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Adobe Lightroom Gains AI-Based Generative Remove Tool for Eliminating Unwanted Objects
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I just tried it. It is by far much much better than the previous content aware healing brush.
Also, I don’t get the hate for Adobe, I find LR far superior than Photos, and $120 / year is very reasonable if photography is your hobby, even more so if it is your work.
if you just take iPhone photos I can understand how it is NOT worth it. But if you have thousand of dollars of equipment (camera and lenses), it’s a really nice software if you like editing photos.
Also, I don’t get the hate for Adobe, I find LR far superior than Photos, and $120 / year is very reasonable if photography is your hobby, even more so if it is your work.
if you just take iPhone photos I can understand how it is NOT worth it. But if you have thousand of dollars of equipment (camera and lenses), it’s a really nice software if you like editing photos.
It’s not really ideal for hobbyists or amateurs. But I’m a working photographer and the $25/mo I pay Adobe for 3 TB of cloud storage and access to PS and LR is an INSANE value. $25 is a tiny portion of that first job of the month.
There are many one time purchase options that are great for people doing photography for fun.
Even for hobbyists, the $9/month is very accesible I believe. I mean, if you enjoy photography (which is not a cheap hobby), the pricing is not ridiculous. And it includes 1TB of space on the cloud that lets you store and share photos.
That all sounds good until you look at long term costs of people having subscriptions for so many services and apps. They are flooding our lives.
Let’s do one simple example but there are many.
That $120 per year is $1200 a decade if the price remains the same. That’s $4800 over the course of a 40 year career either as a pro or a hobbyist.
That’s a ton of money when you look at long term costs. Most likely it is actually $10,000 when including price rises because rich shareholders demand more returns and we include some inflation.
How many hard working people have $10,000 in the bank at 50 years old. It’s very few. Most people have wealth on paper but they have ton of debt, especially in the western style capitalist economies where credit cards, huge college loans, car payments, and mortgages are considered to be a sane system. In the most richest economy in the world most people have no savings.
That’s $10,000 coming out of their potential savings just for tweaking and editing photos. There’s no sane reason at all software should cost that much over the lifetime of your career.
Then we add all the other long term costs of things like Netflix, Spotify etc etc and it looks like there will be a huge amount of very indebted people in 20-30 years. All the money is being sucked out of society by rich parasite shareholders and landlords. Then along comes another parasite like Sam Altman and says hey everyone fire your employees and buy another subscription for my thieving machines.
This will not end well.
Same can be told of anything else you buy.
That morning coffee that you buy once or twice a month, will cost you the same $10,000 dollars in a span of 40 years.
If you enjoy photography and you have the money, it does not sound insane. Just "tweaking photos" gives me some level of happiness and entertainment.
If you make a living from photography, it is just the cost of business.
You just need to know what expenses you can make.
Sure, many people get in a crazy mode of buying everything in monthly payments, and after a while they are paying lots of money and never able to save.
I for one don't dislike the SaaS model, it gives a lower entry price, and normally gives a better experience of getting updates and fixes constantly.
Skip a couple Starbucks/ going out to lunch days and you can afford the yearly not that hard to do, if you enjoy editing photos/ graphic work the adobe subscription is worth every penny plus i get the updates when they roll out
Exactly.
Basically you spend in three years what it would cost you to get a one-time purchase app like Lightroom. As a big bonus they also give you 1TB of space and the ability to share photos with family and friends. And as another bonus you keep getting updates during all those three years.
To me it seems like a very good deal.
Does it?
We often filtered for color both at capture and at print. We also chose stocks for the particular way they would render certain items.
Even if we stick to just reversal films and projection instead of printing, we generally picked the film based on the artistic intent. Provia looks far different from Velvia which looks far different from Ektachrome.
Printing gives you plenty of dodging and burning options in the dark room.
