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Besides, we have been told that Photoshop is not intended to be used by photographers in the first place ..., but I digress.
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Cheers,
Bart
Bart, I have never been able to reconcile this assertion - it is called "PHOTOshop" and was designed by Knoll, a known photography enthusiast, and contains several darkroom analogs in its feature set. Lightroom is actually called "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom" as in, an adjunct to Photoshop where you can convert your raws for further processing in Photoshop.
Lightroom may be "the answer" to working pros who need to keyword and to process hundreds of wedding images or product shots in a hurry, with minimal adjustment and the need to publish them to a web gallery; however, even to the photographer, it is not Photoshop. Lightroom is marketed as the one-stop environment for your digital photographs, and it is pushed toward "photo enthusiasts" (as in, according to Adobe blog update, "Photographers, particularly photo-enthusiasts, are looking for a more tailored offering that focuses on their particular needs."). I don't know what a "photo enthusiast" is, or what it means to Adobe. Presumably it means "non professional who has bought into the Lightroom workflow."
I thought Lightroom was designed to answer the needs of photographers (professionals who guided Adobe in the creation of Lightroom) and that is what inspired the repackaging of ACR into a more limited workflow environment with features like DAM, web publishing, and now printing. This approach signals that the actual concept of *processing* the image is not as important as managing and delivering the image, relative to Photoshop. I can see the appeal to working pros looking for efficiency and amateurs who like to get results by sliding the sliders. Between those two bookends, there are a lot of "photographers" who may, or may not, find Lightroom the most effective or expressive tool for their interests and workflow. I do not know how many Adobe users this comprises, but I would imagine that many of these folks use Photoshop. I think this is, in part, the audience that is not real happy - these users are being told:
"sure, you use Photoshop as a photographer/photo enthusiast, but that is really for pros - if you don;t like the CC subscription to keep using a pro tool, use Lightroom. This is the tool you really need if you are not serious enough to subscribe, and just to prove it to you, we are not going to force you to subscribe - we're doing you a favor, photographer, and keeping LR out of the subscription model. See? We know what you need."
Instead of simply saying, look loyal user, we've decided to change our business model and we apologize if this causes you grief, Adobe keeps insisting that their decisions are based on what is best for the user based on what Adobe knows the user wants and needs. In the end, it may be best for Adobe to change its business model so that it can continue to exist and keep these tools available for the user. That, however, is not the sentiment that Adobe is conveying - what is irritating is the insistence that somehow I cannot creatively express myself with Adobe tools unless I subscribe to them - that is, the subscription aspect of the CC is what is going to spur my creativity with modestly different Adobe applications (faster, more frequent updates, online Behance whatever-the-hell collaboration, Cloud syncing). I get the sense very few people buy that argument, considering people have been getting along just fine without all of this for a long time. So, you have the very real prospect of a disruption in the way people work trying to be balanced by the very vague and unknown potential of the Cloud and all of its claims and magic. The former is immediate and easy to appreciate, the latter is unproven with no experience to change the fence-sitter's opinion.
Interesting.
kirk