Today, subscriptions are everywhere. You must pay by the month. But if you stop, you lose all your tool setup at the end of the month. Nothing is left, nothing is yours.

So, I prefer tools I can buy, that will serve me for years. If the service/cost ratio is good, I’m OK with purchasing a competent tool, but I don’t want to keep my wallet open at all times.

FastStone Image Viewer

The very first step in any processing is sorting. You need to move fast, you need to find the best images, sometimes in a batch of 10 (fast bursts are lethal for the number of images).

FastStone Image Viewer is a marvel in this respect: inexpensive, very competent in display and – above all – it offers a critical feature for sorting: it can display images 4 by 4 on the same screen for quick comparison. For example, you can zoom in on all four images in parallel with a flick of the mouse wheel and compare the quality of detail in the pre-selected images. Use the “Del” key to eliminate unnecessary images, and the “*” key to mark images for priority retention.

Since the software is free for amateur users, it’s even better. But a $35 lifetime license is still an attractive price to support the ongoing development of this indispensable tool.

DxO PhotoLab

Visualizing and sorting images is not enough. You also need to be able to work on them to fine-tune the rendering. FasStone Image Viewer has some interesting correction capabilities, but while this is sometimes sufficient, I can’t rely on it and need a powerful image processing tool (including RAW).

Photoshop has long been considered the benchmark. But the other tools on the market have really come into line. Today, there are only two reasons to choose:

• The user interface must be simple and effective
• Noise processing must enable you to gain ISOs to work in the best shooting conditions.

Adobe does this very well, but so do others. In particular, I warmly recommend DxO PhotoLab (not to be confused with DxO PureRAW plugin for Photoshop or Lightroom). The quality of RAW processing is exemplary. When it comes to noise reduction, it’s often the case that DxO does better than Adobe.

I therefore recommend two options:

1. Either you’re addicted to Adobe and need to add DxO PureRAW to maintain your usual workflow with incredible image quality.
2. Or you’ve discovered (with the trial version) that DxO PhotoLab is a perfectly fluid development environment that’s at least as comfortable as Adobe’s. DxO PhotoLab is French, and for €229, the software is yours for life. Upgrades only cost €109, but are not mandatory if you haven’t changed your camera (my main reason for upgrading).

I can’t get enough of DxO PhotoLab, and version 7 (yes, I know, version 8 is already out) is simply incredible in the detail it extracts from my RAW files.

A word of warning though: you need computing power. On PCs, a graphics card less than 3 years old is highly recommended to drive the processing engine.

IrfanView

This tool is a bit of a “tool bag” for my quicker DIY projects. For example, it’s very fast for image viewing. But it’s also remarkably easy to use for cropping or resizing an image without having to bring out the heavy artillery.

What’s more, IrfanView recognizes just about any image format (photo or not), which makes life easier for quick format conversion.

I find several advantages to it:

1. At 5 frames per second on my Canon EOS 70D, the animal moves are decomposed enough to chose the best attitude (e.g. avoiding blinking eyes);
2. I also learned a long time ago that optical stabilization is not the perfect tool to remove strictly all the fuzz and inside a continuous shooting set, the second or the third is often a tad bit more precise, more crispy than the first one (the small move induced by pressing the shutter button will produce a minuscule imprecision that is not welcome on a large-sized  print when the tripod is not available).

Of course, this forces me in comparing thousands of photos. Two by two or three by three, I must choose the best one and dump the other(s). On Adobe Bridge, it goes very fast. But, if -like me) you started regretting the time of simple software prices (instead of monthly license rental costs), you want to go and look elsewhere.

On Windows (it would work on MacOS too), I tried Lightroom but its library management is definitely not living well with my (bad?) habit of transferring files from disk to disk, grouping and backing up in many locations (while handling more than 2 TB of archives). So what can I do? I had to find a better solution, preferably a low-cost one. Since I don’t like the idea of pirating a big executable version (is it still happening today?), I rushed into photo forums  and found FastStone FSViewer which is free for personal use on Windows.

The user interface is not the same as Bridge, of course. But you can easily and quickly compare 4 images. Maybe somewhat faster than on Bridge.

This is a free download and it is a good replacement for Adobe Bridge on Windows (I will no longer need to keep this old version, I can go freeware).

For the all-new Photoshop CS5:

• Photoshop CS5 Content Aware Fill – Just how good is it?
• An Introduction to Focus Stacking with Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Multiple Image Printing in Photoshop CS4

But also for those who stayed -for now- with an older Photoshop (like CS4 or CS3):

• How to Correct Perspective in Photoshop
• Photoshop Technique: Digital Airbrush
• The 8 Basic Things Every Photographer Should Know How to do in Photoshop
• Photoshop Toning with Adjustment Layers

And one specific addition for users of Adobe Bridge (included in Photoshop): 3 Things to Know about Working in Adobe Bridge.

Returning from Botswana, I started to publish a few of the good pictures I shot in May 2010 while on a photo safari trip. If you are interested, you will find these images on my personal web site and some of them on sale at RedBubble.com. New photos will keep appearing on a daily basis, at least during all June 2010.

In parallel, I had been asked to describe my photographic workflow and the preparation of these photos from Botswana is a good opportunity to go and check this together.

The first thing I should mention is that I am using Adobe Photoshop CS3 (I did not jump to CS4 because of the price, because I did not seem to find the new features attractive enough and because Adobe Camera Raw was already compatible with my own Sony Alpha 700 RAW files).

Mostly, I start with a rough selection from Adobe Bridge. There, I will group images by subject (in the example below, the Bateleur Eagles pictures I shot on May 1st) to get relatively consistent sets of pictures.

There, I will do a first quick pass rejecting all impossible-to-correct defects (blurred image, the animal flew out of the frame, the subject is unclear or confused) and make a first selection labeled as such in Bridge (Ctrl-6). Often, there will be several shots of the same scene with nearly identical features, but I will not look into this right now.

This will be the basis for a second selection (Ctrl-7) where I will check in the details of each picture to make certain that the focus is as good as possible, there is no unwanted blur, the contrast is workable, the exposure is adequate, the details are OK (the light is shining in the eye of the bird or the animal, the attitude is pleasant) and I will try to select the best shot in a continuous burst (best attitude and best focus are the most important features here: A single move of the bird will change everything). This leads to a “feature evaluation” based upon my ALCID set of rules that will lead to an Adobe Bridge ranking from 1 star (Ctrl-1) to 5 stars (Ctrl-5).

Then, I will leave it in this state for a while. I need to give time for a second chance.

When I come back to the image set, I will concentrate on the best images and start working them with Adobe Camera Raw (even for JPEG files, its flexibility is enormous and will help a lot to expose correctly the final photograph). Usually, I start by setting exposure to maximize highlights (using the histogram view, I push the highlights as far to the right as possible without letting it blow out of limits). Then, I will correct blacks the same way (on the left of the histogram view). Last, I will check if contrast needs to be adjusted slightly or color can be toned down or up with vibrance.

Then, I open the image in Photoshop where I will correct the frame (in the example below, I removed a significant part of the frame because I wanted a square frame to enhance the impression of strength given by the Bateleur Eagle looking back at me) and I work on the slight details improvements (removal of a speck of dust, overall sharpening or softening).

In the end, the image is ready to be saved in JPEG (maximum quality) or TIFF format. Once in the largest size for posters and prints, once for web distribution (in a much smaller file size).

The web gallery where I sell prints of my photographs: http://roumazeilles.redbubble.com/works from US$2.39.