For quite some time I have felt that Adobe stopped making Photoshop and Lightroom more useful years ago, and focused mostly on adding marginal features more or less as a ploy to keep us paying a subscription fee.
Sure the AI denoise and AI object isolation are useful, but these days that is bread and butter table stakes for any image processing program. And many of the features were pioneered by others long before Adobe got around to repackaging them in Photoshop.
The lack of consistency in behavior and interface between PS and LR is reminiscent of the absolute mess of software that is the Garmin ecosystem. And forcing that fragile and clunky LR catalog on everyone, whether they want it or not, is just atrocious.
It never was the primary, so how do I choose a radio button?
I've always used other software to convert from RAW to 16-bit TIFF and then used PS for finishing work.
Now with the high-res and noisy MILC files I'm using DXO PL. I will continue using DPP for converting old Canon DSLR low ISO files.
LR is not viable at all for me due to the DB limitations. I only use PS CC for certain purposes, but not generally. I need PS CC 2027 to open Sony a7rVI compressed ARW files until there is DXO support in autumn; I'll do the real processing later.
I've never really used Photoshop much but I did use Lightroom for years a very long time ago but for the last many years I've been using Capture One and am very happy with it.
That firs sentence seems pretty ironic. When they moved to the subscription model (which I objected to vehemently at the time) one of my fears was that once they "had us" they would drastically slow down the rate of innovation and new features.
Actually, it seems the other way around to me. They have continually added new an useful features at an increasing rate.
I'm a Bridge/ACR/PS guy. In recent months they have added and then refined a very set of making features to ACR that has significantly altered how I work in post. The AI Denoise feature is incredibly useful — it has even enabled me to resurrect some marginal files that I had "left for dead."
I don't really use LR much at all. (I sometimes use it for organizing and culling.) But if you are looking for parallels, they won't be between LR and PS, they are between LR and ACR, which share a lot of interface elements.
I"m most certainly not remotely interested in jumping ship at this point. Where would I jump? And to what end?
GroovyGeek wrote:
For quite some time I have felt that Adobe stopped making Photoshop and Lightroom more useful years ago, and focused mostly on adding marginal features more or less as a ploy to keep us paying a subscription fee.
Sure the AI denoise and AI object isolation are useful, but these days that is bread and butter table stakes for any image processing program. And many of the features were pioneered by others long before Adobe got around to repackaging them in Photoshop.
The lack of consistency in behavior and interface between PS and LR is reminiscent of the absolute mess of software that is the Garmin ecosystem. And forcing that fragile and clunky LR catalog on everyone, whether they want it or not, is just atrocious.
How do people here feel about Adobe? Ready to jump ship? Hating it but too lazy to look elsewhere? Just chugging along? Don't use it enough to care?...Show more →
I far prefer the Bridge/ACR + PS workflow and have done so for the entire lifetime of LR. I haven't bought into the whole catalog thing as a concept, far prefer my own folder based DAM. That said, since they changed the ACR UI from tabs to the LR UI I have been far less enamoured with it and I find CO a far superior tool in many ways. Local adjustments and speed are still on Adobe's side for my use cases but not much else.
EB-1 wrote:
How is the Adobe DAM related to their single-user DB?
EBH
I'm merely referring to the catalogs in LR. That's my DAM when it comes to my images and I vastly prefer it over others I've tried and over Apple Photos, which I can't escape.
Yes, LrC is my default. I use PS infrequently for the rare images that require more advanced cut/paste and layering options.
Is anything really that much better than anything else currently available in this space? At the moment I don't really see a compelling reason to look elsewhere.
Grew up processing with PS then LR. I haven’t seen anything that offers such a complete package that handles all my processing from cataloging my images to printing. Like others said where would I jump to?
No. Left the LR/PS ship in 2016 itself, the moment Adobe went on to subscription model.
As a hobby photographer, it did not make any practical sense to me and personally, not having to chose between a subscription vs perpetual license, albeit with limited feature set to that point in time was a slap on my face.
Coming to what I feel about Adobe? Its just like a mob boss, to whom it's customers are paying a monthly fee. If you ask somebody who have their skin in the game with Adobe and making livelihood of photography, they may think otherwise and that is perfectly fine.
Let me give a couple of non-photography related examples. BMW started heated seats as subscription a couple years ago. Lexus started charging subscription on GPS services after an initial period. None of those were the "norm" when it came to cars in the past and if that is not fair, so is not proving a choice to customers between subscription and perpetual license models.
I can't wait to see when Adobe starts charging based on how much data transferred between your local machine and their cloud server in future (not talking about the cloud storage for which they are already charging). Pardon my ignorance, if they are already doing that as well.
Absolutely. There is no package as aggressively priced as my PS/LR combo that can do everything to the same level. Having Photoshop alone is great for other non-photography projects too.
The anti-subscription troglodytes can have fun with their sub-par replacements.
I recently got tired of paying for multiple image processing subscriptions, so decided to abandon C1 and use ACR and PS for everything. I still dislike the LR workflow ethos so avoid it. There’s a lot about C1 I miss, but I am living without it so far, and of course I don’t miss paying for that subscription. There are things in PS I couldn’t live without and some even outside of photography, and thus why C1 lost out. So yes, as of right now I’m 100% Adobe PS/ACR, albeit somewhat reluctantly.
I tried to switch to C1, and I think it handles DNG files better than Adobe, which is saying something considering it's an Adobe raw format, but ultimately I found myself launching images into PS to do stuff C1 can't.
I do a lot of focus stacking and you really can't compare the ease of stacking and blending images that PS offers and to be able to select images in LR and open them as layers in PS is unmatched. Even something as simple as extending the canvas for online presentation is missing in others I've tried, so C1 got cancelled like a woke stepchild
That said, I use a fraction of a fraction of what photoshop can do, so if C1 were to add a couple of modules that bring more functionality, maybe I'll reconsider, but since they seem to be under some sort of financial strain, I won't hold my breath.
johnvanr wrote:
I'm merely referring to the catalogs in LR. That's my DAM when it comes to my images and I vastly prefer it over others I've tried and over Apple Photos, which I can't escape.
I cannot really understand how to use it across an entire system with numerous NAS/SAN, computers at different locations, etc.
I just don't have the ability or interest in the complex levels of organization. Fortunately photography is not my job, so I can use other tools outside of Adode to manage everything. I have no need to suddenly find an image of a particular species for example.
It's like using SAP or Ariba, you have to do it at work, but nobody technical enjoys that. If anything I should get better with AI version of PS.
I’m not going to spend very much time to try an alternative to LR/PS for a $10 a month expend especially if Adobe continues to make ongoing improvements.
EB-1 wrote:
I cannot really understand how to use it across an entire system with numerous NAS/SAN, computers at different locations, etc.
I just don't have the ability or interest in the complex levels of organization. Fortunately photography is not my job, so I can use other tools outside of Adode to manage everything. I have no need to suddenly find an image of a particular species for example.
It's like using SAP or Ariba, you have to do it at work, but nobody technical enjoys that. If anything I should get better with AI version of PS.
EBH
My images are either in LR catalogs or in Apple Photos. They're all one the same drives (plus iCloud for Apple Photos) and backed up. It's really not that complicated. My only issue is that I live a few months every year in Spain and want to have all my images there, so I now travel with the key hard drives (while an exact copy stays behind in either location when I leave there). Also doable, though not ideal.
