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Anyone re-thinking their usage of Lightroom?
- Thread starter maflynn
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6. But it’s not received any up dates in a good while. For example it doesn’t have dehaze.
I get frustrated with Adobe. Their naming convention. Their hot mess of supporting applications for their products. Their stupid and masochistic marketing. Even their reluctance to add features to say Lr CC like hierarchical keywords.
But from the point of view of value for money? I'd pay twice the price for Lr and Ps. I guess given the OP there are still lots of people who don't use Ps, but for those of us who do it's still far less expensive than it ever was, and improving all the time. And Lr/Ps can just do so much more than anything else out there by leaps and bounds. And I've owned and tried most all the alternatives. Indeed, my biggest regret is that I invested in stuff like Capture One, Macphun/Skylum, and some others that I no longer use. And can't sell, BTW.
I was just reminded of this when I started doing infrared photography. So easy to make profiles for stuff like channel switching and custom WB (tough to get right in IR). Lots of Ps actions to download, Lr/Ps profiles to download, and virtually all of the tutorials on YT and other sites are based on Lr/Ps.
But from the point of view of value for money? I'd pay twice the price for Lr and Ps. I guess given the OP there are still lots of people who don't use Ps, but for those of us who do it's still far less expensive than it ever was, and improving all the time. And Lr/Ps can just do so much more than anything else out there by leaps and bounds. And I've owned and tried most all the alternatives. Indeed, my biggest regret is that I invested in stuff like Capture One, Macphun/Skylum, and some others that I no longer use. And can't sell, BTW.
I was just reminded of this when I started doing infrared photography. So easy to make profiles for stuff like channel switching and custom WB (tough to get right in IR). Lots of Ps actions to download, Lr/Ps profiles to download, and virtually all of the tutorials on YT and other sites are based on Lr/Ps.
How does Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop compare to the Photos app on macOS? I'm new to the photography hobby again with an SLR.
I'm a hobbist/enthusiast mainly, although I have done some semi-pro work. I'm sticking with Lr/PS subscription for now. I will think really hard should Adobe double the price. My work flow is so ingrained with Lr that it would be a difficult decision to switch. I do have Luminar but use it as a plug in (lunar Flex( Their DAM is not up to my folder structure that I am so married to. But, if the price does double as of right now I would probably stay with it. But MCAsan's use of Photo Mechanic and a beta DAM option might be something I'd be tempted to look into as their DAM product evolves.
A lot better. You have years of development and experience with PS and LR.
Photos app is really for your casual user. Photo stream for your iPhone photos is what it is for me.
I see, thanks for that! Would a Lightroom -> Photos app workflow make sense for storage? I have 2TB for iCloud
LR is lightyears ahead of photos in my opinion, you can do so much in terms of managing your images, editing, editing features. outputting. Plugin support etc etc.
I don't think people are complaining about the quality of the application and the features, but rather how adobe chose to monetize the application and recent draconion steps, like threats of lawsuits when using old versions.
my needs are so humble, I only scratch the surface of what LR can do, which you see my waffle on LR, and complain about the price and/or living within a subscription
Thanks for that. We pay for Lightroom as part of a Creative Cloud subscription we have (for other work) so I’ve installed it and will play around with it - I was just curious about what others thought about the comparison. My main concern is a sensible workflow. I am a bit of a minimalist and it puts me in a bind sometimes.
I appreciate how LR permits me to easily cull my images in the library tab, and then switch over to the edit tab. Its one of the most seamless and unintrusive workflows imo.
Non destructive edits are somewhat of a industry standard now, so much so that any competitor will have that as a bare minimum - at least that's my mindset. If that assumption is incorrect, please let me know.
On1 finally made all their Photo Raw modules non-destructive. But look at Affinity Photo. When you leave the raw editing module you render the image and can't go back into the raw module with same full range of capabilities as if you were just starting. Maybe one day they will fix that.
I'm not sure what you're saying regarding On1's Photo Raw. The editing is non-destructive but are you saying I cannot get back to the original master after an edit and leave the module?
I made a big jump for my self. I moved to Capture One and Affinity Photo for all my personal and business photography. I also moved to a MacBook Pro from a Windows box. I shoot with a Canon 5D MIII and a MII. Has been a bit of a move and learning new OS and programs but have has some good results so far.
I think MCAsan meant the RAW development in Affinity Photo, which is in fact cannot be applied non-destructively. (But then again, AP can't write any RAW format so there wouldn't be any actual danger to lose your original master.)
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The great thing is that right now there are so many quality choices out there, it’s difficult to go wrong. Adobe certainly is ubiquitous and they put out quality software (most of the time) but it’s not the only game in town, even for professional photographers. Affinity, Darktable, Pixelmator, Luminar, OnOne, the list goes on. I’m a Photo Mechanic, Photos, and more and more a Capture One guy as it fits in nicely with my Nikon/Fuji split brain. Occasionally Photoshop. I don’t have a problem with the prices per se as they are a drop in the bucket relative to the rest of my hobby .
Affinity Photo can be used non-destructively. But comparing it (or Photoshop) with say Lr is apples and oranges. Both AP and Ps are different beasts. In both changes are not stored in parameters, as with Photos, Lr, etc. They're written into a file more akin to what you do with Word. The way one works with both non destructively is through management of layers, by for instance using adjustment layers. Or even via history. The background photo is of course committed as soon as you use the Develop persona in AF or ACR in Ps, but you can go back to that. See here for more details; I think this is still basically how it works, although I'm more familiar with Ps: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/27913-non-destructive-versus-destructive-editing/
Thanks for the clarification.
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I've all but made the decision to stop the subscription service of Adobe. I've tried C1 myself and the tools, and options it provides is top notch, but (there's always a but). The cost, upfront and upgrade costs, I figured I'd upgrade every third iteration and while ran the numbers a few years ago, if memory served me. The cost of that process was no less then the subscription service. I'd need to get C1 for a lot less upfront and then maybe lower my expectations to upgrade on the 4th interval and I don't know if that would be possible.
Conversely, I'm finding On1 Raw to give me about 80% of what LR provides in both categorization and photo editing and such a low cost its hard to pass up. While the categorization process is more like Adobe Bridge in some sense, what it offers is sufficient for my needs.
C1 is great software, but I'd check to see how long folks have been able to go on macOS with older versions. I had an earlier version a couple three years ago. C1 had an annoying rights management thing where it needed to phone home I always had issues with, but the bigger problem was that my edition broke with an OS upgrade. Lasted probably 18 months. And maybe due to the rights thing it wouldn't even open. Not sure, of course, what's been happening since (I didn't upgrade, and went back to Lr) but I'd check just to make sure because as you note, it isn't cheap.