I’ve seen similar posts in Feature Request dating back almost 5 years now, but, wanted to create just an open request for just any other program other than Adobe. Many of us would love to support your product, but refuse to support Adobe. Which means we are unable to utilize the product you’ve created.
I think the requests for a standalone are nice, but unrealistic. However, I do wonder if a plugin for any of the other RAW engines out there is more possible now.
CaptureOne has opened up its APK even more recently (see topaz integration). I’m not sure when the last time you looked at this Nate for porting over a plugin
Affinity Photo generally has good support, and, with Photo v.2 I know they did a ton of work on their RAW processing which may allow for better control for the back end support you need.
Both RawTherapee and DarkTable are open source. I’m not sure if there are any barriers to entry here, and, you could probably enable the community developers to help integrate a solution. Darktable already has a base system setup for negative scanning, but it is much more limited than the product you’ve created here.
Really any alternative to Adobe would be appreciated. Look forward to any sort of response or update from you.
Just looked again at the Capture One developers portal and it doesn’t appear anything has changed with their SDK.
As I understand it from the documentation, the CaptureOne plugins are basically limited to:
Export an image out (as a TIFF or JPEG) to a third party program
Reimport that TIFF or JPEG back into Capture One after it has been edited by the 3rd party program
This is enough for something like what Topaz is doing, but so much of what makes Negative Lab Pro so versatile is that is able to directly and non-destructively work with the original RAW file through Lightroom’s SDK, and being able to store the metadata of your NLP settings in Lightroom’s catalog so that you can alway pick up where you left off.
I’ve seen others trying to get around the limitations of the Capture One SDK by using something like AppleScripts to automate some of the interactions in C1, but this method is also very limited in what it can do (and will not work with Windows).
I haven’t looked at Affinity in a while, so that may be worth looking into again.
With both RawTherapee and DarkTable, I believe their model is fully open-sourced, so I’m not sure if the community would be receptive to any kind of paid add-ons? Or if there examples of others doing this successfully?
I’d really love to do a standalone offering at some point, and have done some groundwork on it, but I can already barely keep up with the support and product improvements I already have going on, so it will probably come very slowly unless I make some changes!
Hey Nate, appreciate your response and answering all of my points.
RE: CaptureOne. That is fair, and unfortunate. If they didn’t change anything else then you would be effectively making that standalone product anyways… hopefully they see the power in plugins and enable further access to backend tools.
RE: Darktable and Rawtherapee. I think there would be some backlash from areas of the community, however, it is open source so my understanding is it’s open to use to a degree. It may be worth just pitching an inquiry to the main Dev. team. Their contact page is here: Darktable/ Get in Contact
And, literature for their negative processing attempt is here: negadoctor/
I realize you have your own way of utilizing Adobe’s APK to convert negatives, but, maybe it is possible to get Darktable on board with working with you to develop something, or, use their code to help create that standalone product.
The only Plugin I know for Darktable is the GIMP plugin, however, that is not a paid software so it isn’t a great example really.
To throw some support behind this one. I agree. We need a non-Adobe option. I do suggest a standalone version is the best long term option though. Regardless of what happens with all the image editor options a standalone version would allow someone to use NLP and then edit the output files in which ever editor they choose. It frees up NLP to a much larger demographic.
I am new here and also a non Adobe software person. I switched over to Affinity Photo & Designer for all my needs years ago. Their software is superb. I also wish I could use your product but can’t because of the Adobe requirement.