Create professional quality, client-ready output from digital photographs.
PhotoFirst is a fully integrated application for pro shooters that takes the drudgery out of organizing, annotating, RAW converting, comparing, enhancing, and creating professional quality, client-ready output from digital photographs. It dramatically simplifies and reduces the time you spend on digital post-production and is designed to work with hundreds of digital photos at a time. PhotoFirst enables you to create client-ready deliverables from your digital photos - faster, more efficiently, and with total confidence that you are presenting your best work.
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />The New Version is Better Than Ever! Support for my newest camera raw files, speed boost, better export options. What is not to like? Saves me more time than ever, which is always a great thing!
Ugh, very broken!
Slothrup
Pros
Cons
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.<br />I had high hopes for photofirst, a friend of mine swears by it. But there are some very serious problems.
First is speed - it is desperately slow compared to iView. (1500 wedding photos took 20 minutes to import into photofirst on 800MHz G4, same job took about 2 minutes in iView)
Second is RAW support - D2h files show up as thumbnails but crash the program when it tries to view them - that's a big nono - unsupported files shouldn't show up, and certainly should crash the program. D60 CRW files work, sorta - there is no apparent way to adjust white balance, exposure controls seem to just be basic levels adjustments, and I get weird red/blue random pixellation on underexposed images that do not appear with other RAW converters. So, at least for these two cameras (D2h and D60) this program seems pretty much worthless.
Third is ease of use, the program forces you into a specific workflow rather than allowing the user to determine what's most efficient for his own studio and work habits. The nonstandard interface and terminology don't help either.
All in all, a very disappointing implementation of a very promising idea.
I haven't tested it extensively yet, but the repeated crashes make it difficult to spend too much studio time with this when other programs (Photoshop, iView) fulfill similar tasks with greater speed, stability and ease of use. Perhaps in a few more revs this will be a viable option, if the company can find customers willing to use the current version.
