Previously Used Software

Note: I use a Windows based PC and laptop only. While most of the software applications mentioned below should be available for the Mac, some aren’t.

Paint Shop Pro 4

In 1996 I was introduced to Paint Shop Pro. It was great software for it’s time, and could import directly from scanners – scanning items into the computer was quite a novelty back then! Since then I have tried and used many image editors and photographic applications, including Corel Photo-Paint, ACDSee, Microsoft Picture Manager (I used that for a long time and liked it), PhotoShop and Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop

I previously had a subscription to the Adobe Photography plan, which bundled Photoshop, Lightroom, Camera Raw, and several other Adobe tools. However, since I only used the software occasionally, the cost-to-use ratio was very high, so I finally pulled the plug in July 2025.

In addition to that, they have put the prices up. If I take out a Photography plan now, I pay almost double what I paid previously, and have to sign up for a minimum of one year!

I worked out that I have paid around £900 so far for the subscription since I took it out! Being a hobbyist I would never willingly pay anywhere near that much for software! I would certainly expect to own a version of it forever…

I’ve used Photoshop on and off for about 15 years and learned a lot, but I’m not an expert. It’s such a versatile tool that many of its features go way beyond photography.

Photoshop is ideal for photography because it offers precise, non-destructive control over retouching, tonal adjustments, compositing, and creative effects – all within a modular, layer-based workflow.

Lightroom on the other hand streamlines non-destructive editing, batch processing, and RAW image development with intuitive tools for exposure, colour, and organization – all optimized for speed and consistency across large photo sets.

Sounds great, except for the price tag!

Current Software

Note: I use a Windows based PC and laptop only. While most of the software applications mentioned below should be available for the Mac, some aren’t.

Before ditching Adobe (in July 2025), I embarked on a wider project to research photography related software applications to handle all of my updated workflow use cases. The following is a list of applications I chose not to use:

• DxO PhotoLab
  • DxO is primarily for sharpening and noise reduction, but what put me off is that you can only observe the changes applied at 75% zoom level and above. I won’t consider using this software until that is ‘fixed’. It also does not contain all of the editing tools I would need, e.g. Retouching, Layers, Effects, etc, so it’s a niche product.
• Capture One
  • Too expensive for me right now, but it looks like one of the best photo processing applications outside of the Adobe ecosystem.
• Topaz Gigapixel
  • Relatively expensive, considering I get ON1 Resize AI as part of ON1 Photo RAW. I could not get a goose to look as good in Gigapixel 8 as I did in ON1 Resize AI. There are a lot of options though, and I have not had the time to explore them all yet.
• Upscayl (Free)
  • This works well, better than simple image resizing, but the results are nowhere near as good as ON1 Resize AI.
• IrfanView Viewer (Free)
  • I tried IrfanView, but the user interface is too simple. It has no browser pane and the preview and thumbnail windows are separate, with the latter not opening by default.
• Darktable / Raw Therapee / ART (Free)
  • These applications are incredibly powerful, but their steep learning curve prevents me from integrating them into my workflow. Raw Therapee is one of those applications that feels like it’s built for people who already know how to use it. 😄 I generally prefer more intuitive user interfaces. ART, a fork of Raw Therapee, was developed to streamline the user interface while preserving the high-quality adjustment capabilities. I haven’t spent much time with either yet, but I plan to give ART a try if I run into trouble fine-tuning something in one of the other editors.
• EasyHDR / Luminance HDR
  • While Luminance HDR offers a deep, free toolkit and EasyHDR has a refined interface, neither matched Luminar Neo’s ability to deliver high-quality HDR results as quickly or effortlessly. Neo could benefit from more manual controls like Aurora HDR, but since it shares the same core engine, I’m confident I’m getting the best output available.
• ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate
  • ACDSee is very similar to ON1 Photo RAW in that they are both all-in-one photo editing platforms that combine RAW processing, layer-based editing, and digital asset management (DAM) into a single ecosystem. ON1 however leans more toward a modern, modular interface; has invested heavily in AI masking, noise reduction, and sky replacement; and has a larger preset marketplace and more frequent updates geared toward creative workflows.
• Paint Shop Pro 2023
  • Paint Shop Pro 2023 offers a fully comprehensive set of editing tools once you move beyond the beginner-oriented scaffolding. While it shares some similarities with Photoshop and Affinity Photo, its workflow and interface feel too different for my needs, and some features are not as advanced as Affinity Photo or Photoshop. Since I already use Affinity Photo, I don’t see myself adopting it.

