Printing Part IV – Software Part 1 – raw converters and editors.

[john beardsworth]

As Andrew might have put it, you can't go into Develop or Map, and you can't sync with LrMobile. You can do everything else.

Adobe use standard metadata to avoid locking you in. It's perfectly possible to migrate to another app with all your keywords, other metadata, and even adjustment data. Can you say the same for its competitors?

[digitaldog]

No I did not know that-
Do you mean you can still actively use the DAM; add new photos to it and use it as desired after the payments to adobe stop?

Again, all modules except Develop and Maps operate after you end your subscription. Library continues to operate (the Dam) and you can  still even use Quick Develop! 

[kers]

OK - clear good to know.

[nemophoto]

I must thoroughly agree with Dan about his gloomy prediction regarding LR. Any time a company adds the appellation "Classic", it usually means "so to be discontinued". That was my instant thought when Adobe revised the name. Stupid, arrogant idiots. I find most of the software/cloud developers think EVERYONE has 1Gb and higher speeds because they do. though I travel for my work and am nominally based in NYC, I chose to live in a very rural area. The downside is 8Mbps is my "fast" internet download. hold on, it gets better, 756Kbps is my whopping upload speed. And Adobe thinks I'd use Lightroom CC and upload my images? I'd never upload all my images anyway. My average week long job is 500-750GB. But I think Dan alluded to it well. Adobe is hoping to cash in on cloud storage and make you pay the price -- especially if it can force you to do so.

As a result, I have been updating concurrently my Capture One, DxO Photolab and OnOne. I have tried to become more conversant in all those so that the day Adobe pulls the plug (not much longer now) I have alternatives. Pity. I've worked with LR since beta in 2006. (I owned the precursor software Adobe bought and used as the basis of Lightroom, RAW Shooter.) I use LR for most of my personal, fine art printing as well as all my RAW processing before taking an image into PS. I agree that at this point, DxO is one of the best alternatives, though I haven't printed from it. Capture One is pretty kludgy (I liked it better when I used it pre-Lightroom). The outlier is On1 Photo Raw. It's improved greatly, though I still have reservations about it's color. It also has the ability to import and LR catalog, with Develop settings and all.

Alas poor Lightroom, I knew you well....

[john beardsworth]

Like Dan, you're listing the obvious downsides of the cloud-dependent "Lightroom", a different program, ignoring changes in Classic Lightroom that indicate long term investment, and making this confusion fit your prejudice about the word "Classic". And garnishing this hit job with fake facts*.

I cannot defend Adobe's naming shenanigans, but last time I looked Coke was still the product they tried to sideline as "Classic".

John


* Adobe did not base LR on RawShooter. Its first public beta was over 6 months before the acquisition.

[David Mantripp]

The author clearly has a personal preference for DxO, which is fine, but should not extend to writing complete nonsense.  The U-Point approach is a interesting approach, but to imply that this is the only way to do local adjustments is ridiculous.  Capture One has extensive, almost overwhelming local adjustment ability through layers, and very similar targeting to U-Point with luminance masking (which is actually more tuneable than the Nik approach).  Lightroom similarly has advanced local adjustments, with, again, luminance and color range masking (it would be nice if Lr could make it more obvious when a photo has local adjustments applied, though).  Both of these existed well before DxO acquired Nik and bolted U-Points into PL.

And there was plenty more misrepresentation in there.  Sorry, but this article is simply not up to standard of "Lula Classic". Disappointing.

[nemophoto]

Like Dan, you're listing the obvious downsides of the cloud-dependent "Lightroom", a different program, ignoring changes in Classic Lightroom that indicate long term investment, and making this confusion fit your prejudice about the word "Classic". And garnishing this hit job with fake facts*.

I cannot defend Adobe's naming shenanigans, but last time I looked Coke was still the product they tried to sideline as "Classic".

John


* Adobe did not base LR on RawShooter. Its first public beta was over 6 months before the acquisition.

Re: Adobe and RAW Shooter, from Adobe's release:
Pixmantec is a privately held company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark and currently ships the RawShooter® line of digital photography software products.  Adobe plans to integrate Pixmantec raw processing technologies into Lightroom™ and wherever customers will be working with raw files.

So, yes, I misspoke the timing, but I remember the feeling that Lightroom was inferior in some of it's handling of RAW (highlights in particular) and that the later release mimicked RAW Shooter.

As for "Classic", Coke only relented on "Classic Coke" because "New Coke" was widely ignored by the public. If I remember correctly, they stopped production on "Classic Coke" in 1985 or so. The New Coke was cheaper to make since it was made with corn syrup rather than cane sugar. (Again, if memory serves me well.) Finally they brought back the "old" Coke and called it "Classic".

A good example of Adobe pulling the plug on desktop vs web app is easy to see. I loved Muse. Adobe was gung-ho for it -- an easy drag and drop web designer, minimal coding. Diehard coders love Dreamweaver. I hated it. (I've had a web site since the mid-90's and had to teach myself HTML. No templates out there then. Though I had a web site, some of my AD clients weren't allowed to use the web!) For 5 or 6 years, Adobe was all in on Muse. Until it wasn't. development ended in 2018, and tech support ended in March. Adobe now pushes a collection of web (Spark and Portfolio) and the not really suitable XD as replacements for what was a unique, well like program.

[digitaldog]

Re: Adobe and RAW Shooter, from Adobe's release:
Pixmantec is a privately held company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark and currently ships the RawShooter® line of digital photography software products.  Adobe plans to integrate Pixmantec raw processing technologies into Lightroom™ and wherever customers will be working with raw files.

