In our reviews of earlier versions of Corel's photo workflow software, we noted its weakness at importing, sharing, and some of the editing steps in between.
The second version sped up the program, made some interface changes, and added new editing tools.
The current version, AfterShot Pro 3.5, adds blemish removal, watermarking, a preset library, and on-demand lens profile downloading.
Corel claims the current 64-bit software offers the fastest camera raw file conversion, but speed was not the only problem in previous versions.
The program now includes useful HDR tools, red-eye removal, and more.
But it still falls short of Lightroom Classic's state of the art raw conversion, geometry tools, and organization features.
Honest, Objective Reviews
Daxdi.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services.
Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
Pricing and Getting Started
AfterShot has one-shot pricing, so you needn't worry about shelling out monthly contributions as you do with Adobe Lightroom Classic ($9.99 Per Month at Adobe) .
AfterShot lists for $79.99, but is usually discounted.
That price compares well with Capture One's ($299), DxO PhotoLab's ($149), and CyberLink PhotoDirector's ($99.99).
A free 30-day unlimited trial is available, with no payment info required.
Upgrading for existing users cuts the price by $20.
The program is lighter in storage demands than competitors, taking up just 142MB, especially when compared with Lightroom CC's 1.3GB.
Right after installation, you see a dialog with lots of text and a choice of where to store settings, cache, and user data.
Leaving this set to the default will work for most users.
Next, you optionally register the software using an email address.
Importing
The interface still lacks a clear Import button, and doesn't pop up any helpful message when you plug in an SDHC card.
Nor does it add an AutoPlay option.
In fact, you must navigate down to the File menu's ninth choice, Import Photos from Folder.
What about from camera media? For that, you have to navigate through the SD card's folders to get started.
Most similar apps ease this process by finding the photos on a card automatically.
It's odd that a program whose makers boast about import speed hide the capability.
An old-style Windows XP-type window opens for importing, only letting you choose the AfterShot catalog to import to, not the PC folder.
What this tells me is that the import doesn't actually copy the image files to your PC, but just indexes them in its own catalog.
It does however, create previews for editing and lets you apply presets during import, a plus of sorts.
It also helpfully shows progress bars for the separate importing and preview-creation steps.
Since speed of ingesting digital photos into your computer is a bragging point for Corel AfterShot, I tested it by importing 157 24MP raw files in .CR2 format from a Canon EOS 6D.
Each file weighed in at about 25 to 30MB.
I tested on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
AfterShot beat most competitors, taking just 18 seconds (minutes:seconds) for the import, and another 46 seconds to finish building previews for a total import time of 1:04.
Note that that's without actually moving the files; it's simply adding them to its catalog.
This compared with 2:35 for Lightroom to complete both tasks, 2:41 for Capture One , and a group-leading 1:03 for PhotoDirector.
These numbers aren't completely comparable, since AfterShot isn't copying or moving the files, but just adding their info to its catalog database.
Lightroom only lets you do this when importing from a folder on the local disk.
AfterShot doesn't even offer the option to move or copy files, so it's up to you to use your operating system or another utility, such as PhotoMechanic, to move pictures off your media cards.
Only after this can you import them into AfterShot.
It's a pretty important missing piece of the workflow.
Speed of import and quality of raw camera file conversion are two different things, and things that are often in opposition to each other.
The images in AfterShot's initial import are less tonally nuanced and less detailed than the same images in Lightroom, DxO, and especially Capture One.
Interface
AfterShot doesn't have modes, the way Lightroom Classic, DxO PhotoLab ($129.00 at DxO US) , and CyberLink PhotoDirector have.
It's more like the defunct Apple Aperture, in that you do everything in the same window layouts.
AfterShot has a left panel for organization functions like catalogs, folders, and output, and a right-side panel for adjustments like lighting, color, and detail.
Vertical tabs let you switch among each of these panels' function groups.
At top left are buttons for magnifier (usually called a loupe in other programs), slideshow, and full screen.
The last is not a true full screen like Lightroom's; rather, it just removes the program title bar.
You can get a nearly full-screen view by toggling off the left and right panels, either from arrow buttons, the menu, or shortcut keys.
Next to the standard side panel for adjustments and metadata is an unusual vertical filmstrip view of photos in the folder, but you can set this to show along the bottom, as most programs do, with the Toggle Orientation menu option.
On the right is a panel for Basic adjustments, Histogram, and Presets.
Always-present buttons for grid view, photo with filmstrip, and full-photo view are at top left, and let you easily switch between choosing and working on photos.
Oddly, the arrow keys don't take you back and forth between photos.
