Post processing is my least favorite part of photography. It’s time consuming, takes a lot of time, and did I mention how long it takes? Quite often I shoot events with hundreds photos to be delivered. If this were my full time paid gig, then I would spend and budget quite a bit of time to making each image look as good as it possibly can. The reality though is that I just don’t have that kind of luxury. Nowadays, my workflow involves running an image through Capture One Pro 11 with minor tweaks, and then a final pass through Perfectly Clear. Unfortunately, Perfectly Clear is a poorly written program with many issues, but the final output quality is quite nice, so I keep using it. However, there’s always room for improvement.
I wasn’t in the market for another piece of software, but a couple of weeks ago, I happened to see an advertisement for a competing product of Perfectly Clear called Photolemur. I emailed the developer and offered to review their software. The marketing manager was nice enough to reply and he sent me a copy of the software to review.
The software has minimal bugs – one after processing all the images (repeats every time). The Lightroom Plugin only works for individual images, not a batch. What it does do though is add a nice bit of pop to your photos, fixes highlights and shadows, sharpens the image, but tends to bake the images a little too much. The end results look quite nice on things and places, but not so much on people.
My basic conclusion is that it’s a program that I only hope will get better. The fact that they emailed me back shows that they care about their product. What could be improved upon? It needs to focus more on people and their features. Also, it needs to have the ability to tweak the settings of the end result for multiple images at once, not just one photo at a time.
What’s the bottom line? It won’t replace Perfectly Clear for me, but I’ll use Photolemur along side of it. Perfectly Clear for people. Photolemur for everything else (mostly).
Check out the full video review for more.
[wpvideo l8ssv6qN]
12/4/2017 Update
One correction to make from my video. I have since re-tried the Lightroom plugin for Photolemur, and it does indeed work the way it is supposed. I cannot explain why my initial testing suggested otherwise.
The Lightroom Plugin only works for individual images, not a batch. – I do use Photolemur for batch processing in Lightroom, it works great.
I tried a couple of times with no success. I’ll try again and post a follow up video.
I’ve posted the following fix on the blog:
“12/4/2017 Update
One correction to make from my video. I have since re-tried the Lightroom plugin for Photolemur, and it does indeed work the way it is supposed. I cannot explain why my initial testing suggested otherwise.”
Also, I’ve posted the above correction on the YouTube video as well.