Luminous Landscape Forum
Site & Board Matters => About This Site => Topic started by: Morris Taub on January 13, 2012, 03:40:15 am
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kinda...
One thing : I've never read so much confusing info in my life. This whole episode would make a great Marx Brothers routine,...if it didn't cost us so much. Ok, so Adobe is relenting just a smidgen here...but honest, they are a major company, don't they think these things through? It sounds more like the accounting department making the announcements or maybe the shareholders. Hmmm, does adobe have shareholders?
Reading, trying to make sense of this new info, can anyone tell me if my CS3 Indesign or CS3 Illustrator is part of the new deal? Can I upgrade these individual programs to the CS6 versions? Is my individual copy of Photoshop CS5 eligible for an upgrade to CS6? It seems like Adobe is saying that only Creative Suite versions are included in this upgrade path until 31 december 2012. None of my software is part of a creative suite and I don't want to upgrade to a suite of anything. I'm also totally not interested in suites, subscriptions, or clouds. If this is the way forward with Adobe I will, sadly, look for other digital solutions.
Moving forward, after all the faithful have upgraded to CS6, it sounds like then we will be forced to upgrade every version or end up having to buy the whole program again. Is that right? Am I getting it? And further, it sounds like after this CS6 upgrade, if I don't have an individual copy of say Photoshop CS6 I won't be able to just buy Photoshop CS7 or Illustrator CS7 as a one program deal. Adobe will be forcing me to buy a Creative Suite or a subscription to get these individual programs?...
Please correct me on any of this. I'd like to hear where I'm not understanding the Adobe info. I've been using their software for a long time. I just love Photoshop and Lightroom and hope to continue using them for years to come. I dropped Quarkxpress as soon as Adobe put out Indesign...I think the first version was called something else. And I've been using Illustrator too, though less frequently. It's all great software. I really don't want to be forced into other solutions. Like I also love the pixel genius software I'm using via Photoshop. I hope I can continue to use it.
No, really. I bought a program way back when. I want to upgrade that program. I'm not a big studio or company that has any use for all the programs that the creative suites offer. I also do not have the budget for the creative suites or the subscription offers as they stand. In good times or bad I want to be able to buy what I need. I don't like being given solutions that not only hold no value for me, but hurt my income and take away choice. I guess it goes without saying that it sucks that Adobe is changing the rules of the game I signed up for. But it's their game, and I guess they can do what they want.
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Yes, you're right it's a complete mess.
I suspect Adobe are starting to see more and more people not upgrading their products as often as Adobe would like and are desperate to find a way to keep their customers on their gravy train. This nonsense won't have help at all, probably the opposite.
It's hardly surprising, times are tough financially and most Adobe products are mature, stable and feature complete. Why pay to upgrade if you'll get no significant benefit ?
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Adobe is facing the same problem that Microsoft and most other software companies have--their main competitor is older versions of their software. The main alternative to the current version of Photoshop is the older versions users already own. So to compete with the older versions, they need to add compelling new features which gets harder and harder to do. Seriously, what new feature can Adobe add to Photoshop that would be a most have for most of us?
Lightroom 4 added soft proofing which, at least to me, justifies the upgrade. I'm not sure what they can add to Photoshop CS-6 that would justify the upgrade.
Les
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Yes, you're right it's a complete mess.
I suspect Adobe are starting to see more and more people not upgrading their products as often as Adobe would like and are desperate to find a way to keep their customers on their gravy train. This nonsense won't have help at all, probably the opposite.
It's hardly surprising, times are tough financially and most Adobe products are mature, stable and feature complete. Why pay to upgrade if you'll get no significant benefit ?
The answer for Adobe is that Adobe needs to innovate and provide us with features we want/need and don't have today.
Then people would want to upgrade rather than feel like they had to.
I'm finding this now with LR4. There's nothing in it that compels me to upgrade from LR3 because my methodology has had to develop to a point where I can already do everything that is "new" (handling paper colour, recovery of dark/light tones, location via keywords, etc.)
Adobe seems to be becoming a lot like Canon/Nikon: providing iterative updates that tweak a thing or two here and there, provide a new know there.
Who's going to be the equivalent of Sony/Fuji for raw conversion? Corel now that they've just bought Bibble? Or someone else?
I suspect that the "compelling" feature to upgrade to LR4 will be when I get a new digital camera and LR3 is not able to do the raw conversion for it - I'll need LR4 instead. And that makes me wonder about the architecture of the application, for undoubtedly the same thing will happen again with LR5. Maybe it is time for Adobe to build LR in such a way that new raw converters can be added or upgraded independent of LR itself.