You can't see a before-and-after view of edits unless you create a second copy (version) of the image, select both, and switch to Multi-Image view.
Most other photo programs have simple split or side-by-side viewing options during editing.
Nor does AfterShot's program window follow standard Windows behaviors like snapping to a half side view if you drag it to the side.
It does, however, make very strong use of keyboard shortcuts, with options even for specific actions, such as "+1/10 Stop EV." But it doesn't make good use of right-click options.
Help is only accessible over the Web, so if you're somewhere on the road without a connection, there's no help for you.
This is an issue shared by all of Adobe's software.
Organization
AfterShot has a few organizing tools, with buttons right at top center for pick/reject flags, star ratings, and color labeling.
I was surprised to see no hierarchical organization levels below the top-level Catalog, such as albums, sets, projects, collections, and the like.
AfterShot does offer a couple more organization tools, including stacks and versions.
The first lets you group similar photos in a single unit, while the latter lets you create what Lightroom calls "snapshots," or images with various edits you've made.
I had a little trouble finding the keyword-tagging capability, but it's there, in spades, in the Metadata vertical tab on the right panel.
AfterShot supports hierarchical keywords and lets you create keyword sets.
There's even a keyword manager.
Despite all of that, I still much prefer the way Lightroom Classic handles keyword tagging.
Adobe's program remembers your previous tags, suggests keywords based on other images in the import, and includes sets of topic-related keywords.
Forget about organizing by face recognition or geotagging (which you can do in Lightroom Classic).
Nor does AfterShot let you search based on camera or lens models, or use AI to search for all you shots of dogs or trees (which you can do in Photoshop Elements).
Adjusting Photos
AfterShot has a rich selection of photo-finishing tools.
Without even switching to the Standard, Color, Tone, or Detail tabs of the right panel, you can start perfecting your image from quick-access buttons just below the image viewer.
These get you to white-point picking, cropping, leveling, red-eye correction, and even layer-based region editing.
The Standard left-side tab offers a couple of effective instant tools, AutoLevel and Perfectly Clear ($99.00 at Amazon) .
The latter is licensed technology from AthenTech that does an impressive job of improving a photo's lighting, color, and sharpness.
It costs $129 as a Lightroom plugin, so AfterShot scores a point over the market leader here.
When I used a basic adjustment tool, Highlights, to recover a blown-out white sky, however, AfterShot did pretty much nothing.
Lightroom's highlights tool (and most other software, for that matter) does what I want and expect, showing the cloud detail in the sky.
This is despite Corel's claims that the highlight recovery has been improved for the latest version.
Unlike most pro photo software these days, AfterShot has no dehaze option (something at which DxO PhotoLab and Lightroom particularly excel).
Aftershot has two noise-removal sections, somewhat confusingly.
The first, simply called Raw Noise, is not very useful.
The second, Perfectly Clear Noise Removal, does quite an impressive job of smoothing out sensor noise on a test image without losing detail—in fact better than I am able to accomplish in Lightroom, but not quite as well as DxO PhotoLab's results.
AfterShot has a section for Lens Corrections in its Details panel, and it includes profiles for the Canon EOS 6D and 80D I used.
You can download camera models' profiles individually, or create your own.
DxO wins in this area, automatically downloading profiles based on the images you import.
In practice, checking the Enable Correction under Lens Correction made some very minor changes to a test photo's geometry, but mostly it did nothing.
On some images, it did nothing to fix geometric distortion.
Nor did the Chromatic Aberration correction remove a glaring example of that image distortion.
The tool offers the standard Red/Cyan and Blue/Yellow sliders, which don't produce results as good as DxO or Lightroom's automatic lens-profile corrections; in fact they only seemed able to add chromatic distortion.
Like Lightroom, AfterShot offers local adjustments for most of its exposure, color, and detail adjustments.
A new heal/clone/blemish remover tool did a respectable job on a test portrait, and it lets you adjust feathering and size, as well as picking the source area.
You won't see this tool, however, unless you tap the Layers button.
You can apply presets like several B&W choices or "bluer skies" using the outline shapes and brushes.
Extension packs for things like Portrait, Wedding, and Film looks are available as extra-cost add-ins.
The program also supports plugins, several of which are free.
The Photoshop-like heal/clone option applies a texture from one area of a photo to another, letting you remove distracting object from the image.
Finally, you can adjust tone curves in the standard graph control, with as many control points as you like.
The program's support for multiple layers works not just for heal and clone, but also for light and color adjustments.
I'm not a huge fan of layers in photo workflow apps, because they add complexity and are more suited to creative photo editing programs like Photoshop.
The whole reason Lightroom exists and is so popular is that it hides layer complexity from the user.
