What has the Adobe LR team been doing since LR5 for 2 years?

[OnyimBob]

+1
Lightroom started life as an almost perfect amalgam of DAM and premium raw converter combined with the Print module. Wherever it goes in the future, I hope the Lightroom team don't lose sight of the 'lean and mean' moniker and keep the ethos of excellence as their guiding principle.

Better to be the yardstick by which others are judged rather than a second-rate jack-of-all trades.

Absolutely agree!
Bob.

[Rhossydd]

the point was basically about what was in LR6 besides what came from ACR. Not much.

But that's irrelevant to those of us that don't have ACR. All I care about is what's new in Lightroom.

[pegelli]

But that's irrelevant to those of us that don't have ACR. All I care about is what's new in Lightroom.

+1

And if you think there's not enough new stay with LR5, pretty simple until you get a new camera (and even then a conversion to .dng will save you)

I think what you are seeing is that LR (and also PS) are both approaching the top of their S-curve. PS wise for me this was already the case around CS2 or CS3 (and that's where I remained upgrade wise).

[Robert-Peter Westphal]

I've waited to reply. All I can say is that I basically agree. If you have done HDR with PhotoMatrix Pro and made panoramas with PTGui (or even Microsoft's free ICE) then you realize LR has a long ways to go. The performance boost with a GPU has been close to nonexistent for many people, including me. It is a start, but not a complete product. And the Library functions have seemed to have been frozen for a long time.
V6 ?? More like v6 beta.

 

A 'all in one package' like Lightroom will never reach the option a program has that was developed just for one purpose. But, this is not the reason of this thread.

[Morris Taub]

I really don't want to be negative towards the Adobe teams working on the photography related products Lightroom and Photoshop, but given the comment in another thread that the HDR and Pano functions were developed by the Adobe Camera Raw team and given that I see only small enhancements besides this in Lightroom 6, I'm asking: What has the Adobe Lightroom team been doing for the last 2 years? I do know that use of GPU's were implemented but I assume that this is also the case in ACR and likely the ACR team has done the work.

This leads me to the thought that Lightroom as a licensed product should be discontinued in order to allow Adobe to do the logical merge of Lightroom and ACR into a single module that is used from both Lightroom and Photoshop and to get rid of the arcane UI of ACR and therefore allow a tighter integration between Lightroom and Photoshop.

The basic message is that I'm disappointed that there were not more new features in Lightroom 6. Lightroom 5 was even rather light on new features.

One "small" thing about both HDR and Pano in LR6 is that there is not even information about which pictures went into a merge, so basically both HDR and Pano were slammed onto LR6 without considering integrity features like the above.

I have added the compare list of features between LR5 and LR6 and LRCC. Not much in LR6 and most of the list for LRCC compared to LR5 was in LR5 with CC subscription.

Sorry Adobe, I'm not impressed 

I've been feeling the same Hans. Good you put it down for us in writing. I'm not enjoying the performance of Lr 6 either. Very buggy. I hope they can at least iron out all the usage problems in 6.1 if nothing else. I mean at least get that right if you're gonna release a new version via subscription. Wasn't that part of the promise. Lr 6 does seem to have been released too early. Not enough people working on the beta testing? Not enough money going to the team to get it done right? The chiefs now only focused on shareholder dividends and not the users who pay for and use the programs...

My gut feels like the zeitgeist of this new way forward, subscription, is not for the user but for the shareholders.

[Morris Taub]

+1
Lightroom started life as an almost perfect amalgam of DAM and premium raw converter combined with the Print module. Wherever it goes in the future, I hope the Lightroom team don't lose sight of the 'lean and mean' moniker and keep the ethos of excellence as their guiding principle.

Better to be the yardstick by which others are judged rather than a second-rate jack-of-all trades.

Yes. Lr 5 was already starting to feel 'slow' and not as nice to use. Lr 6 is not a fun experience in the develop module for me. I'm starting to think about downgrading back to v5.

[dreed]

Yes. Lr 5 was already starting to feel 'slow' and not as nice to use. Lr 6 is not a fun experience in the develop module for me. I'm starting to think about downgrading back to v5.

My workflow is now something like this:
- import with Lr6 for newer cameras with "copy as DNG"
- get all the basic metadata done
- for pano's and hdr's, do them
- sync all metadata to disk
- quit lr6
- start lr4
- sync the dir tree and import photos plus metadata
- go to work on the images

[Hans Kruse]

I think my comment LR CC got a bit misunderstood... I'm not projecting that Adobe will take the licensed model away! Instead I'm suggesting that Adobe takes the licensed verison away and only provide the CC model so that Adobe can cleaup the mess of multiple UI's for the same thing and stop using resources to maintain both so we can get a better working environment and more stable and as well get new features.

Besides that I do think and would hope that Adobe gets some more and real competition so they can get up on their feet again! The only alternative to LR at the moment is in my view Capture One.

[Manoli]

Instead I'm suggesting that Adobe takes the licensed verison away and only provide the CC model so that Adobe can cleaup the mess of multiple UI's for the same thing and stop using resources to maintain both so we can get a better working environment and more stable and as well get new features.

Besides that I do think and would hope that Adobe gets some more and real competition so they can get up on their feet again! The only alternative to LR at the moment is in my view Capture One.

That I don't understand - Lr6 and LrCC both have the same UI. CC updates are easily replicated with .dot releases in the Lr6 version.

Adobe doesn't need more competition, they need to catch up with the competition - take a 'sondage' of the pros on this forum and I think you'll find that there's a heavy weighting in favour of C1 v Lightroom - and not just because of IQ.

[Hans Kruse]

That I don't understand - Lr6 and LrCC both have the same UI. CC updates are easily replicated with .dot releases in the Lr6 version.

