Photography and Photo Editing

I want to find a quality image editing application.

Just about any of them work for non-creative photography (ie. No SFX). I do NOT do creative, I just do basically what any photographer does. I almost solely use CaptureOne.

You'll see people always recommend Photoshop, but not for Photoshop itself, but for plugins. This is a very, very, very valid argument and as long as you process color balance and exposure in any raw tool, you can use very old Photoshop versions. Again, as some think it's more complexed.... you literally only need a tool to process CB and exposure... that's it and you can export to tiff and work in anything you want.

I've used Linux based tools, in fact do so more everyday, but finger rolling your own macros and plugins becomes tiresome, and some plugins in Photshop I don't know how to write period.

I stick with Windows only for photography. I work local out of "scratch" space, but I read off of the NAS, there's 2 possible downsides (but apparently only 2):

Optional problem*: WinApi STILL has a bug when renaming related to UNC. On occasions "//OMV/blah" will evaluate correctly for the copy, but on the delete, the evaluation will have removed the first '/', thus leaving "/OMV/blah", which of course fails but it does so silently leaving the original unwanted copy in place. Not sure which WinAPI or .Net version or whatever... but it can still happen so when you use any operation first, watch it.

Lastly, on Windows do not depend on your application to understand UNC. Luckily, the silver bullet for all photography programs I've used is 'mklink /D ...', which creates a sym link to any directory. This also eliminates the first UNC problem, so as you would guess I link everything.

Inkscape: this is a great tool, it's one I'm using more and more Linux, but not for photography as if I have a 14bit file, crashes and/or weird linear filter problems happen when I crop., but ONLY if I crop... strange madness. So if you also crop when you color balance and expose, Inkscape is great.

Adobe's Lightroom has the advantage in the tools department, or at least did. I stopped using it and moved to CaptureOne after it acquired certain tools.

Darktable is one I'll try about every 9 months. It has yet to NOT crash, but it crashes less and less, so I keep an eye on that one as it's a Lightroom clone.

Davinci Studio is kinda worth a mention. It runs on CentOS and even though it's a NLE for video, you can using the masking with the caveat that it's a much more manual process than you may be used to (a whole bunch of grab and pull) but it turns out very nice.

This isn't really topic related, but if you start down a more serious road in photography, don't buy into Nikon. If I didn't have so much invested in Nikon glass, I would switch to ANY other camp and be happier.

1. Nikon doesn't care like Nikon zealots think. Nikon rightfully has much more interest in their optics divisions, thus the D850 is the last Nikon product I'll ever buy. They really have substantially bigger profits in all fields but professional photography. I hate them for it, but I understand.

2. Both their F-mount and Z-mount (the newer one) are not friendly with ANY other mount. You'll see 6/8/12/16k video cameras that will have options for just about any mount... but Nikon's mounts are not ones you'll see. There's 3rd party adapters, but all of them lose length and speed because of how they must be designed.

Go for EF, PL, 3/4... anything but Nikon.

I saw you post that and will check it out. As far as working with the same file structure, I won't be do doing that, at least not if you mean directly working off the source (OMV in my case) filesystem.

I use Lightroom to create catalogs, then use programs like Photoshop, Aurora HDR, Luminar, and Magic Bullet Looks, among others, as plugins when I want to do more than what Lightroom alone offers. Recently used it for my college project along with guys from https://www.topwritersreview.c…iews/bestessay-education/ ). Still, before having all these other programs, Lightroom did 100% of my photo editing and did it reasonably well.