A new capability in version 3.5 is the Watermark tool.
This lets you stamp a photo with either an image or text.
You get good choices for text style, size, position, and opacity, and you can save custom watermarks for later use.
Output: Printing and Web Sharing
Any pro photo-workflow software needs strong printing options.
AfterShot has decent printing options, but nothing that can compare with Lightroom Classic's full-featured Print mode.
AfterShot does offer soft proofing and export sharpening, but the latter is in the main menu rather than in the Print dialog.
You can choose custom print layouts and select a color space from standard choices, but you can't save custom layouts as you can in several other workflow applications.
The program's lack of albums or collections makes online sharing of more than one photo at a time less convenient than in most workflow apps.
You can select multiple thumbnails and choose Export to Web Gallery, but this will just get you source code to add to a web server.
You can view this locally in a browser, too, but the design isn't terribly slick.
There are, surprisingly, no facilities for sharing to commonly desired places like Flickr, SmugMug, or Facebook—a lack that haven't seen in any photo application I've reviewed in a long time.
The final blow? There's no ability to export to the PNG, a format popular for use online.
You can only output to JPG or TIFF.
You do get adjustments for things like sharpening and compression at output, however.
Stability is not a major problem for AfterShot as it was in the past, but it did crash a couple times, with an "AfterShot Pro has stopped working" message box.
AfterShot Still an Afterthought?
Corel's updated AfterShot 3.5 does several things admirably—in particular, noise reduction.
That said, this update isn't enough for us to give the software a better rating.
From start to finish, you're far better off with our professional photo-workflow software Editors' Choice, Adobe Lightroom Classic, which offers a much smoother workflow, vastly superior organization features, effective lens-profile-based and perspective corrections, and powerful output and sharing features.
Also check out fellow Editors' Choices DxO PhotoLab for its superior noise reduction and automatic profile-based corrections, Capture One Pro for the best initial raw file conversion, and Photoshop CC for the fullest set of photo editing tools.
Cons
Clunky import procedure that doesn't move files from media to storage.
Few organization features.
Almost no online sharing features.
Ineffective highlight correction.
No PNG file format support.
The Bottom Line
Corel's Lightroom competitor offers excellent noise reduction and adequate photo...
In our reviews of earlier versions of Corel's photo workflow software, we noted its weakness at importing, sharing, and some of the editing steps in between.
The second version sped up the program, made some interface changes, and added new editing tools.
The current version, AfterShot Pro 3.5, adds blemish removal, watermarking, a preset library, and on-demand lens profile downloading.
Corel claims the current 64-bit software offers the fastest camera raw file conversion, but speed was not the only problem in previous versions.
The program now includes useful HDR tools, red-eye removal, and more.
But it still falls short of Lightroom Classic's state of the art raw conversion, geometry tools, and organization features.
Honest, Objective Reviews
Daxdi.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services.
Our expert industry analysis and practical solutions help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.
Pricing and Getting Started
AfterShot has one-shot pricing, so you needn't worry about shelling out monthly contributions as you do with Adobe Lightroom Classic ($9.99 Per Month at Adobe) .
AfterShot lists for $79.99, but is usually discounted.
That price compares well with Capture One's ($299), DxO PhotoLab's ($149), and CyberLink PhotoDirector's ($99.99).
A free 30-day unlimited trial is available, with no payment info required.
Upgrading for existing users cuts the price by $20.
The program is lighter in storage demands than competitors, taking up just 142MB, especially when compared with Lightroom CC's 1.3GB.
Right after installation, you see a dialog with lots of text and a choice of where to store settings, cache, and user data.
Leaving this set to the default will work for most users.
Next, you optionally register the software using an email address.
Importing
The interface still lacks a clear Import button, and doesn't pop up any helpful message when you plug in an SDHC card.
Nor does it add an AutoPlay option.
In fact, you must navigate down to the File menu's ninth choice, Import Photos from Folder.
What about from camera media? For that, you have to navigate through the SD card's folders to get started.
Most similar apps ease this process by finding the photos on a card automatically.
It's odd that a program whose makers boast about import speed hide the capability.
An old-style Windows XP-type window opens for importing, only letting you choose the AfterShot catalog to import to, not the PC folder.
What this tells me is that the import doesn't actually copy the image files to your PC, but just indexes them in its own catalog.
It does however, create previews for editing and lets you apply presets during import, a plus of sorts.
It also helpfully shows progress bars for the separate importing and preview-creation steps.
Since speed of ingesting digital photos into your computer is a bragging point for Corel AfterShot, I tested it by importing 157 24MP raw files in .CR2 format from a Canon EOS 6D.
