I’m thinking of using the Black Friday deal to buy a license for Photo Supreme and I’d be interested to hear others’ experiences of using it with DxO PhotoLab on a Mac.
My current workflow is as follows:
Import raw photos from camera and save in a folder on an SSD.
Use Fast Raw Viewer to review and choose which photos to keep/work on.
Use Adobe Bridge to tag and rename shortlisted photos.
Use DxO PhotoLab to process shortlisted photos and export some/all of them to high-quality .jpgs.
I’m wondering how this compares with the workflow adopted by Photo Supreme users and what in their experience are the benefits/downsides of using Photo Supreme?
By way of background, I’m running the latest version of PhotoLab on a Mac Studio with the latest version of Ventura.
I am a Photo Supreme User on a Mac. My workflow is:
Import raw files with PSU into the respective folder. At this time PSU will add copyright, name of photographer or any other metadata that you want as “default”
Cull within PSU
keyword, geotagging etc…
Use DPL and export as 16-bit tiffs
IMPORTANT: Do NOT use several apps to edit metadata unless you love problems. In this case, use PSU only for your metadata. Do not edit any in DPL. In preferences in DPL do not tick “Syncronize”
When you do changes in PSU and save those to an xmp in PSU, then DPL will pick it up and you will see an “S” on the thumbnail, top right corner:
If you click on that “S” you can tell DPL to update its database also with that change. Of course if you do that on hundreds of files in PSU you can select all of those files in DPL and do that with one go.
All this works perfectly and I can i.e select some raw files in PSU and open DPL directly from within PSU.
That’s really helpful, thank you, Sigi. By the sounds of things, you reckon that Photo Supreme is a good investment in terms of providing a DAM and at the same time integrating well with PL to provide a smooth and easy workflow.
I’m running Photo Supreme - the server version - as my DAM as well and have done so for many years.
It’s a great combination and they complement each other very nice.
My workflow is very much like Sigi’s but I sometimes do the culling before ingesting the photos to PSu.
PSu offers a lot of advanced features like stacking and versioning and I have PL setup to name and generate the files accordingly.
Thanks, Required. If you use Photo Supreme to rename a batch of images, does it rename all their associated sidecar, etc files? Have you found any downsides to Photo Supreme?
I rename all the files when I download them from my camera onto the computer to: YYYYMMDD_####
I do that with Photo Supreme. You can create your own profile for the download and specify whatever you want. It is very flexible
If you later rename, move or delete the file WITHIN Photo Supreme all relevant sidecar files will get handled accordingly (assuming you have sidecar files in the same folder as the photo files of course, which I highly recommend to do)
For my needs I have not found a downside with PSU.
Thanks once again, Sigi. I’ve now downloaded and installed a copy of Photo Supreme.
I wonder if you or someone else can help me with a couple more questions before I dive in:
I’d like to try PSU out on a folder containing a handful of photos in order to play with it and get to know it. If I do this, can I then delete the database prior to importing all my photos so that I don’t end up with duplicates?
I’m planning on installing PSU on both my desktop and laptop Macs. I need it on my laptop so that when I go on holiday I can use it to process the photos I take each day. Will it be possible to synchronise the databases on the two Macs before and leave and when I return?
Thanks for any help with either of these questions.
Up to now, Chuck, I have been renaming them because I haven’t had a DAM and it makes them easier to find. I may well drop steps 1–3 as you suggest. Thanks for chipping in.
No problem. You can have as many catalogues as you want. Ultimately it is smarter to have only one catalogue but for testing and learning no problem. I know people who have 300.000 files in their catalouge without problems.
A good place to start is the forum they run - very helpful. Please reach out via mail to their support.
They will usually help you within hours.
Thank you, Sigi, and Chuck too. I’ve been playing around with Photo Supreme today. I have a lot to learn here but it looks really interesting so I’ve taken advantage of the Black Friday deal and bought a license.
