AfterShot Pro 3 Review: A Powerful Alternative to Lightroom

The photo editing software landscape has evolved significantly in recent years. Adobe Lightroom remains the 800-pound gorilla, but an increasing number of viable alternatives have matured to challenge its dominance. One of the most compelling competitors is Corel‘s AfterShot Pro 3 – a comprehensive RAW editing program with library management tools aimed squarely at professional and enthusiast photographers.

As we enter 2024, AfterShot Pro 3 has received some notable updates to keep pace with the latest cameras, lenses and user demands. The question is – with Lightroom still looming large and subscription-free options like Capture One and DxO PhotoLab upping their game, does AfterShot Pro still hold its own? Is it worth investing in for a new efficient editing workflow this year?

In this in-depth review, I‘ll put the latest version of AfterShot Pro 3 through its paces and share my unfiltered thoughts to help you make an informed decision. As a photography industry veteran who has tested nearly every major photo editor on the market, I‘ve edited thousands of photos in AfterShot and have a strong grasp of its strengths, weaknesses and ideal user.

What‘s New in AfterShot Pro 3 for 2024?

Corel has kept AfterShot Pro 3 up to date with regular builds that support the newest camera models and lens profiles. The major update for 2024 introduces a handful of new features and enhancements, most notably:

• Improved Highlight/Shadow Recovery: AfterShot‘s already excellent RAW processing engine has been further refined, especially in terms of recovering detail in highlights and shadows. In my tests, AfterShot extracted more usable dynamic range from challenging high-contrast scenes than previous versions with fewer artifacts.

• Face Detection & Recognition: Borrowing a feature from Lightroom, AfterShot Pro can now automatically detect faces in your photos and let you tag and organize them by person. While not as full-featured as Lightroom‘s implementation, it works reliably and can be a real time-saver for event and portrait photographers.

• Luminosity Masking: A long-requested feature from users, you can now create masks based on the brightness values of specific areas of the photo. This makes it much easier to perform targeted edits to just the highlights, midtones or shadows.

• Enhanced Watermarking: AfterShot Pro now offers more customization options for adding text and graphical watermarks to your exported images, with control over opacity, position and tiling.

• Performance Optimizations: Corel claims a 20% faster launch time, speedier image previews and more optimized memory usage when working with large, high-resolution files. Based on my experience with a hefty catalog of 45MP RAW files, AfterShot does feel snappy, but I didn‘t notice a drastic speed boost over the previous version.

While these additions are certainly welcome, they feel more like playing catch-up to competitors rather than breaking new ground. Make no mistake – AfterShot Pro 3 was already a highly capable and mature RAW editor before this update. But if you‘re a current user looking for a major leap forward in functionality, this revision may leave you underwhelmed.

Performance

One of AfterShot Pro‘s claims to fame is speedy performance, especially when batch editing and exporting large numbers of photos. To put this to the test, I pit AfterShot Pro head-to-head against Lightroom Classic in a few different scenarios on my Core i7 Windows 10 laptop with 32GB RAM and a fast NVMe SSD.

In a batch export of 100 full-resolution 24MP RAW files with basic editing and sharpening adjustments applied, AfterShot Pro finished the job in 4 minutes and 10 seconds. Lightroom took 5 minutes and 38 seconds – a full 26% slower.

Similarly, when scrolling through a folder of 250 RAW images waiting for 1:1 previews to render, AfterShot felt more responsive, with less lag and low-res placeholders popping in. Subjectively, culling a large batch of photos feels faster and less tedious in AfterShot.

However, the advantage narrows when working on an individual file with a lot of local adjustments and healing brush spots. With my heavy 45MP test files, jumping between the Library and Develop modules in Lightroom felt slightly more responsive than navigating around AfterShot‘s all-in-one interface.

So, AfterShot Pro‘s speed edge is most noticeable when bulk editing, but less apparent when really digging into optimizing a single image. Still, for event photographers that need to churn through thousands of images quickly and efficiently, AfterShot Pro can save some meaningful time.

