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AfterShot Pro 2 from Corel is a competitive Mac photo manager

mel martin
Updated ·3 min read
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Corel's latest Mac OS release, AfterShot Pro 2 (currently on sale for US$69.00) is hard to quickly characterize. It combines elements of Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. It excels as a RAW-file importer and manager with very fast performance. It easily catalogs and can search for images in extremely large libraries. It supports sophisticated batch processing and has world class noise reduction from Athentech.

Images can be tagged with your own categories in addition to the standard EXIF tags your camera creates. Image editing is non-destructive, with both manual and automatic adjustments. Among the features is lens correction to reduce distortion in any of your DSLR lenses.



For output, you can easily create contact sheets, templates for standard print sizes, and even create web galleries to show off your images. There is complete on-board help as well as web-based videos to walk you through the application. In this latest edition, AfterShot Pro shows you how to create HDR images and adjust them.

I gave the app a spin and found it powerful, but it took a while for me to adjust to it after many years of using Photoshop. The GUI is efficient, but very different. It took a few sessions to get comfortable with where controls were located, but once I did I found the program to be fast and efficient. The HDR mode is powerful, with plenty of adjustments. I found it superior to Photoshop's HDR tools, but not quite up to where Photomatix and the NIK HDR programs are. There are several presets to get you close to your desired "look", but most people will want to adjust from there.

Import of raw files is very speedy, but in the HDR mode when I had five files open, my Mac Pro would hesitate for a couple of seconds on each adjustment.

Curves and the usual tonal adjustments are easy to apply, and the application supports layers which most experienced photo editors will want. There is so much here, it's worth a trip over to the Corel website to watch the videos and get an idea of what the program will do.

Although reasonably priced for an app this professional, it's not going to unseat Photoshop and Lightroom, which Adobe now makes available at reasonable subscription prices for advanced amateurs and professionals.

Also, Corel has an on again-off again relationship with Apple and the Mac. Corel Draw was offered and then withdrawn in 2001. They had Word Perfect for the Mac which was pretty popular as an alternative to Microsoft Word, but it was pulled off the market back in 1997. If Corel will stay with the Mac platform, the company has a chance to build up a loyal audience, especially offering this kind of software at very competitive pricing.

AfterShot Pro 2 is a solid application. Although it's an excellent editor on its own, it has the ability to hand off work your to another editor like Photoshop if you want to.

AfterShot Pro 2 runs on any Mac with OS X 10.7.3 or higher. It ran fine on Yosemite. It wants 250 MB of hard drive space, and at least 2 GB or RAM, but the more RAM the better. There are separate 32- and 64-bit editions.

Corel AfterShot Pro 2 looks very good. I expect some areas of performance could be speeded up a bit, but for less than 70 dollars, this is a pretty incredible package. Expect to spend some time learning it, but in my tests I saw no glitches or crashes.

If you are interested in AfterShot Pro 2 you can download a fully functional demo, and there is a 30 day money back guarantee.