The following are applications I currently do use:

FastStone Image Viewer (Free for home use)

I have been using FastStone for many years now. It’s a free lightweight yet surprisingly capable image browser and basic editor that is great for speed and simplicity, and it’s my default application for viewing images. When opening an image, you can choose how it’s displayed – either in full screen, windowed mode, or browser view. The browser view includes an explorer pane for navigation, a thumbnail pane for quick previews, and a larger preview area for detailed inspection. Metadata is displayed in a separate window. Zooming and panning are handled by the mouse alone – no modifier keys. It offers quick precise cropping and rotating, inititiated by keyboard shortcuts. Sadly (as of version 8.1) it does not handle video that well though.

FastStone features I like:

• Favourite Folders Menu
• Cropping
• Rotation
• Side-by-side Image Comparison
• Filtering and Sorting (persistent extension filter)
• Dual Monitor Viewing (browser and thumbnails on one, full screen viewer on another)

XnView MP (Free)

XnView MP is another great lightweight free tool, but is more configurable, and therefore more complex. It offers deeper metadata control, layout flexibility, image rating, and better video handling than FastStone.

Affinity Photo

This was the big one for me. Having used Photoshop for so long, I was reluctant to switch to any other application. Any replacement needed to offer a comparable interface and robust capabilities for advanced, layer-based editing. Then I discovered Affinity Photo! After trialling it, I found that despite some user interface differences and a few tools being named differently, I can accomplish what I need without relearning everything from scratch – the interface feels familiar enough. While I can’t directly compare its tool quality to Photoshop, Affinity appears to offer everything I need. The only filter I regularly use in Photoshop that’s missing is Smart Sharpen – but Unsharp Mask performs well enough for my needs, and I have other software that can sharpen photos. And I actually found a few features I like better than Photoshop!

Affinity has a ‘Develop’ persona equivalent to Camera RAW in Photoshop:

The ‘Photo’ persona is where you carry out layer-based editing:

Affinity also has ‘Liquify’, ‘Tone Mapping’ and ‘Export’ Personas.

Excire Foto

Excire Foto is one of the top-tier contenders for AI-powered search, keywording, and face recognition, and I like it’s simple yet powerful interface.

It combines multiple AI engines to streamline photo organization by automatically tagging images with relevant keywords, identifying faces with improved accuracy, evaluating aesthetic quality for culling or portfolio selection, and enabling powerful free-text and GPS-based searches – all within a clean, intuitive interface designed to handle large photo libraries efficiently.

One of my goals is to host my personal photo albums on PhotoPrism, which I have running in a docker container on my Raspberry PI Server.

Although PhotoPrism includes its own AI keywording capabilities, I’m looking for a tool that gives me full control—one that allows manual editing of keywords and face tags in addition to AI, lets me assign or adjust GPS coordinates, and supports local cataloguing of my entire photo archive. In that regard, Excire offers more advanced AI keywording and facial recognition, making it a good fit for my workflow. Excire has other feature that will benefit my workflow.

Also, once my entire archive is catalogued, I can make use of the free-text search powered by its X-prompt AI, allowing me to locate images using natural language queries like “sunset over mountains with a lake” or “laughing child at birthday party.”

There are some downsides, but they hardly take away from how impressive the software is overall:

• It does not store face data in files.
  • A workaround for this is to assign keywords with the person’s name.
• It uses a proprietary database, and you cannot connect to it. Custom SQL queries gives me visibility of the metadata and keywords across all files.
  • After writing metadata to files I can always import into digiKam and access it’s database.

ON1 Photo RAW

ON1 Photo RAW offers a comprehensive solution by combining powerful photo cataloguing with a full-featured editing suite in a single, integrated platform. It’s surprisingly affordable as well!

ON1 Photo RAW combines non-destructive RAW processing with advanced features like AI-powered masking, Super Select AI for targeted adjustments, NoNoise AI for intelligent noise reduction, Resize AI for high-quality enlargements, AI Sky swap, AI Portrait with face enhancements, and a full suite of effects, layers, HDR merging, panorama stitching, and focus stacking – all wrapped in a customizable interface.

