Corel AfterShot Pro to Give Lightroom a Run for its Money

I stopped by the Corel booth at one of the CES 2012 events last week.  After seeing Lightroom 4 beta, I figured I had seen the tip of the spear for photo-editing software for the week.  Boy, was I wrong.
Corel’s new AfterShot Pro is brought to you by the guys from Bibble after it was recently acquired by Corel.  When Jeff Stephens showed me a demo of AfterShot Pro, I kept thinking “that’s all the stuff I’ve been wanting to do in Lightroom.”
While Lightroom 4 beta has added some better local edit features (like WB), it comes nowhere near the power available for local edits in AfterShot Pro.  There is so much you can do with masking/layers in a completely non-destructive workflow that I haven’t gotten my mind around all of the possibilities yet.

Even with third-party plug-ins, AfterShot Pro keeps the edits non-destructive.  I watched him edit an image with a black and white plug-in, then go back to the primary editing panel (like the Develop module in Lightroom) and make additional non-destructive changes to the RAW image.  And then, AfterShot Pro updated the plugin edit settings to take effect after the primary edits.
It also includes a light version of Noise Ninja as its native noise reduction tool.  You can purchase an add-on of the full Noise Ninja for a larger complement of noise reduction controls.
Stephens tells me that Corel is giving third-party plugin developers the choice of where to put their plugins in the editing pipeline.  Note to developers: keep them non-destructive.

You can also choose to send RAW images out to other programs like Photoshop (you can set the default external editor in the preferences panel).
Oh, and here’s a big one, AfterShot Pro lets you search across multiple catalogs! This was one of the first questions I asked the Adobe reps about Lightroom 4 beta when I spoke with them.  Better yet, in AfterShot Pro, you can edit images without importing them into a catalog at all.  Your choice.
AfterShot Pro is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Best of all, the price of AfterShot Pro is only $99.  Are you kidding me?  Compared to the $299 that Adobe is after for Lightroom?  Corel just got serious about the RAW-editing workflow for enthusiast and pro photographers.
You can find AfterShot Pro at Amazon.
Check out the video below for some cool RAW workflow tools found in AfterShot Pro.  Eat your heart out Lightroom.

Apologies for the audio distortion. It wasn’t clipping, but rather failing preamps on the camera, which we later remedied by recording to the Zoom H4n instead.