Corel AfterShot Pro review

There are a few other areas with room for improvement. It’s possible to pick a narrow range of colours for manipulation, but pixels are either manipulated or not – there’s no feathering by location or colour. This often gave the affected area a harsh, noisy border. Meanwhile, noise reduction is in three parts, with the more powerful processing provided by a third-party plug-in, and overall it can’t quite match Lightroom’s noise reduction quality. Corel needs to rethink its approach here, as the current system feels disjointed.

It’s incredibly quick to locate photos based on metadata – here we have all the raw images taken in June 2011 at ISO 200 to 800 with a Sony 50mm lens

Another concern is its less-than-fully comprehensive support for raw formats. There’s always a small delay for these applications to support a new camera, but AfterShot Pro is yet to support the Panasonic FZ150, Nikon P7100, Sony NEX-C3 and Pentax Q, all of which were launched between June and August 2011. The entire Samsung NX range and anything by Fujifilm and Sigma are currently off limits, too.

Corel needs to address this urgently. Users should be free to choose whatever camera they like, both now and in the future. Once you’ve invested hundreds of hours tagging photos and performing non-destructive edits, the last thing you’ll want is to be forced to switch to different software when you buy a new camera.

However, AfterShot Pro also feels more specialised than its competitors. It doesn’t have multimedia capabilities such as video support, geo-tagging and integration with online hosting services. We anticipate that this will change under Corel’s stewardship, but in a way, the streamlined design is part of its charm. We hope that Corel can expand it without compromising its efficiency.

As it stands, AfterShotPro compares well with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4, beating it for catalogue management and local edits and coming close for colour correction. Noise reduction is a little disappointing, though, not so much in the quality of the results but more in its convoluted implementation. Meanwhile, the less-than-comprehensive raw format support doesn’t inspire confidence. As such, we’re reluctant to recommend it unreservedly, but a minor update could bring it to the top of the pack.