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Author Topic: Upgrade offer  (Read 4241 times)

Ferp

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Re: Upgrade offer
« Reply #20 on: November 22, 2021, 05:35:47 pm »

I thought it unlikely that they'd better 20% + 10% (from Fujirumors), but I expect them to repeat it at some stage.
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Ray Harrison

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Re: Upgrade offer
« Reply #21 on: November 23, 2021, 12:37:37 pm »

Looks like they were honest about the first discount not being bettered.
The Black Friday "deal" is only for subscriptions and style packs, nothing for upgrades to perpetual licences.

That means I can get two years of Adobe's photo plan with Lightroom and Photoshop for the 80% of the price of a single(uninspiring) upgrade to CO.

Much as I absolutely loath the concept of subscription software, there's enough new in LR now to be worth the jump now bits of LR6 are breaking.

Yeah, LR is a great offering and great software, quite obviously. I like that both Adobe & C1 have each spent the last year to 18 months adding a lot of great features (in my mind). It's sort of a golden age of raw processing out there so whatever fits your way of working, likes/preferences and cost/benefit equation, one can find a product that fits. I've really liked C1 21 more than many recent upgrades. I'm looking forward to version 22. I give Adobe my cash too for Photoshop and other tools in their Creative Suite that I use for my day job, and both are small expenses in the grand scheme of things and provide great value.
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Rhossydd

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Re: Upgrade offer
« Reply #22 on: November 24, 2021, 05:49:33 am »

I like that both Adobe & C1 have each spent the last year to 18 months adding a lot of great features (in my mind).
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. I don’t think it’ll offer much to CO’s big market of fashion and product photographers.
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.

For me the one stand out product for raw conversions in the past two years has been DXO’s DeepPrime noise reduction. It may be slow, but the results are really fantastic for high ISO images. Adding a degree of automation to and from LR will have won DXO many customers.

What remains a disappointment across this market is that some aspects just don’t seem to get any attention.
Adding keywords hasn’t got any easier. No simple way to add sets of keywords on import or even just buttons to click. Lightroom will find and mask a ‘subject’, or sort people by facial recognition(sometimes), but automatically keywording a daffodil as yellow or recognising a car seems not to be considered.
Maybe building web galleries has gone out of fashion now, but that’s not had anything new added in any of the packages I’ve seen.

A “golden age” ? maybe, but there’s still lots of room for innovation.
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Ray Harrison

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Re: Upgrade offer
« Reply #23 on: November 24, 2021, 08:49:29 am »

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.
« Last Edit: November 24, 2021, 02:31:13 pm by Ray Harrison »
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Rhossydd

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Re: Upgrade offer
« Reply #24 on: November 28, 2021, 04:14:57 am »

Ray, you sell the improvements better than Phase do ;-)

With Amazon offering a year of the Adobe Photography Plan at £46 today I've bought into that. For the price of one annual upgrade to C1 I've got more than four years of LR + PS.

My understanding of Photo Mechanic is that is primarily a tool for very fast ingest, which does better than anything else, but doesn't have full DAM cataloguing options. Fast ingest or culling isn't an issue for me, but cataloguing is and I've found LR to be the easiest all round package for that.
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Ray Harrison

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Re: Upgrade offer
« Reply #25 on: November 28, 2021, 05:46:26 am »

Photo Mechanic Plus has their cataloging, just FYI. It’s really quite good and very fast. The good thing about them is that not only are they super responsive with issues but once you pay, they don’t tend to ask for money more than once every 5 years or so.
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