topaz is only going up against Adobe in the image editing category, whereas Lightroom has much more functionality, in particular library management and printing. Anyone taking the full pro upgrade will spend around the same as a perpetual licence for Lightroom. As you say, you cannot argue with free, especially if it supplements an older version of Lightroom.

[GrahamL]

Looks an interesting tool. Will have to find time to try it out.

As a new one appears an old suite disappears. The long expected demise of the once famous Nik Collection has occurred. See https://petapixel.com/2017/05/30/google-abandons-nik-collection-popular-photo-editing-software/.

Hopefully there won't be too many more useful photo-tools being picked up by much larger companies, toyed with, and then abandoned. In this case it wasn't even a competitor that did the deed.

Cheers,

Graham

[Mike Farley]

As a new one appears an old suite disappears. The long expected demise of the once famous Nik Collection has occurred. See https://petapixel.com/2017/05/30/google-abandons-nik-collection-popular-photo-editing-software/.

The Nik Collection is not yet dead, but its usefulness will be reduced if there is an incompatibility with another application or operating system in he future since Google will not provide a fix. My main use is Silver Efex Pro, which I purchased at its original price, although I do find I can obtain similar results using the Lightroom monochrome conversion tools.

Hopefully there won't be too many more useful photo-tools being picked up by much larger companies, toyed with, and then abandoned. In this case it wasn't even a competitor that did the deed.

Google only ever wanted Snapseed when it bought Nik. The Nik Collection was incidental to the purchase. It was a pity that Google continued to sell the software after the acquisition if it did not intend to maintain it long term. It could now do the decent thing and release the code to the Open Source community so that there is an oppotunity for support to coninue.