I personally have never used the standalone version very much, but according to DXO the Elite version supports raw.
This is from DXO’s getting started guide for FilmPack 5.
“In the standalone version of DxO Filmpack 5 , you can JPEG and TIFF files, and RAW files (Elite edition), and apply automatic corrections for noise and lens defects, as well as color protection”
I know there have been periodic updates to FilmPack 5 Elite and I assume they were mostly for new camera raw file support.
Mark
Mark, you are right. I was confusing FilmPack with ViewPoint, which doesn’t edit RAW.
Sorry to have caused confusion.
Just ignore that last to and fro, it was just me not having drunk enough tea to keep the brain cells moving 
Or, maybe you were testing us, to see how many of us would correct what you wrote? 
You might find the lighting from such a setup is not as even as you expect.
stuck
No problem. After reading your post I wasn’t certain about it myself so I checked.
Mark
Makes sense to me. Why bother doing it that way, if the results might not be as expected. And I can’t see myself spending many hundreds of dollars for one of the professional looking machines.
My current plan is to use my Epson scanner, following the instructions shown in the YouTube video I posted earlier (youtube.com/watch?v=48FStinOSVY). I went through my negative collection, and separated maybe 50 images I would like to scan. The overwhelming majority are black&white, so I’ll get to try the film pack software.
If I could send myself a note, to receive it when I was very young, it would be to spend more time documenting which negatives were which, and when they were taken. Doing it 50 year later may bring back pleasant memories, but it’s not fun, and in many cases almost impossible. I would also separate my “good” images from the “useless” ones. …but I’m not sure if when I was young, I would realize which images would be most useful to me in the future.
Make sure you’re doing this for your current images as well. As we all continue to produce more digital images, this becomes more important. Digital devices do usually produce a time stamp, which makes things a bit easier. A good digital asset manager (DAM) is very helpful here, but even basic steps to include some documentation in digital images (e.g., location, keywords, etc.) helps.
In prehistoric times, I got my negatives back either rolled up, or in sleeves. I never threw anything out.
Then, with digital, I figure it’s all “free”, so again I saved everything, and used stars to mark what I thought was worthwhile.
End result of the above is a gazillion images, usually stored in an organized method (folder names), but again no idea of which were “best”.
Starting later last year, I got into the habit of using PhotoMechanic to “ingest” my images. It put them where I wanted them, with proper folder names, and even renamed the images, but I saw no purpose in saving stuff that was not good, so I would go through perhaps 50 images, delete the junk, then delete anything that I didn’t think might be useful. So 50 images was cut down to 10 or 15.
I decided I would start out a new “master folder” for anything shot in 2021, and since PhotoMechanic has the capability of being used for DAM, I will be calling them in the next few days so I start this off properly. All images go into their catalog, but I need to be sure I can use the catalog to search for things I’m likely to want to search for - and to create a list of keywords that is adequate for my needs.
I haven’t deleted Adobe yet - on the basic plan it is still affordable, but I expect them to raise their rates. I read long ago that I could tell adobe Lightroom to take the catalog information, and write it out to all the individual images. That means if the catalog ever gets damaged (or deleted) I don’t lose all my work. This is on my list of “things to do”.
Starting today, and looking forward, I feel somewhat in control. But then I have a humungous folder with all the digital photos I created back when I was using Windows, not Mac, and I’ve also got image collections on both my iMac, and my MacBook Pro. I have no idea how I can ever combine everything into one huge photo gallery.
Good idea, and in fact better to to that sooner than later. (Best not to have images/data stuck in proprietary formats, even something as commonly used as Lightroom. I use a Win 10-based DAM, IMatch https://www.photools.com/, but that’s not an easy option for a Mac user. I’m not familiar with PhotoMechanic, but I know if has a devoted following. I believe but am not sure that you just tell PM where your images are and it references them (i.e., it creates a database of where they are and what information they contain, including information exported from a Lightroom catalog). Regarding folders, I assume you don’t actually have your earlier digital photos in one ‘humongous’ folder but instead have a series of sub-folders (e.g., date-based) under a top folder. Operating systems tend to get testy when you have too many images in one folder.