Each file weighed in at about 25 to 30MB.
I tested on an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC running 64-bit Windows 10 Home and sporting a 4K display, 16GB RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700T CPU, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M discrete graphics card.
AfterShot beat most competitors, taking just 18 seconds (minutes:seconds) for the import, and another 46 seconds to finish building previews for a total import time of 1:04.
Note that that's without actually moving the files; it's simply adding them to its catalog.
This compared with 2:35 for Lightroom to complete both tasks, 2:41 for Capture One , and a group-leading 1:03 for PhotoDirector.
These numbers aren't completely comparable, since AfterShot isn't copying or moving the files, but just adding their info to its catalog database.
Lightroom only lets you do this when importing from a folder on the local disk.
AfterShot doesn't even offer the option to move or copy files, so it's up to you to use your operating system or another utility, such as PhotoMechanic, to move pictures off your media cards.
Only after this can you import them into AfterShot.
It's a pretty important missing piece of the workflow.
Speed of import and quality of raw camera file conversion are two different things, and things that are often in opposition to each other.
The images in AfterShot's initial import are less tonally nuanced and less detailed than the same images in Lightroom, DxO, and especially Capture One.
Interface
AfterShot doesn't have modes, the way Lightroom Classic, DxO PhotoLab ($129.00 at DxO US) , and CyberLink PhotoDirector have.
It's more like the defunct Apple Aperture, in that you do everything in the same window layouts.
AfterShot has a left panel for organization functions like catalogs, folders, and output, and a right-side panel for adjustments like lighting, color, and detail.
Vertical tabs let you switch among each of these panels' function groups.
At top left are buttons for magnifier (usually called a loupe in other programs), slideshow, and full screen.
The last is not a true full screen like Lightroom's; rather, it just removes the program title bar.
You can get a nearly full-screen view by toggling off the left and right panels, either from arrow buttons, the menu, or shortcut keys.
Next to the standard side panel for adjustments and metadata is an unusual vertical filmstrip view of photos in the folder, but you can set this to show along the bottom, as most programs do, with the Toggle Orientation menu option.
On the right is a panel for Basic adjustments, Histogram, and Presets.
Always-present buttons for grid view, photo with filmstrip, and full-photo view are at top left, and let you easily switch between choosing and working on photos.
Oddly, the arrow keys don't take you back and forth between photos.
You can't see a before-and-after view of edits unless you create a second copy (version) of the image, select both, and switch to Multi-Image view.
Most other photo programs have simple split or side-by-side viewing options during editing.
Nor does AfterShot's program window follow standard Windows behaviors like snapping to a half side view if you drag it to the side.
It does, however, make very strong use of keyboard shortcuts, with options even for specific actions, such as "+1/10 Stop EV." But it doesn't make good use of right-click options.
Help is only accessible over the Web, so if you're somewhere on the road without a connection, there's no help for you.
This is an issue shared by all of Adobe's software.
Organization
AfterShot has a few organizing tools, with buttons right at top center for pick/reject flags, star ratings, and color labeling.
I was surprised to see no hierarchical organization levels below the top-level Catalog, such as albums, sets, projects, collections, and the like.
AfterShot does offer a couple more organization tools, including stacks and versions.
The first lets you group similar photos in a single unit, while the latter lets you create what Lightroom calls "snapshots," or images with various edits you've made.
I had a little trouble finding the keyword-tagging capability, but it's there, in spades, in the Metadata vertical tab on the right panel.
AfterShot supports hierarchical keywords and lets you create keyword sets.
There's even a keyword manager.
Despite all of that, I still much prefer the way Lightroom Classic handles keyword tagging.
Adobe's program remembers your previous tags, suggests keywords based on other images in the import, and includes sets of topic-related keywords.
Forget about organizing by face recognition or geotagging (which you can do in Lightroom Classic).
Nor does AfterShot let you search based on camera or lens models, or use AI to search for all you shots of dogs or trees (which you can do in Photoshop Elements).
Adjusting Photos
AfterShot has a rich selection of photo-finishing tools.
Without even switching to the Standard, Color, Tone, or Detail tabs of the right panel, you can start perfecting your image from quick-access buttons just below the image viewer.
These get you to white-point picking, cropping, leveling, red-eye correction, and even layer-based region editing.
The Standard left-side tab offers a couple of effective instant tools, AutoLevel and Perfectly Clear ($99.00 at Amazon) .
The latter is licensed technology from AthenTech that does an impressive job of improving a photo's lighting, color, and sharpness.
It costs $129 as a Lightroom plugin, so AfterShot scores a point over the market leader here.