Adobe doesn't need more competition, they need to catch up with the competition - take a 'sondage' of the pros on this forum and I think you'll find that there's a heavy weighting in favour of C1 v Lightroom - and not just because of IQ.

I was referring to LR6 and ACR as in my original post.

So what do you think the sales of C1 is relative to LR?

[chez]

Look here https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/features.html and see that HDR, Pano and GPU support came into ACR and then was plugged into LR6. My point in the original post was pretty clear on that. Therefore the point was basically about what was in LR6 besides what came from ACR. Not much.

Why does it matter to you who exactly implemented the features as long as if they get into Lightroom? Would it matter to you if Adobe bought some great new features and merged them into Lightroom. Would you be disappointed that the "Lightroom team" did not write them from scratch?

[Hans Kruse]

Why does it matter to you who exactly implemented the features as long as if they get into Lightroom?

I think that was pretty clearly written in the original post.

[pegelli]

I think my comment LR CC got a bit misunderstood... I'm not projecting that Adobe will take the licensed model away! Instead I'm suggesting that Adobe takes the licensed verison away and only provide the CC model so that Adobe can cleaup the mess of multiple UI's for the same thing and stop using resources to maintain both so we can get a better working environment and more stable and as well get new features.

I hope they don't take the licensed option away, first because lots of people still want it and secondly because it doesn't take any resources to maintain it, and certainly not the resources that might make the PS and LR UI's look more the same.

My suggestion for Adobe would be to stop "pushing" everybody to the CC model and make finding and buying the licensed version on their website less complicated and more user-friendly.

[Manoli]

So what do you think the sales of C1 is relative to LR?

Is this thread about dollars and cents or IQ ?

[stevebri]

Not sure how many who have read or responded to this (great and relevant) thread are busy working pro's so I will add my 2c worth.

Luckily I am busy working and from that point alone LR6 is a complete waste of time in it's current 'beta' state..

To buggy, very 'half finished' no new processing engine and there is no way I would convert my existing catalogue to LR6.  I cannot risk losing work, the type of work I shoot doesn't use pano or HDR, in fact with an MF back or D810 you don't need HDR..  I don't need face recognition either so although I upgraded to LR6 and installed it (I don't need or run CC)... LR6 is just sitting there unused, save for a quick 'test' catalogue  I tested it with one slack Sunday.

I have been a long time supporter of Adobe and often spouted how over the years their S/W has been the gold standard by which others should be judged, especially in terms of release bugs, and giving us 'tools' almost before we thought of them.... (heal,patch tool... content aware fill etc...)

LR6 shocked me in so much as it gave us 'nothing' real, just a few sprinkles that 'might' apply to some...  It does seem that it was a forced release, for whatever reason, and the obvious push for CC seems a little too one sided, more an immature money grab.

If you look at the last few iPhone updates and their 'own' map,,, it all smells very similar, too many number crunchers at the top who know very little about real users leading real lives... If we add Windoze 8 into that mix too......

As the famous saying goes....'if it ain't broke... don't try to fix it...'

From a fast, reliable work turnaround LR5.7 and PS5 work very well for me and long may it continue...


S

[jjj]

Adobe doesn't need more competition, they need to catch up with the competition - take a 'sondage' of the pros on this forum and I think you'll find that there's a heavy weighting in favour of C1 v Lightroom - and not just because of IQ.

I've not noticed any evidence to suggest that. You may find few non-Pros use C1, which is not the same thing.

LR is certainly way superior to C1 in my view for one single feature. They support all cameras. C1 doesn't support one camera I have despite it outputting DNG and being several years old, they also  do not support Pentax MFDSLRs either, again despite them outputting DNG files. So no way would I invest in company who may not bother to support cameras I want to use.
Things like usability/quality of processing are irrelevant compared to that issue.

[indusphoto]

The basic message is that I'm disappointed that there were not more new features in Lightroom 6. Lightroom 5 was even rather light on new features.

Sorry Adobe, I'm not impressed 

I came late to this party (i.e. thread) but I feel the same. LR6 is really thin on new features, as was LR5 (and was selling at $79 new, or bundled free with camera products at the beginning of this year). LR6/LRCC discussion aside, there just isn't anything in the new version(s) to make people want to upgrade. It is not that Adobe has run out of things to do. The wish list for LR5, LR6, and now LR7 is (already) multiple pages long on this forum alone (and much larger on adobe's own forums).

Whether Adobe has laid off resources (quietly) or moved them to other products, I don't know, but I can tell that half-a-dozen brilliant fulltime engineers working for two years could have recreated LR from scratch (this is how much time 2 years is). So obviously something is not normal.

[smahn]

Especially disappointing for those of us (myself at least) looking for better image quality and performance rather than nifty features. 2 years and basically nothing.

[eliedinur]

Especially disappointing for those of us (myself at least) looking for better image quality and performance rather than nifty features. 2 years and basically nothing.

Agree entirely. For me, HDR and Panorama are nice little gimmicks that I may use occasionally, but far from the main thing which is Develop, Develop, Develop. And in Develop the global tone/color controls of PV 2012 are superb, but I was hoping for (and expecting) increased functionality in the local adjustments. The visible overlay in the Grad and Rad filters and the integration of Brush functions into those filters is very welcome, but I want expansion of the editing functions; such as local HSL and a second sharpener whose parameters are independent of the global sharpener - to name just two.
"Disappointing" may be a bit too mild.

[mburke]

Elied,

Could not agree more. Those are the kind of additions that would help. More features in the develop module. I would think the vast majority of users want to work on their pictures first. Then it would be nice to export, book module, and the rest. For all the time from LR4 to LRCC not many improvements that are useful to me.

Mike