Yes, and this was done AFTER LR was released so John's correct: Adobe did not base LR on RawShooter. Its first public beta was over 6 months before the acquisition.

As for "Classic", Coke only relented on "Classic Coke" because "New Coke" was widely ignored by the public.

Like the idea that anything called "Classic" spells its doom should be ignored? 
I use Muse too, it still runs just fine.

[nemophoto]

The U-Point approach is a interesting approach, but to imply that this is the only way to do local adjustments is ridiculous.  Capture One has extensive, almost overwhelming local adjustment ability through layers, and very similar targeting to U-Point with luminance masking (which is actually more tuneable than the Nik approach).  Lightroom similarly has advanced local adjustments, with, again, luminance and color range masking (it would be nice if Lr could make it more obvious when a photo has local adjustments applied, though).  Both of these existed well before DxO acquired Nik and bolted U-Points into PL.

The point is more that, if Adobe DOES kill off Lightroom (as we know it for desktop), DxO is an excellent alternative. I have owned C1 since it was first introduced for the EOS 1D. I just updated to the latest version of C1 20. DxO's approach is more straightforward, in my mind, and easier to use than C1's. Lightroom is my benchmark and still my preferred and favorite, though I much prefer the noise handling and sharpening in DxO. Certain jobs, I'll "round robin" images from Lightroom to DxO PL and back to Lightroom and then any final tweaking in PS.

[nemophoto]

Like the idea that anything called "Classic" spells its doom should be ignored? 
I use Muse too, it still runs just fine.

My favorite music is "classic" rock, so, in a way, yes it does spell "doomed". My wife teases me that the only bands I like are "dead bands". 

And yes, Muse runs just fine. But it's still dead software. But what I love about Windows, I can run LOTS of dead software if I want. Excuse me, Classic software.

[john beardsworth]

Re: Adobe and RAW Shooter, from Adobe's release:
Pixmantec is a privately held company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark and currently ships the RawShooter® line of digital photography software products.  Adobe plans to integrate Pixmantec raw processing technologies into Lightroom™ and wherever customers will be working with raw files.

So, yes, I misspoke the timing, but I remember the feeling that Lightroom was inferior in some of it's handling of RAW (highlights in particular) and that the later release mimicked RAW Shooter.

As for "Classic", Coke only relented on "Classic Coke" because "New Coke" was widely ignored by the public. If I remember correctly, they stopped production on "Classic Coke" in 1985 or so. The New Coke was cheaper to make since it was made with corn syrup rather than cane sugar. (Again, if memory serves me well.) Finally they brought back the "old" Coke and called it "Classic".

A good example of Adobe pulling the plug on desktop vs web app is easy to see. I loved Muse. Adobe was gung-ho for it -- an easy drag and drop web designer, minimal coding. Diehard coders love Dreamweaver. I hated it. (I've had a web site since the mid-90's and had to teach myself HTML. No templates out there then. Though I had a web site, some of my AD clients weren't allowed to use the web!) For 5 or 6 years, Adobe was all in on Muse. Until it wasn't. development ended in 2018, and tech support ended in March. Adobe now pushes a collection of web (Spark and Portfolio) and the not really suitable XD as replacements for what was a unique, well like program.

You're still just bolstering a perfectly-understandable prejudice with dodgy facts,  barely-relevant analogies, and ignoring contrary evidence about continued Classic development.

If Muse is an analogy, it works equally against your expectations for Classic Lightroom. Adobe killed the newer, dumbed down app, Dreamweaver's still going, and maybe that will happen with Cloudy Lightroom? Muse failed because its market was those who found DW too difficult and they were no longer designing their own sites - they are using customisable cloudy solutions like SquareSum, Wix, and Spark, Portfolio etc, even social media.

But Muse just isn't relevant, while Coke shows how it's naive to base your case on Adobe's product naming acrobatics. It's reasonable to ask the question of "Classic", but the evidence doesn't back it up.

[Jager]

Lightroom and Photoshop are fantastic pieces of software.  But, like any software, it's easy to see how the pace of innovation slackened and slowed as the products matured.  The "core" features of those products mostly made their appearance in the earlier releases.

You can imagine the consternation of the product manager of LR or PS once they had hit version four or five.  "What the hell do we add now, to keep people buying the next new release?"

"Oh, wait!  We'll do a subscription model!  We'll sell the narrative of constant, continuous improvement!"

Ten bucks a month ain't all that much.  And, really, when you total it all up it isn't all that different from the periodic, major-version releases we used to see back in the day.  And so it's really not a surprise that so many photographers simply shrugged at the new model.

Alas, if you put the feature set of either program into a matrix, and truly scrutinize what you got, when... you'll see a clearly declining value proposition.

Now, having already captured much of the serious-photographer market, Adobe has set its eyes upon the vastly larger smartphone-in-every-pocket universe.  True, cloud storage will suck for Sally, the wedding photographer, just back from an event.  But it'll work just dandy for Suzie and her Saturday night selfies!

Me, I just said no.

I stopped at LR 6, the last standalone version.  And was finally pushed to an inflection point last fall when Apple released Catalina - the first MacOS version that removed support for legacy 32-bit apps.  Turns out that although Lightroom and Photoshop are both 64-bit apps - and have been for awhile - the installer that Adobe provides is 32-bit.  Alrighty then.

After using LR and PS for literal decades, I have nothing but fondness for them.  But Adobe long ago got too big for its britches.

And after six months I can say that Capture One is both an able replacement as well as an elegant piece of software in its own right, software that brings to bear its own singular strengths.