Interesting how differently people see things.
For me the last CO upgrade offered so little it wasn’t worth buying. The addition of HDR & Pano building in 22 seems very much a ‘bolt in’ and seems unlikely to better LR’s offering and won’t match the quality and power of dedicated software that anyone interested in this genre is likely to already own.
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Adobe’s recent Lightroom improvements in masking do seem to have wide appeal and really offer benefits for all users. The annual cost now seems a bargain compared to keeping CO up to date too, especially at Black Friday prices.
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A “golden age” ? maybe, but there’s still lots of room for innovation.
I like what C1 has done with masking over the course of the v21 release. The magic brush, while a silly name, is absolutely fantastic. While it doesn’t isolate specific subjects in one click as an advertised feature, it is pretty sophisticated in its isolation capabilities for a lot of the landscape and architecture work I do. While perhaps not innovative, per se, the style brushes were also a great addition to masking capabilities this past year. The ProStandard profiles and Speed Edit features were sleepers but great additions. I still like how C1 focuses on and does color adjustments and editing (the aforementioned profiles are a good example of that), though I know that LR did some work in that area this year too.
Pano and HDR are features that a lot of people asked for, like dehaze that was added in v21, and from what I’ve been able to gather, they’ve done a really good job. We shall see and to your point, I don’t know if I’d switch from the the pano tools I already use. I don’t do exposure bracketing in general.
To me, nothing touches Photo Mechanic Plus for keywording, culling and cataloging so I continue to use that as part of my workflow.
I call it a golden age because of choice and quality of solutions. The choice used to be Aperture, LR, and a distant 3rd with C1 and to some degree DXO. When Aperture dropped off the map, it gave the opportunity to a lot of players. I think C1 is trying to be as responsive as they can be to the market and trying to make it attractive to move to rather than just moving to it because people don’t like Adobe’s license model. Hence I think some of the “leveling up” with similar features to LR. I think some of LR’s work with their color management tools, tethering improvements and stuff like that are in at least a small way a response to what people say they like in C1.
I agree that DXO is doing some interesting work. They don’t support all of my camera systems, though I’m happy to see they finally started supporting Fuji XTrans.