It’s a good idea to have an overall photo folder structure (e.g., with date-based sub-folders). If you’re not currently there, PM should be able to help you restructure your folders even if you have lots and lots of images.
My older folders are organized by country, then by year, then by city, and then by the “function”.
There are three places currently where I want to store photos, one for Lightroom (nothing new going there), one for Luminar, and the main folder PhotoLab. What I did last year and will do again for PhotoLab this year, is divide those between India, Infrared, Ingest, Mike, Photography, Shooting, Ingest, Test, Thulsi Photos, and USA.
Under USA they are broken down by “City”, and within City they are broken down by year, and then by “function”.
If I took a photo of Biscayne Bay right now, it would go into PhotoLab > USA > Miami Beach > 2021 > and a folder there that describes what they’re about. If I took more tomorrow, everything would be the same but for that final folder, to keep them separate.
There is one BIG problem with this, that I can’t fix. In addition to Lightroom, Luminar, and PhotoLab, apparently I need a folder for "OTHER. PhotoLab can’t edit photos from my Leica M6, and my Fuji X100f. So I’m not sure what to do with those.
A smaller issue that I haven’t sorted out yet, is PhotoMechanic goes to my memory card, and “ingests” all the images from the card. This is where I delete the useless images. I haven’t done so yet, but my plan is to move that finished “Ingest” folder, into my PL4 folder.
(I find it rather annoying that PL4 won’t/can’t accept photos from my older Leica or my Fuji. I have no idea how to integrate those images alongside my images that PL4 accepts. Lightroom accepts them, and I think Luminar accepts them, so maybe my Lunimar folder should be re-named OTHER, and anything that won’t work with PL4 can go there, including my Luminar Photo Illustrations.)
Confucius said something about one photo being more useful than 1,000 words. Here’s an image from FINDER that shows my filing system clearly. The items highlighted in gray show where I would find my jpg exports from a folder (Sun Reflections on Water) created in 2020, under Miami Beach, under USA, under PhotoLab, which is inside of my “Pictures” folder on my iMac.
Looking at this now, I can see it needs some clean-up.
Please explain why you store photos in different places. Why not put all files in one place/folder structure? Imagine getting the new wow-app in a few years. Will you start a new repository and/or rearrange the structures?
Just because PL cannot display those images, does it make them outcasts to be thrown in an OTHER folder? Do these photos not show something that fits your structure?
Until I got involved with PhotoLab, all my photos were going into my Lightroom folder, using the folder structure as in my image. At some point, as soon as I’m sure how to do it, I need to have Lightroom transfer the image data out of the catalog, and into the individual images. Twice now, Lightroom has done an update, making the old “database” obsolete, and they replaced it with a new database.
PhotoLab seemed like a totally different system, and I didn’t want to get my new photos, mostly RAW, and intended for editing in PhotoLab, mixed in with the old Lightroom folders. Now I have upgraded to PL4.
Let’s say I want to edit an image, perhaps abcde123.cr2 that I have stored away. Based on where the image is stored, I immediately know which editor I had used for that image. That’s one reason for not combining everything.
Lightroom is sort of at a dead end. I have no plans to continue using it. Again, I see no reason to combine those old images with my new raw images I’m editing in PL4 whenever possible.
I’m also old, and my memory is easily confused. All my new “stuff” in the PhotoLab area, so if I’m searching for something, it is easier to find.
Finally, when I get my PhotoMechanic catalog set up, with keywords, I don’t want to go back and identify all my years of having worked with Lightroom images.