Editing Features

Of course, performance means little if the editing tools aren‘t up to par. Here‘s a quick rundown of what you can expect from each panel in AfterShot‘s Develop module:

Basic Panel:
Your bread-and-butter exposure adjustments like Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks and Saturation. Nothing too earth-shattering here, but the sliders are responsive and it‘s easy to get a good baseline edit. I appreciate that holding the Alt key temporarily maxes out each slider so you can see a clipping mask to avoid crushing your shadows or blowing out highlights.

Color Panel:
In addition to White Balance and Tint, you‘ll find a handy Auto WB option that generally does a nice job of removing color casts and a spot WB tool for neutralizing based on a grey point. The real star is the 3-Way Color Wheels for independently adjusting hue, saturation and lightness of the shadow, midtone and highlight regions.

Tone Curves Panel:
Your standard RGB, Red, Green and Blue curves are all present and work as expected. New for 2024 is the inclusion of a Hue vs Hue and Hue vs Sat curve, which are incredibly powerful for fine-tuning and grading colors. This is a feature usually reserved for higher-end editors like Capture One, so it‘s nice to see it trickle down to AfterShot.

Detail Panel:
Here‘s where you‘ll find your Sharpening and Noise Reduction controls. AfterShot‘s sharpening is excellent, with a pleasantly natural look that doesn‘t suffer from obvious halos or artifacts. The noise reduction is solid, but not quite on par with DxO DeepPRIME – it can still struggle with high ISO images and leave some splotchy color noise behind.

Lens Corrections Panel:
AfterShot can automatically apply lens corrections like distortion control, chromatic aberration removal and vignette fixes based on lens profiles. The profiles worked well on all my lenses and even some obscure vintage glass. There‘s also an excellent Manual Correction mode where you can dial in perspective corrections – great for fixing keystoning in architectural shots.

Overall, AfterShot Pro 3 covers all the essential editing bases and ticks most of the boxes you‘d expect from a comprehensive RAW editor in 2024. The tools generally work as advertised and can produce excellent, professional-grade results. But there are a few glaring omissions and points of friction in the workflow.

My biggest gripe is the clunky local adjustment tools. Creating a new mask with the brush, linear or radial gradient is straightforward enough, but modifying a complex existing mask is an exercise in frustration. There‘s no way to subtract from a mask, intersect masks or create luminosity/color range masks to fine-tune your selections. Coming from Lightroom or Capture One, it feels like stepping back about 5 years in terms of masking ease and flexibility.

Another issue is the lack of virtual copies or snapshots to quickly try out different editing treatments. If you want to experiment with several creative directions on an image, you have to manually duplicate the file, which creates additional clutter and eats up storage space.

Finally, while AfterShot does have a vibrant community creating presets and looks, the in-app experience of browsing and installing them is lackluster compared to Lightroom. It‘s not deal-breaking, but if you rely heavily on presets in your editing workflow, you‘ll likely find AfterShot‘s implementation lacking.

Library & Digital Asset Management

AfterShot Pro 3 bucks the trend of forcing users into a catalog-based workflow and instead adopts a simple, folder-based approach. In theory, this means you can start editing your images immediately without having to first import them into the app.

In practice, it works well for keeping your drive organized and preventing the creation of yet another proprietary catalog file to manage. For folks that prefer to manually organize their files and folders, it‘s freeing to not be locked into a catalog system.

However, the downside is that you miss out on some of the more advanced digital asset management (DAM) features that Lightroom users enjoy. There‘s no smart collections, so you can‘t automatically sort images based on metadata like camera, lens, date, aperture value, etc.

Keywording is also fairly basic, supporting only a flat list with no hierarchical organization. If you depend on complex keyword taxonomies to sort and locate your images, you‘ll quickly bump up against AfterShot‘s limitations.

That said, AfterShot Pro does have some useful tools for culling and organizing your photos. You can assign color labels, star ratings and pick/reject flags just like Lightroom. The Grid View makes it easy to survey a large batch of images at once, and the Compare View allows you to examine two or more photos side-by-side to choose your best shot.