When choosing filters, it presents you with a list of objects found in the photo which you can check to create an instant mask for the selected filter!

Other things I like about ON1 is the strong community, the helpful video tutorials, and the emails that offer tips for various features.

I was blown away by what the Resize AI function did to a cropped photo of a goose! Take a look, this is the original image showing the cropped section:

The size of the cropped section is 1036×691 pixels. I set the new size at 6000×4003 pixels and used the better quality model. Here is a side-by-side comparison:

And here is a close-up of the head:

That’s impressive – it’s as if I just zoomed in with a telephoto lens! It’s important to note though that this is an upscaling function – it won’t have any effect unless the new dimensions are set larger than the original image. It’s not designed for simple sharpening, and it tends to perform poorly on vintage scanned film photos. This is because the AI is trained to enhance recognizable patterns found in modern digital images, which low-resolution scans often lack.

Luminar Neo

Luminar Neo is a powerful, AI-enhanced photo editing platform that combines intuitive controls with advanced tools, with a deceptively simple user interface.

It streamlines complex editing tasks that would typically require multiple layers, masks, and adjustment stacks in Photoshop – offering intuitive, slider-based tools that let you achieve professional effects like relighting, structure enhancement, and sky replacement in just a few clicks, without sacrificing creative control.

I use it primarily for HDR merging and panorama stitching – Luminar Neo incorporates the acclaimed Aurora HDR application that existed as a standalone product until 2019, and it appears to excel at panorama stitching. I have Hugin to fall back on for more challenging stitching.

To create HDR photos, I typically capture three bracketed exposures at -2EV, 0EV, and +2EV using my Nikon D750. However, using more frames with tighter EV intervals can provide additional tonal detail and smoother transitions. I can also replicate this process on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra with the Open Camera app, which supports exposure bracketing and makes mobile HDR capture surprisingly effective.

Topaz Photo AI

Topaz Photo AI is a desktop photo enhancement suite that uses advanced machine learning to automatically detect and fix issues like noise, blur, low resolution, and facial softness, with just a few clicks. It combines the power of Topaz Labs’ former standalone tools (Gigapixel AI, Sharpen AI, and Denoise AI) into one streamlined interface, and produces high-quality results without diving into complex manual adjustments.

I tested it on a batch of old photos I’d scanned from family albums my mother left us, and the results were amazing! The results are far beyond anything I could do myself with Photoshop. This tool is going to be incredibly useful for restoring and enhancing those cherished images with minimal effort.

Hugin (Free)

Up until recently I have been using Hugin for panorama stitching. Its advanced capabilities include the ability to manually set control points, though this is rarely necessary thanks to its robust automatic detection algorithm which handles most image alignments effectively. As my skill in capturing well-overlapping images has improved over time (see how I do this in the Panoramas section), I’ve found myself relying on manual adjustments far less frequently.

Hugin intelligently balances exposure differences between overlapping frames using control point alignment and advanced blending algorithms, resulting in a seamless, unified panorama without visible transitions.

The user interface can be used in simple or advanced mode, with simple mode including a wizard that automates the stitching, and you only need to deviate from this if you need to handle tricky image alignments, for manual cropping and horizon levelling.

It’s worth noting that after Hugin aligns the images, it applies a default crop to ensure there are no gaps in the panorama. This can sometimes affect the framing and even cut out areas of the image you want to retain. If you want to ensure you have included everything, and are happy to fill the gaps afterwards using generative fill, cloning, or other techniques, then click the Crop tab and adjust accordingly.

DigiKam (Free)

I used to rely on GeoSetter for geotagging photos, but its map view has become increasingly unreliable, and as of 2019 development seems to have stalled. In contrast, digiKam is a free, open-source, actively developed photo management tool designed for handling large libraries and organizing images. It also enables geotagging by manually placing markers on a map, as well as assigning locations using GPX track data.

Since I already use Excire Foto for managing my photo library, I won’t need digiKam’s organizational features. However, its geotagging capabilities and detailed metadata handling will be quite useful.

DigiKam uses multiple different map providers. Google is still the best and if you want to use Google maps, especially the satellite view for viewing your photos on the map, you need to enter a Google Maps API key. You can still use Google Maps if you don’t, but you will see an overlay with ‘For Development Purposes Only’ across the map.