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Adobe is facing the same problem that Microsoft and most other software companies have--their main competitor is older versions of their software. The main alternative to the current version of Photoshop is the older versions users already own. So to compete with the older versions, they need to add compelling new features which gets harder and harder to do. Seriously, what new feature can Adobe add to Photoshop that would be a most have for most of us?
Have you seen the "de-blur" video clip?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxjiQoTp864
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I suspect that the "compelling" feature to upgrade to LR4 will be when I get a new digital camera and LR3 is not able to do the raw conversion for it - I'll need LR4 instead. And that makes me wonder about the architecture of the application, for undoubtedly the same thing will happen again with LR5. Maybe it is time for Adobe to build LR in such a way that new raw converters can be added or upgraded independent of LR itself.
I think you've explained exactly why they won't do that - if the only reason to upgrade is that your new camera is not supported by an old version, they won't let you avoid upgrading by making it cheap and easy to keep your RAW converter current.
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Have you seen the "de-blur" video clip?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxjiQoTp864
Oh yes, that was the demo Adobe had to do some PR afterwards to wriggle out of.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2011/10/18/adobeclarifies
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Have you seen the "de-blur" video clip?...
You might also want to mention that the clip was fake.
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You might also want to mention that the clip was fake.
Whether it was fake or not is beside the point.
It was a demonstration of something that if Adobe could get into a product and make it work, that people would clearly "want" and buy.
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Adobe has now put an idea in people’s heads,
“there must be a lot of people NOT upgrading, they must know something I don’t”.
The opposite of Adobe's desired goal to encourage upgrades.
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It was a demonstration of something that if Adobe could get into a product and make it work, that people would clearly "want" and buy.
Sure ?
I reckon there's a growing awareness that firstly Adobe don't features like this right in their first releases and that you can often get far superior results from specialist packages at a lower cost. The auto-stitching panorama feature and the HDR options are both examples of this.
De-blurring ? is that really a 'must have' feature for a high end professional program like Photoshop ? I think the PS Elements user base would be more attracted to that.
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Adobe has now put an idea in people’s heads,
“there must be a lot of people NOT upgrading, they must know something I don’t”.
The opposite of Adobe's desired goal to encourage upgrades.
I'm sure you're right.
It's also causing people to think if they really need to upgrade at all or what the alternatives are that cost less.
Not exactly a great move in tough economic times.
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Sure ?
I reckon there's a growing awareness that firstly Adobe don't features like this right in their first releases and that you can often get far superior results from specialist packages at a lower cost. The auto-stitching panorama feature and the HDR options are both examples of this.
I wouldn't say that I'm particularly happy with any of the HDR options that are available at present, be they from Adobe or others.
De-blurring ? is that really a 'must have' feature for a high end professional program like Photoshop ? I think the PS Elements user base would be more attracted to that.
So what sort of features are you looking for in Photoshop that would make you upgrade?
What digital development problems (be they image or workflow related) would you like to see Adobe solve for you that they haven't yet?
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... So what sort of features are you looking for in Photoshop that would make you upgrade?...
Oh, here is one: I often do faux-HDR (i.e., from a single file)... and when shadow/highlights are used aggressively, there is always a thin white line or ghosting around the bordering areas (mask artifacts, I guess). Well, I'd like to be able to eliminate that.
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So what sort of features are you looking for in Photoshop that would make you upgrade?
What digital development problems (be they image or workflow related) would you like to see Adobe solve for you that they haven't yet?
- The confidence that I am not upgrading just because I have to,
- Faster compressed tif open/save time on multi-core machines,
- Bridge able to refresh quickly/maintain thumbnails even for large images in tiff/psb formats (probably related to the former although they could just generate them on save)
- A GPU enabled real time zoom tool that preserves image sharpness,
- Adustement layers for shadow/highlight tools,
- The ability to preserve newly created actions even when PS crashes before the end of the session,
- Multi-tracks non linear history (could also be called alternative studies with multi-levels undo),
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And i would sure hope they start wasting time and resources trying to do stitching and HDR since the specialized guys do it better and faster.
Cheers,
Bernard
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So what sort of features are you looking for in Photoshop that would make you upgrade?
What digital development problems (be they image or workflow related) would you like to see Adobe solve for you that they haven't yet?
