Aftershot Pro 2 review conclusions

When it comes to digital photography, I have to confess that I am primarily a JPEG shooter.  I don't like post-processing so I don't like the idea of using RAW format, as I have the impression it is going to slow down my post-processing tasks and add bulk to my digital archives.

Well let's be honest, I wanted to try it out despite the cons and see if there is anything in for me.  My photo workflow has been based in the past on (mainly) JPEG tools : Gthumb, then F-Spot and since a number of years I have settled down to using Shotwell, a great and fast catalog/edit/publish all-in-one tool.  Pretty limited for retouching but I don't like to do that much anyway so never a problem for me at least.  I can use the Gimp from within Shotwell when I need to remove some dust spots but for the rest it is fine to adjust exposure, contrast, saturation (and I don't do much of anything else 95% of the time).

That being said, last month I tried Corel Aftershot Pro 2 (Linux install; amd64 package downloaded from Corel's site) and started the 30 days trial.  Soon after the install I got an update from Corel.  Don't know exactly which version I have tested but it must be whatever is current as of July 2014.

I quite liked using the program, here are my main conclusions:

Pros:

• it is MUCH more powerful than Shotwell for retouching photos (including while doing the RAW conversion of course).
• The GUI is pretty sleek after you get used to it (took a couple of days maybe). 
• The program is pretty responsive even when working on RAW files.  There is clearly a lot of caching and performance improvements behind the interface (and I have old hardware)
• Can use hardware acceleration when available (I installed OpenGL to try that, not sure it helped a lot on my old hardware though)
• Good coverage of the entire workflow (but not entirely all-in-one)
• I could work with IPTC metadata and tagging in a way that was compatible with Shotwell (hierarchical tags are supported with semicolon separators).
• It was pretty easy and fast to convert RAW images to JPEG and the different adjustment modules are well organised. 
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Cons:

• workflow completeness is not 100% : I didn't find how to import photos from the camera or card.  Not a problem during the trial because I worked mostly on photos that were already in my Shotwell library anyway.
  Again, workflow completeness is not 100% : when finished you can export photos to different places and formats but not directly publish (to social media)
• Camera support is not bad but far from complete.  DNG is OK (tried with both my K-m and K-r raws).  Fuji EXR doesn't work (tried with some .RAF files downloaded from review sites as samples of RAW images from compact cameras that I was investigating to possibly add to my arsenal, like the F600EXR).  Even worse, the Olympus ORF format from my old Pen Mini 1 is supported but not more recent cameras (e.g. the OMD E-M10 that is still on my list and almost in my shopping cart, and the XZ-10 that I eventually bought last month).
• Some irritating behaviour from the GUI : when flagging an image for reject and having a filter to not show the rejects, the image is removed from the view but it is still selected.  Pretty annoying.  I would like it so show whatever the next image is but couldn't configure it to do so.
• Not free, not open source (but at least Linux is a supported platform).

Conclusion
Even though I quite liked using it, I decided against buying a license.  At least until my (current and future) Olympus RAW formats are supported.  During my testing, I also started using Rawtherapee and found that it had better support for more RAW formats so that might be my future way of working with RAW under Linux.