Impressions of Corel After Shot Pro

I decided to look into Corel After Shot Pro and see how easy it was to work with.  
I read and read and...read reviews about Adobe Lightroom 4 and how sometimes it was a bit slow and clunky.

Corel offers their product with a 30 day trail and an attractive price of $59.99 at the moment.

I found that I can shoot RAW files with my Nikons and my Olympus E420 and quickly edit them in a batch.  
I did all these photos as a batch with different settings and then sent them 'off' to be turned into .TIFF files to work with later.

The 'development' of the files took less than 4 seconds.
Okay, I was happy about that.
 
The program edits the RAW files but does not change them.  I even made 3 versions of one .RAW file [all saved quickly into fine quality .jpegs  ~~ not shown here].

Now I am not a techie, nor have I tried Lightroom 4, so I may have to really give that a go too.

The only camera that I have that isn't supported by Corel AfterShot Pro, was my Fuji camera with .RAF files.  No matter I can live with that small inconvenience, Corel may update their program to include it at a future date.

 

There are some fun features in this program that allow you to experiment with your photo.  The only drawback I can see is that you cannot add a watermark while working with them.  That is not a real big issue for me though.

The above shot was off color due to the bright snow, I did a quick check with the 'white' picker in Corel AfterShot Pro and bumped the saturation.  That was it.

You can also do non-destructive editing in layers.  Well, I haven't figured that out yet.  I've only been using it for 3 days.

The black dog in this photo was totally blown away yet I was able to save her image.  I used Corel to properly expose and bring back the black blob of a dog...then I easily sent it to CS2 to use a Topaz Plugin to finish it off.

Lastly.  Speed.
Speed
Speed
I loved this program's speed!

As did my sidekick, Morris.