Jasc AfterShot

[SeanKlingler]

Anybody got any opinions on Jasc AfterShot as a photo management app? I'm a happy Paint Shot Pro user, so I guess I tend to believe this will be a good app.

Seen any good reviews/comparisons anywhere?

[rlwhitt]

I have been a happy user of what is now JASC After Shot for a while now (this WAS Sierra Imaging's Image Expert 2000)

I've noticed that this software does not get a lot of discussion, not nearly as much as the "bigger names" like Thumbs plus, QImage, the ULead products. I've downloaded trials of most of these and frankly for what *I* want, After Shot has them all beat hands down. Keep in mind that others may need different features, everone is different. My advice is to download the trialware (everyone has it) and TRY THEM!

At the risk of sounding like an advertisement shill (I'm just an enthusiastic user, no connection to the company), here are a few of the highlights in MY opinion:

- Download from camera. Canon is not a directly supported camera, but it can use any generic TWAIN driver or direct from CF.

- Good browser, though the thumbnails are fixed size. Neat "2 Window" mode to easily compare 2 images. Can read/show PSP files, but cannot save them. This is the sole difference from Image Expert 2000 and I suspect it was added quickly at the last minute. I expect they will upgrade this in the future to save as well. Does not download RAW formats or view their thumbnails - perhaps this would be a good wishlist item.

- Catalog & Search better than anything else I've seen - worth the price of admission alone. User definable keywords, enter descriptive text. keyword & text search with boolean combos. All very easy to use. Result sets can then be managed, printed, etc as a group.

- Great, flexible printing, standard size layouts, combo layouts, custom, save templates. I know others have this, but I find After Shot's easier to grok & use. Also has a favorite albums feature.

- Decent Slide show feature.

- Panorama stitcher built in. I've only used it once, and it worked fine, but I'm no expert on it's capabilities. Uses Enroute's PhotoSythesis, so take whatever you can from that.

- Shows some EXIF data, but one of my complaints is that it does not show more - hope they add to this.

- Program Launch Bar. Put other programs down here, drag images to them to launch with the selected image. This is where you've put Image Editors, AVI players, etc. Makes this software easy to set up as your "central control center".

- Batch operations, renaming, rotating, quick fixing, etc.

- Lossless rotation.

- Quick Fix. I know a lot of people don't like one button fixers, but for a casual snapshooter like me this is gold. This one actually does a decent job quite frequently.

- Crop tool. OK all you other tool vendors, if you want to see how a crop tool ought to be implimented, look no further, this is it. Gives you a window with buttons for portrait & landscape, pulldown menu with std print sizes like 4x6, 5x7 so you don't have to have a friggin calcuator to get your crop.

- Has a red eye tool, but it's the worst feature in the whole program. Wish they'd put the excellent one from Paint Shop Pro in here. I've notices a LOT of crappy red-eye tools out there, I suppose it's hard to do well.

- Basic editing, like color, saturation, brightness, add text, special effects, etc. This is NOT an image editor though. If like me most of your snaps are "close enough" and you don't enjoy mucking about with histograms & levels and nitpicking every pixel to get it perfect, it just might be enough though. Can apply editing & corrections to just selected areas.

- Save to CD or disk with catalogs intact.

- Create web pages. I never use this, though it looks pretty good. I'm pretty sure there are other image management programs that do this better, so I can't judge.

Like you I'm glad to see JASC take this, and I hope they continue to improve it and integrate it more with PSP.

[Roger_Cavanagh]

Sean,

I got Image Expert 2000 a while back. I would agree with most of what rlwhitt said about it as Aftershot. I would only make two extra comments:

- EXIF data: I have a D30 and none of the EXIF data will show in Aftershot/IE2k. This is a PITA as it limits the archive value of the prog.

- HTML generation works quite nicely, although many of the canned formats are rather naff

As a "photo album", I think this software works very well.

Regards,

Roger

[rlwhitt]

Roger,

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but do you not see any EXIF even if you selct "Show Image Details" from the View menu?

I see quite a bit of data here, though not all of it that say a BreezBrowser would show. Plus much of it is a cryptic, raw form like integers for values, etc.

Rick

[Roger_Cavanagh]

rlwhitt wrote:
Roger,

Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but do you not see any EXIF even if you selct "Show Image Details" from the View menu?

I see quite a bit of data here, though not all of it that say a BreezBrowser would show. Plus much of it is a cryptic, raw form like integers for values, etc.

Rick


Rick,

Nope, I get nothing except a message that says something like "camera details not available". This is with D30 raw->Photoshop->JPG->EXIF copy in BB.

BB shows the EXIF data in the JPG OK. I emailed both Chris Breeze and Sierra Imaging with this issue. Chris (as always, helpful) spent some time checking, but concluded his EXIF write routines were OK. He didn't know of any other software that couldn't read the data. Sierra Imaging didn't even bother to acknowledge my email. No doubt, they were already having trouble, which explains why JASC now owns the software.

I did some investigation and discovered that Image Expert stores its data in an MS Access database. I considered trying to build an import routine to add EXIF data using the BB text file, but decided that was far too much like hard work :D and probably wouldn't be a very robust process.

Does your EXIF data show in similar circumstances to mine?

Regards,

[rlwhitt]

Roger,

OK, now I see the difference in what we're seeing. I don't do RAW, so I can't say - just that it has no problems with the JPEGs right out of the camera.

No doubt these aren't the best routines out there, since EXIF reading was never, IMO, one of the main thrusts of Image Expert. One more thing to add to the wishlist for JASC - during the honeymoon period, maybe they'll actually be agressive about updating it!

With regard to the Access MDB, the DETAIL EXIF is not stored there. It records some of the highlights (the ones that are shown in the upper panels, not the detail one), but the Detail EXIF stuff is coming right out the header, and apprently in the raw format (shows the same in EXIFRead)

My limited experience in studying some of the EXIF specs is that it's kind of loose and allows some variation on how you record things. An EXIF reader needs to be pretty robust to make sure it does not miss variations. Obviously Breezbrowser is one of these robust ones, AfterShot is not.

[rlwhitt]

FYI follow-up, to whoever reading this might be a current or future user of this product.

As the last couple of messages indicate, AfterShot's cataloging data (keywords, descriptions, titles, etc) are kept in a file called IXDB.MDB in the AfterShot\System directory. It's a good idea to back this thing up periodically if you use these features at all - would hate to loose all that hand entered stuff.

And on a related note, if you sneak behind AfterShot's back and move a file via windows explorer, you also loose the info because it won't be able to find the filespec reference any more. If you've got to move or rename image files, do it within the AfterShot UI.

Rick