And, if I’m going to switch there will also be a cost in terms of adapting my workflow.

The most powerful of these additional features are “Local Adjustments.” Local Adjustments is PL2’s name for the Control Points ( U Point Technology) which allow you to very quickly create selections/masks which you can then use for selectively applying adjustments.Īt the same time, Bridge/ACR, together with Photoshop, provide powerful features that cannot be matched by PL2. Comparison OverviewĭxO’s PhotoLab 2 avoids some of these problems while also providing some useful features that are lacking in Bridge/ACR.

I’ve also had problems with losing collections and keywords during software upgrades. This is settable in ACR but you have to keep your eye on it because it occasionally seems to change of its own accord. A more minor problem is the way that Bridge sometimes defaults to the sRGB color space or to a lower resolution version of your images. A major annoyance is Bridge’s limit of only two zoom levels. There are other major and minor annoyances. Having a histogram directly in Bridge would also be helpful in selecting the best image from an exposure-bracketed series. And opening Camera Raw implies opening Photoshop which is not a speedy operation even on my speedy PC. This slows me down when culling images and checking to see if a portion of the image is blown out or blocked up. There is no histogram within Bridge-you have to open Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).There may to be a workaround for this details below. And that’s an extra step that slows my workflow. But I don't always want the image at full screen size. If you click to blow the image up to 100% it then becomes sharp. Bridge often displays blurry image previews, both in the Preview Window and when previewing full screen.Not nearly as slow as Lightroom, mind you, but slower than Photo Lab 2, for sure. Adobe Bridge IssuesĪt the same time, I’ve had some irksome problems with Bridge, including: Because I recently received a free copy of PL2 (along with my upgrade to the latest version of the Nik Collection) and because Bridge hasn’t received any significant updates in some time (none that are useful to me, at least) I decided to give PL2 a try. But now a new (to me) app, DxO Photolab 2 has me reconsidering my loyalty to Adobe Bridge & Camera Raw. I've tried Lightroom a number of times over the years but have always found it lacking (for my purposes). I've been a dyed-in-the-wool Photoshop user for years now and have never seriously considered any alternative workflow except Lightroom.

Dxo photolab 2 smooth faces