My everyday workflow is Capture One + Photoshop, has been for a couple of decades and it's never been LR/ACR +PS. I still use LR/ACR on occasions, but don't feel I can't tick any of these boxes.
When Adobe first switched to the subscription plan, I was as aggressively anti-Adobe-subscription as anyone here. I was already a long time Adobe user who regularly moved to each new version and paid for it, regarding the software as a tool that was as important to my photography as a camera or a lens.
I assumed that Adobe’s move to the subscription plan was going to be bad for consumers in just about every way:
1. Once they hooked us they would radically raise the price.
2. Once they had us hooked and no longer had to persuade us of the value of each new update to generate cash flow, they would stop updating and improving the program(s).
3. They would nickel and dime us to death by charging separate subscriptions for each app.
I did not upgrade for the first year or more, but eventually I simply had to for compatibility and so that I cold keep up to date on the software everyone was using. So I swallowed hard and got a subscription.
About my three fears listed above — was wrong.
1. After an initial higher price, Adobe reduced it to $10/month. Adobe kept the price exactly the same for at least a decade. Many of us who bought in early and made the right decision along the way are still paying the same price over a decade later.
2. The pace at which features are refined and added has not slowed at all — in fact, it seems to be increasing. Just in the past few months several features that are extremely valuable to photographers (see my earlier post in the thread) have been added.
3. I was astonished when Adobe rolled Photoshop and Lightroom into the same subscription price. Before they were separate purchases which together cost many hundreds of dollars. They also include LR and PS on tablets in the price, along with a few other apps (that I do not use).
I know everyone likes to get free stuff, and I understand, but it still surprises me to see people so strongly objecting to paying… $10/month (OK, a bit more for some of you) for a software environment that is so powerful and which replaces essentially the entire physical darkroom we used to purchase and maintain. Heck it costs most of us way less than a relatively mundane lens!
(On the other hand, I’m also glad that there are still some Adobe competitors…)
Miranda forums are a poor place to ask, because they have a certain Anti-Adobe bias. The vast majority of "high end" image processors don't bother with amateur internet forums. Here's what market analyzers say:
Commercial Image editing - Market Share Breakdown
#1 Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop/Lightroom)75% – 80%
High-end retouchers, commercial editors, and general professionals.
#2 Capture One Pro 10% – 12%
High-end fashion, commercial studio, and e-commerce tethered photographers.
All others, including commercial, free, and special purpose = less than 1%
NOTE: This is market shares based on revenues, NOT number of images produced. All these apps would be insignificant in that measure, since social media images SOOC (straight-out-of-camera) would probably be > 99%. Likewise, if Bill Gates wrote an image processing app and sold 1 copy to Elon Musk for $300 billion, that would make it #1.
ALSO NOTE: Adobe does not consider Capture One, Affinity, or any others to be significant competition. The competition Adobe fears most is AI.
I have bought and paid for PS CS6 and Lightroom Classic? - I believe? Though Lightroom is a program I never use. Basically, I use OEM software for all of my RAW conversions and only use PS for stuff like levels, cropping, healing brush, cloning, content-aware, etc. I also use it with plugins to tweak the image.
Never used Lightroom. I am one of those "troglodytes" who uses Capture One, paid $150 perpetual license in 2020. I don't feel any need to subscribe to Lightroom and Photoshop and insult those who don't to feel better about myself.
I took a course but never had any interest in Lr. Then I had issues with poor performance from ACR when opening Canon raw files. The free Canon DPP4 software does a great job of opening raws based on picture styles. It also does well with basic adjustments such as color, pulling details from the shadows when needed, saturation, contrast adjustments, etc.
For more advanced editing I switch my Tif files from DPP4 over to Photoshop Elements. Elements has a great number of the tools and functions available in the full Ps version. Even so I rarely use many of them.
atnpro wrote:
Have moved on since 2012. First, moved on to Gimp/C1, and then later Affinity/Darktable/Xnview, $0 cost. F Adobe.
I need to revisit Darktable, It's been years since I tried it and I've now got several friends that have moved over to it. Sounds like it's quite capable. But, I do really like Capture One - but one less subscription is always appealing.
I've used Adobe Photoshop since 1996, and the ACR/PS workflow since it existed. I've tried other things and each time was a mistake, hassle, and waste of money - except for Focus Magic sharpening.
Bruce Marriner wrote:
I need to revisit Darktable, It's been years since I tried it and I've now got several friends that have moved over to it. Sounds like it's quite capable. But, I do really like Capture One - but one less subscription is always appealing.
Darktable offers much faster performance and more capabilities that can handle what LR can't. If AI tools are your thing, Darktable has them for nothing.
atnpro wrote:
Darktable offers much faster performance and more capabilities that can handle what LR can't. If AI tools are your thing, Darktable has them for nothing.
I do like fast That's one thing I love about C1, it's very snappy. I've read about Darktable having pretty good AI masking, I like that kind of AI but I don't use any generative AI stuff.
Bruce Marriner wrote:
I do like fast That's one thing I love about C1, it's very snappy. I've read about Darktable having pretty good AI masking, I like that kind of AI but I don't use any generative AI stuff.
The fastest library management with a tiny footprint is NXView, which can be integrated with darktable and Affinity.
gdanmitchell wrote:
Really? What kind of problems? I’ve been using ACR with Canon files for years.
This is not a current problem. For many months following the introduction on Canon's CR3 raw format, Adobe ACR did a noticeably poor job of opening the files. I continue to use DPP4 because it does an OEM perfect job and has some features which I believe are missing from ACR.
The diffraction correction seems to work like magic. I have no idea how this algorithm works, but it does indeed seem to pull details otherwise lost due to diffraction. This becomes a nice feature especially because I shoot a lot of macro at f/20.
DPP4 is designed to work with Canon picture styles or the individual photographer's custom picture styles. Of course this does not affect any raw data but provides a great starting point for additional editing.
Lens corrections are automatically applied. Initial sharpening and noise corrections can be applied automatically.
Camperjim wrote:
This is not a current problem. For many months following the introduction on Canon's CR3 raw format, Adobe ACR did a noticeably poor job of opening the files. I continue to use DPP4 because it does an OEM perfect job and has some features which I believe are missing from ACR.
The diffraction correction seems to work like magic. I have no idea how this algorithm works, but it does indeed seem to pull details otherwise lost due to diffraction. This becomes a nice feature especially because I shoot a lot of macro at f/20.
DPP4 is designed to work with Canon picture styles or the individual photographer's custom picture styles. Of course this does not affect any raw data but provides a great starting point for additional editing.
Lens corrections are automatically applied. Initial sharpening and noise corrections can be applied automatically. ...Show more →
ACR does essentially all of the things you described.
No button option for me either. I convert my Raw files in Nikon NX Studio then export to Tiff for editing in PS. Commercial work has special requirements!
That's one thing I love about C1, it's very snappy. I've read about Darktable having pretty good AI masking, I like that kind of AI but I don't use any generative AI stuff.