When I use FastRawViewer I have a very simple method. It could take less if I had a much faster computer, but instead of investing 5 grand in a new PC, I spent $20 on software that does a great job at rendering raw images really fast. It takes around 15 seconds for Lightroom to open an image in high resolution. This is where Lightroom fails so miserably. I must have the eyes tack sharp, the rest is usually more or less blurry. What it means is that in some images I may miss the focus, especially if my subject is moving. f1.2 in most cases, and rarely over f2.8. I shoot my portraits almost always at a very shallow depth of field. When I sort my images, all I want is to delete those that I don’t like or pictures where my subject is not perfectly sharp.

I think it’s fair, but as I was only shooting a few weddings a year, I decided to look for cheaper alternatives. The problem was that the software was not particularly cheap. They had a month demo and I have to say that the experience was a very pleasant change from having to cull my images in Adobe Lightroom. When I used a Mac as my main processing computer, I tried PhotoMechanic first. The shortcuts are adjustable, which is very convenient for me as I was able to setup my workflow in such a way as to allow me to cull a 2000 image wedding in less than 2 hours. It’s fast as the name suggests, much faster than Lightroom, or even Exposure X3.

FastRawViewer is designed and capable of doing many things like exposure adjustments, etc, but I mainly use it for image culling. It’s a brilliant piece of software designed mainly for culling images from a shoot. I wrote a quick review of Alien Skin Exposure X3 the other day and I remembered that I still have and use my trusted Fast Raw Viewer.

Fastrawviewer reviews