When I used a basic adjustment tool, Highlights, to recover a blown-out white sky, however, AfterShot did pretty much nothing.
Lightroom's highlights tool (and most other software, for that matter) does what I want and expect, showing the cloud detail in the sky.
This is despite Corel's claims that the highlight recovery has been improved for the latest version.
Unlike most pro photo software these days, AfterShot has no dehaze option (something at which DxO PhotoLab and Lightroom particularly excel).
Aftershot has two noise-removal sections, somewhat confusingly.
The first, simply called Raw Noise, is not very useful.
The second, Perfectly Clear Noise Removal, does quite an impressive job of smoothing out sensor noise on a test image without losing detail—in fact better than I am able to accomplish in Lightroom, but not quite as well as DxO PhotoLab's results.
AfterShot has a section for Lens Corrections in its Details panel, and it includes profiles for the Canon EOS 6D and 80D I used.
You can download camera models' profiles individually, or create your own.
DxO wins in this area, automatically downloading profiles based on the images you import.
In practice, checking the Enable Correction under Lens Correction made some very minor changes to a test photo's geometry, but mostly it did nothing.
On some images, it did nothing to fix geometric distortion.
Nor did the Chromatic Aberration correction remove a glaring example of that image distortion.
The tool offers the standard Red/Cyan and Blue/Yellow sliders, which don't produce results as good as DxO or Lightroom's automatic lens-profile corrections; in fact they only seemed able to add chromatic distortion.
Like Lightroom, AfterShot offers local adjustments for most of its exposure, color, and detail adjustments.
A new heal/clone/blemish remover tool did a respectable job on a test portrait, and it lets you adjust feathering and size, as well as picking the source area.
You won't see this tool, however, unless you tap the Layers button.
You can apply presets like several B&W choices or "bluer skies" using the outline shapes and brushes.
Extension packs for things like Portrait, Wedding, and Film looks are available as extra-cost add-ins.
The program also supports plugins, several of which are free.
The Photoshop-like heal/clone option applies a texture from one area of a photo to another, letting you remove distracting object from the image.
Finally, you can adjust tone curves in the standard graph control, with as many control points as you like.
The program's support for multiple layers works not just for heal and clone, but also for light and color adjustments.
I'm not a huge fan of layers in photo workflow apps, because they add complexity and are more suited to creative photo editing programs like Photoshop.
The whole reason Lightroom exists and is so popular is that it hides layer complexity from the user.
A new capability in version 3.5 is the Watermark tool.
This lets you stamp a photo with either an image or text.
You get good choices for text style, size, position, and opacity, and you can save custom watermarks for later use.
Output: Printing and Web Sharing
Any pro photo-workflow software needs strong printing options.
AfterShot has decent printing options, but nothing that can compare with Lightroom Classic's full-featured Print mode.
AfterShot does offer soft proofing and export sharpening, but the latter is in the main menu rather than in the Print dialog.
You can choose custom print layouts and select a color space from standard choices, but you can't save custom layouts as you can in several other workflow applications.
The program's lack of albums or collections makes online sharing of more than one photo at a time less convenient than in most workflow apps.
You can select multiple thumbnails and choose Export to Web Gallery, but this will just get you source code to add to a web server.
You can view this locally in a browser, too, but the design isn't terribly slick.
There are, surprisingly, no facilities for sharing to commonly desired places like Flickr, SmugMug, or Facebook—a lack that haven't seen in any photo application I've reviewed in a long time.
The final blow? There's no ability to export to the PNG, a format popular for use online.
You can only output to JPG or TIFF.
You do get adjustments for things like sharpening and compression at output, however.
Stability is not a major problem for AfterShot as it was in the past, but it did crash a couple times, with an "AfterShot Pro has stopped working" message box.
AfterShot Still an Afterthought?
Corel's updated AfterShot 3.5 does several things admirably—in particular, noise reduction.
That said, this update isn't enough for us to give the software a better rating.
From start to finish, you're far better off with our professional photo-workflow software Editors' Choice, Adobe Lightroom Classic, which offers a much smoother workflow, vastly superior organization features, effective lens-profile-based and perspective corrections, and powerful output and sharing features.
Also check out fellow Editors' Choices DxO PhotoLab for its superior noise reduction and automatic profile-based corrections, Capture One Pro for the best initial raw file conversion, and Photoshop CC for the fullest set of photo editing tools.
Cons
Clunky import procedure that doesn't move files from media to storage.
Few organization features.
Almost no online sharing features.
Ineffective highlight correction.
No PNG file format support.
The Bottom Line
Corel's Lightroom competitor offers excellent noise reduction and adequate photo...