You are missing the point of analog photography. It's capturing a moment, frozen in an analog medium. You can adjust tones but you cannot add a dog to the medium. This is an industry, standard-fact. Photo contests regularly kick out people that Photoshop in something or Photoshop something out... that's why there are rules and regulations for photography contests and photojournalism...ethics & what constitutes manipulation. And imo that is fine by me.
Photography has bifurcated and I'm fine with that. If you don't agree, and you can get to the photography world to change the definition of photography, so be it.
I went to hs/college/post for photography and I was a professional photographer for years, that's just the way I see it and I agree with the current ethical parameters.
Most things you buy are casual purchases and you don't need them. When a software company like Adobe has an effective monopoly they can keep increasing charges on users.
When companies started making subs obligatory they said it would combat piracy and bring costs to users down. As pointed by others in this discussion this has not brought costs down. Long term costs are higher and will probably be twice as high a decade from now if shareholders demand more returns. Wall Street just wants to see number go up for the one percent. They don't care about wider impacts.
If subs could offer better value long term, or even a long term contract with discounts and price lock-in, then this argument changes.
Lenses distort reality. Take the same portrait with 14 mm and with 200 mm, with f 0,95 or f22. Flash or natural light. Over- or underexposed. Film emulation does so - massively. tri-X or cross development. And so on. Plus, framing a shot, choosing a moment, a subject. The act of even deciding to TAKE a picture of this (and not all the other things, other moments). Villem Flusser wrote about that and basically the act of photography is full of design choices. All of this combined is what makes photography so wonderful … digital just augments that process and democratizes the tools. Which is what tech does — giving former professionals tools to the masses.
Piracy has gone down no doubt. But let’s make a comparison of subs vs one time purchase.
For simplicity sake, let’s not take into account price increases, which would apply to both versions.
LR sub for 10 years costs you $1,200. It includes constant updates and 1TB of space in the cloud.
A stand alone version would cost around $300. In 10 years you would need to update at least once, maybe twice. So that amounts to $600-900.
So the difference is, let’s say, $600 in 10 years. For that money you receive more updates and 1TB of space. Sure, you maybe already have another service that gives you cloud space, but it is not as convenient and simple to integrate with LR. $5 a month gives you this.
Greedy capitalists is a complete different story, which I don’t believe have anything to do with subscription models.
That extra $600 is no way worth it and if you include price rises it's really bad.
Retouching and photo compositing were things way, way before computers existed.
Cameras capture the moment, whether analog or digital. You can't manipulate the original digital shot. What comes from the camera comes from the camera.
You can't add it to the film, but you can add it to the print using some darkroom techniques and multiple shots. Heck, it's similar to using merging two digital photos, only it requires more skill as you can't undo.
There is a photo of General Grant that's a composite--aka photoshopped--that predates digital camera.
The complete Adobe suite when purchased years ago cost around that much. When you add in upgrade costs over 10 years it would be quite a bit more.
Yes, but to be fair you don't get the full Adobe suite for $120 a year. I still think $120 a year is a good deal to keep Photoshop and Lightroom current. Photoshop upgrades used to cost about $150-200 each.
Photoshop was expensive but you could upgrade when you wanted. I stayed with Photoshop 3.0.5 for a long time from 1995 to 2000. 5 years! I was only compelled to upgrade when there were enough upgrades.
I've spent what, close to 5K in the last decade on Creative Suite. I'm not seeing 5K worth of upgrades. 90% of what most of us do could have been done in the suite 6 years ago.
$5 / month to get monthly updates and 1TB of space to share photos?
For me it is a very attractive price.
Price rises would also happen for the stand-alone license.
It's not worth exaggerating the quality and content of those monthly updates. They are mostly bug fixes which should be free. The few features they introduce every year are not essential and often gimmicks. Maybe once every 4-5 years they introduce a feature or two that becomes a regular daily tool.
1TB of space is not worth $5 a month from any provider. I can guarantee most users of Creative Suite are not using Adobe's cloud sharing at all. Every big client I work with is using the various box.com, dropbox, wetransfer for work because it's just easier for everyone to access.
Where can you get 1TB of space for less than $5 per month?