Nothing really, which is why I didn't bother going from CS4 > 5. I didn't bother rushing out to buy the upgrade when Adobe changed their policy to still on the train for a cheap upgrade to 6 because I doubt that will offer enough to be worth spending money on either.
Generally if I come across a 'problem' in PS, it's usually because I've forgotten how to do something, rather than a limitation of the software itself.
It's not perfect, but where it's got failings, I've often already got solutions from third party suppliers, eg the poor range of print options is fully covered by Qimage.
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I think you've explained exactly why they won't do that - if the only reason to upgrade is that your new camera is not supported by an old version, they won't let you avoid upgrading by making it cheap and easy to keep your RAW converter current.
I seem to recall that DNG Converter came in pretty handy at times.
Jeremy
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True. Download the DNG converter and convert your RAW files to DNG. That way you can also work with files from cameras not officially supported by your version of Camera RAW or Lightroom.
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And i would sure hope they start wasting time and resources trying to do stitching and HDR since the specialized guys do it better and faster.
My preference for stitching is Microsoft's tool - Image Composite Editor. Results with it have surpassed nearly everything else that I've tried.
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I'm finding this now with LR4. There's nothing in it that compels me to upgrade from LR3 because my methodology has had to develop to a point where I can already do everything that is "new" (handling paper colour, recovery of dark/light tones, location via keywords, etc.)
Adobe seems to be becoming a lot like Canon/Nikon: providing iterative updates that tweak a thing or two here and there, provide a new know there.
Who's going to be the equivalent of Sony/Fuji for raw conversion? Corel now that they've just bought Bibble? Or someone else?
I suspect that the "compelling" feature to upgrade to LR4 will be when I get a new digital camera and LR3 is not able to do the raw conversion for it - I'll need LR4 instead. And that makes me wonder about the architecture of the application, for undoubtedly the same thing will happen again with LR5. Maybe it is time for Adobe to build LR in such a way that new raw converters can be added or upgraded independent of LR itself.
I have now played with LR4 and especially on some pictures that I had trouble with in LR3. That is often pictures with mixed light and extreme DR (still from one RAW file). I used for a long time a sort of tone mapping in LR3 using recovery and fill light and compensated with the tone curve and brightness. And leveling out the extremes of light using graduated filters (sometimes a number of them) and brushes. Sometimes I got results that pleased me and sometimes I resorted to Photoshop to finish it up. I have now gone through several of the pictures in LR4 and I must say such an approach works a LOT better. Especially the shadows slider works really well and with much less side effects than fill light. What I also really like is the ability to brush in white balance like a higher white balance value in shadow areas (and btw. noise reduction selectively). WOW, I'm impressed!
So I entirely disagree that this is a small upgrade. For me it is huge! And this just in the basic panel in the develop module and the brush and grad filters. That alone would be worth an upgrade for me! It's so much better.
I wish there was an auto button in soft proofing to adjust the soft proofed version to mimic the picture (virtual copy) was made from.
I'm not quite agreeing with you on the Canon/Nikon analogy. They are perfecting the technology on DSLR's (and they have to), but e.g. Canon came out with new video cameras that take the EF lenses. And Canon just came out with the new large sensor compact G1X.
New cameras is not a reason to upgrade since you have the DNG converter.
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I have now played with LR4 and especially on some pictures that I had trouble with in LR3. That is often pictures with mixed light and extreme DR (still from one RAW file). I used for a long time a sort of tone mapping in LR3 using recovery and fill light and compensated with the tone curve and brightness. And leveling out the extremes of light using graduated filters (sometimes a number of them) and brushes. Sometimes I got results that pleased me and sometimes I resorted to Photoshop to finish it up. I have now gone through several of the pictures in LR4 and I must say such an approach works a LOT better. Especially the shadows slider works really well and with much less side effects than fill light. What I also really like is the ability to brush in white balance like a higher white balance value in shadow areas (and btw. noise reduction selectively). WOW, I'm impressed!
After reading what you wrote above, I decided to download LR4Beta and give it a try ...
... yes, it is vastly superior to LR3 when it comes to dealing with shadows and highlights in images with large DR.
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I can understand both sides of the argument.
I did jump at least one version in the past, keeping my upgrade budget low and have more investment in hardware.
However I can see that it is ridiculous that I can buy a new very old stock clearance PS 6.0 version for 10$ and then expect to upgrade to CS6.
I think if Adobe fully implements its intended policy they will loose customers and revenue instead of gaining revenue. A policy that allows updates for the last two versions would probably be a fair compromise.