All Day I Dream About Photography

There is a lot of fuss and speculations about the Adobe new cloud licensing scheme and a lot of you out there might be on the road scanning for a solid and trustworthy replacement for Photoshop.

Myself have been looking for an Adobe Photoshop replacement for quite some time but couldn’t really find my joy in anything I have tried before I discovered PhotoLine.

The first thing that caught my eye with PhotoLine was that it was the only photo-editing tool I found, aside from Adobe Photoshop, that could handle 16 bits per channel (or 48 bits) images. When I decided to download their 30 days trial version I was totally shocked to notice that we are talking about a mere 18 Megabytes download file.

So how can a 18 Megabytes (around 80 megabyte footprint on your disk) compare to the Adobe Photoshop giant ?

Disclaimer This is not a paid review, I have not been paid to write what I am writing however I was offered a license for PhotoLine in return for the AD spot that is showing on side bar of this blog. The review is my honest take on the software.

You might be a much fancier photohop user than I am so your mileage may vary but, so far, I have not encountered any thing that I need and couldn’t do with Photoline.

Here is a reduced feature list of what PhotoLine can do for you

• Price : 59 Euros
• Upgrade Policy : 29 Euros per major upgrade
• Disk Footprint : 80MB
• Supported Operating Systems : MAC and Windows
• Native 64 bits support
• 16 bit per color channel support
• RGB / CMYK and Lab color space
• Color management with ICC profiles
• Lossless image processing
• Can undo up to 999 operations.
• Layers, Layer masks and adjustment layers
• Actions
• Brush removal and object removal tool (equivalent to content aware of Photoshop)
• Liquid scaling
• Much faster and lighter on my system
• Good support for PSD files
• RAW images support (although I don’t use it since I have Adobe Lightroom for that
• Built-in sharpening and blurring filters and more
• Auto-masking (think magic wand)
• Color filters : alternative to luminosity masks and even more powerful
• Integrates with Adobe Lightroom as external editor
• Merge to HDR (I have never used this feature since I don’t do HDR)
• Support through email or on the PhotoLine Forum, reply is quick on both

The list can go on but I want to list the tools that I personally was looking for in the Photoshop Alternative, for the full feature list please visit PhotoLine webpage

So much for the “good” part, let’s take a look at the “bad side” or let me say “room for improvement” section

• Learning curve: If you are coming, like me, from a photoshop background you can expect a learning curve to get used to PhotoLine terminology, tools and shortcuts. But I guess this is to be expected anytime someone is jumping ships.
• The user interface is no were as sleek and sexy as photoshop but I guess the guys at PhotoLine send their time working under the hood rather than developing the interface.
• Lack of tutorials: of course you can imagine that the number of tutorials available for PhotoLine out-there is considerably less than what you would find for Photoshop

Just in case you are wondering here is how the PhotoLine interface looks like

As a conclusion if you are an amateur/enthusiast photographer (or even maybe a pro) on a budget and you are looking for a very powerful photo editing tool then you should definitely give PhotoLine a try for yourself, you can download their 30 days trial version no strings attached.

I have nothing against adobe and I have bought Adobe Lightroom 5 however Photoshop is totally outside my budget range and the only surprises I have had using PhotoLine are good ones.

Have you tried PhotoLine or do you own it ? do you love it or did you find any serious short-comes to it ? Let us know your opinion in the comments.

P.S. Psst, before you go! We will be giving away shortly a free license for PhotoLine for one of our readers so stay tuned.