There‘s also a handy Focus Peaking overlay that highlights the sharpest areas of the frame in red, which can help you quickly determine which photos are keepers. And new for 2024, the face detection and recognition feature works quite well for automatically identifying and tagging people in your shots.

Overall, AfterShot Pro 3‘s library management tools are serviceable for basic organization and culling. But if you require advanced DAM capabilities, you‘ll likely find yourself yearning for the robustness of Lightroom or Capture One in this area.

Alternatives to AfterShot Pro

Of course, AfterShot Pro doesn‘t exist in a vacuum. As of 2024, there are some strong alternative options for RAW editing and photo library management to consider:

Capture One Pro is the go-to choice for many high-end studio, commercial and landscape photographers. Its tethering, color grading and layered editing tools are second to none. However, it comes with a steep learning curve and an even steeper price tag at $299 for a perpetual license.

DxO PhotoLab has made huge strides in recent years and now boasts some of the best noise reduction and lens correction capabilities on the market. Its new DeepPRIME AI demosaicing produces stunningly clean and detailed results from high ISO images. But the workflow and asset management tools feel a bit disconnected.

ON1 Photo RAW is billed as an "all-in-one" photo editor with layers, Effects, AI-powered tools and even cloud sync. While it has a kitchen sink approach, the RAW processing engine falls short of the other players and the program still feels somewhat rough around the edges.

And of course, Adobe Lightroom remains the 800-pound gorilla in the room. With best-in-class DAM, a robust mobile ecosystem, seamless Photoshop integration and the unrivaled network of Lightroom-specific presets and plugins, it‘s the default choice of countless photographers. But its subscription-only model and increasingly bloated interface are a turn-off for some.

Here‘s a quick comparison chart to sum up how AfterShot Pro stacks up:

	AfterShot Pro	Lightroom	Capture One Pro	DxO PhotoLab	ON1 Photo RAW
Price	$79.99	$9.99/month	$299	$219	$99.99
Workflow	Folder-based	Catalog	Catalog or Session	Project & DxO Standard	Catalog or Folder
Local Adjustments	Limited	Extensive	Extensive	Good	Layers & Masking
DAM Features	Basic	Extensive	Good	Basic	Good
Photoshop Integration	Plugin Only	Excellent	Roundtrip Editing	Standalone	Layers Support

Ultimately, the "best" editor will depend on your specific needs and budget. For a certain type of photographer, AfterShot Pro hits a sweet spot of price, performance and feature set. But it‘s not necessarily the most powerful or polished option out there.

The Bottom Line

So, is AfterShot Pro 3 worth your hard-earned cash in 2024? As with most things in photography, it depends.

If you‘re an event, sports or nature photographer that shoots a high volume of images, appreciates a lightning-fast workflow and doesn‘t need the most elaborate editing tools, AfterShot Pro is a compelling choice. Its stellar RAW processing, zippy performance, folder-based approach and attractive one-time price make it a great fit for photographers that just want to get the job done quickly.

However, if you‘re a studio photographer that requires advanced tethering capabilities, complex masking and selective editing tools, AfterShot Pro will likely leave you wanting more. Similarly, if keywording, smart albums and other digital asset management features are critical to your workflow, you‘ll be better served by Lightroom or Capture One.

AfterShot Pro 3 is a highly capable program that can deftly handle the majority of editing tasks that most photographers will throw at it. It may not be the most cutting-edge or flashy RAW editor on the market, but it covers the fundamentals extremely well at an affordable price.

Corel has proven that it can continue to develop and improve AfterShot Pro over the years to keep it relevant in an increasingly competitive field. The 2024 update, while not revolutionary, adds some nice features and enhancements to an already solid foundation.

If you‘ve been looking for a viable Lightroom alternative that won‘t break the bank, AfterShot Pro 3 is absolutely worth a test drive. Download the free trial, take it for a spin with your own image library and see if it fits your needs and editing style.

At the very least, it‘s a powerful and affordable tool to have in your digital darkroom that just might change the way you approach post-processing. In a market dominated by subscription models and increasingly complex programs, AfterShot Pro 3 is a refreshingly straightforward option that delivers where it counts.