One specific use case that digiKam is useful for is running SQL queries. I am able to access digiKam’s SQLite database and run queries via one of the freeware database management tools – I use DBeaver. Excire’s database on the other hand is proprietary and not accessible. I can write data to file or XMP in Excire and then read it with digiKam and run queries on the database.

The reason I want database access is to run queries that show me metrics like how many photos have a specific keyword, how many have a specific location. etc. I can also make sweeping changes to keywords and update other data based on specific metadata or other data about the photo. I can then sync these changes back into the file metadata in digiKam. I had previously started to do this in PhotoPrism (MariaDB) using HeidiSQL, but will move this process upstream into digiKam, so that my offline albums retain the master data.

Excire does not export any face data. To get around that I will simply add the names of the people as keywords with the convention ‘Person:<name>’, e.g. ‘Person:Alice’.

ExifTool (Free)

If you need to extract metadata from virtually any file and want complete visibility, Phil Harvey’s ExifTool is widely regarded as the most trusted and comprehensive solution available.

In fact, many companies integrate ExifTool directly into their software to handle metadata. I’ve incorporated it into my own Photo Browser as well.

It’s a command line utility, but someone has written a GUI for it – ExifToolGui.

ExifTool supports a vast range of metadata formats including EXIF, IPTC, XMP, GPS, ICC profiles, and proprietary maker notes from dozens of camera brands. It can read, write, and edit metadata across more than 150 file types—including images, audio, video, PDFs, and Office documents.

Its command-line interface supports scripting and automation, making it ideal for forensic workflows, archival systems, and bulk metadata operations.

Bulk Rename Utility (Free for home use)

Bulk Rename Utility is a powerful tool with extensive renaming options. It supports basic EXIF metadata such as Date Taken, Camera Model, Orientation, and Dimensions for image-based renaming. For more advanced metadata handling, including conditional logic and custom tag access, its JavaScript renamer unlocks extended capabilities.

It features a web-based Rename Assistant powered by AI – just describe the task you want to perform, and it provides step-by-step guidance, including auto-generating JavaScript when needed! I asked the assistant to rename files with the Date Taken and Sub Seconds EXIF metadata, and it produced the following script:

{
  // read EXIF date/time (returns a Date) — fallback to filePropertyDate or ItemDate if needed
  var dt = filePropertyDate("exif:DateTimeOriginal") || filePropertyDate("exif:DateTime") || filePropertyDate("System.ItemDate") || object("modified");
  // read subseconds as string from EXIF (common tags: SubSecTimeOriginal or SubSecTime)
  var sub = fileProperty("exif:SubSecTimeOriginal") || fileProperty("exif:SubSecTime") || "";
  // normalize subseconds to 3 digits (milliseconds). If tag contains more or fewer digits, trim/pad right.
  if (sub) {
    // keep only digits
    sub = sub.replace(/\D/g, "");
    if (sub.length > 3) sub = sub.substring(0,3);
    while (sub.length < 3) sub = sub + "0";
  } else {
    sub = "000";
  }
  // format date/time part (use formatDateTime helper)
  var datePart = formatDateTime(dt, "YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm-ss");
  // build final newName (without extension). Change ordering/sep as you like.
  newName = datePart + "." + sub;
}

{
  // read EXIF date/time (returns a Date) — fallback to filePropertyDate or ItemDate if needed
  var dt = filePropertyDate("exif:DateTimeOriginal") || filePropertyDate("exif:DateTime") || filePropertyDate("System.ItemDate") || object("modified");
  // read subseconds as string from EXIF (common tags: SubSecTimeOriginal or SubSecTime)
  var sub = fileProperty("exif:SubSecTimeOriginal") || fileProperty("exif:SubSecTime") || "";
  // normalize subseconds to 3 digits (milliseconds). If tag contains more or fewer digits, trim/pad right.
  if (sub) {
    // keep only digits
    sub = sub.replace(/\D/g, "");
    if (sub.length > 3) sub = sub.substring(0,3);
    while (sub.length < 3) sub = sub + "0";
  } else {
    sub = "000";
  }
  // format date/time part (use formatDateTime helper)
  var datePart = formatDateTime(dt, "YYYY-MM-DD_HH-mm-ss");
  // build final newName (without extension). Change ordering/sep as you like.
  newName = datePart + "." + sub;
}