Maybe I’m being silly, but I don’t see any benefit from combining what I’m doing now. with what I’ve done for the past ten years or so - and even then, my laptop, and my desktop, each have separate file systems, currently only Lightroom on my laptop - and I also have all my digital images since I first used digital, stored on my old Windows laptop, and two large storage drives of everything from way back when… maybe 20 years? I’m not sure. They’re all organized, but not as well as what I’m doing now.
Everything in the OTHER folder will be stored in the same organization as what’s in the PhotoLab area. I’m not sure what to do about this, as the Leica M8.2 images are not accepted by PL4, and the Fuji images have the same problem, for a different reason. Regardless of where the images are coming from, they will be INGESTED from the memory card onto my computer. If you have a better idea of how to deal with them, please suggest it. (I’m probably not going to be doing much with the old Leica, but the Fuji is what I normally walk around with, here and in India. Life would be easier if PhotoLab were able to recognize, and work with, the images from my Fuji X100f.
I’ve images from the d80,d300 and the d700. All converted with CaptureNx2. My d750 is not supported by CaptureNx2. I started to create a new directory for the d750 images looking for a way how to deal with this. It became Photolab. But I still keep them seperated. I can browse the CaptureNx2 pictures with IrfanView and even when viewing the nef I see the edited embedded jpg.
The pl images I’ve to export to a \jpg subdirectory. Viewing them I must be aware that 1) the image has been exported and 2) I view the exported image.
George
I think you’re making things too complicated. You appear to be committed to using Photo Mechanic (PM) as your DAM. The advantage of a DAM is that it can read and manage the information (metadata) in your images wherever they are on your computer. In a sense, a DAM unifies information about images no matter what their physical location.
So, for example, if you point PM to your Lightroom folder (after storing information from the LR catalog in the images), that metadata should be available to you even if you don’t change the location of any files. Likewise, you can point PM to other folders also and thus unify metadata information from all those images.
By storing /adding metadata like location (country/state/city/location) in your images, you can easily access them wherever they are on your computer, e.g., do a search for all images taken in Miami Beach in 2021. You then don’t need to create physical folder structures based on locations.
Using a DAM to manage metadata is a different way of thinking than being forced to manage an elaborate folder structure, and much more flexible and powerful. It really makes your workflow much simpler.
My memory is terrible. I left things with default setting to automatically create an EXPORTS folder inside the same folder with the original images and that’s where my PL4 exports go. I frequently want to send one of them out as an email, and I know right where to go.
I suspect what I created looks overwhelmingly complex, more so than what’s needed, but I always know exactly where to put images. I’m still not sure what to do with images from Luminar. I put them in their own area, so I never accidentally think one of my images there is a “photograph”. Maybe I should rename that folder “Photo Illustrations”, and put my HDR results there too.
…select, in Lightroom, the folder that contains all the folders with your images and press command-s. This saves data from the catalog, creating .xmp sidecars or overwriting existing sidecars. Development settings and metadata are transferred herewith.
My Lightroom file directory contains jpg, nef, dng, cr2 and who knows what else files. I wanted to understand what happens if I open Lightroom, go to my top level folder, click on it, then do command-s.
I did some more searching, and found this:
(https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/metadata-basics-actions.html)
Am I correct that one by one, Lightroom will open every image and either write a sidecar file to the raw images, or add all the data to the original image file?
Also, while I realize if I open the file later in Lightroom, it will open normally, but what will happen if I open it in PL4 ? Will PL4 be aware of my editing, or will it ignore the previous editing?
Finally, if I copy/move the entire folder structure (after doing the above) and put it on an older iMac still with the original Lightroom 6 in place (but do not move over the catalog) will Lightroom 6 on the old computer recognize the files and edits? Maybe I should ask this in a Lightroom forum…
PL4 doesn’t know anything about your LR image edits. I don’t think any of the raw developer programs can read each other’s edits. However, PL4 should see the metadata edits that LR has done (e.g., Rating or any of the other tags that PL4 reads).
