I've heard so many stories, and have had so much recent close experience of those stories not ending on a high note. It's nice to hear that Burnt Sushi's and your wife's experience do sometimes end in a very positive way.
I was a lightroom user for almost 20 years, and their licensing ridiculousness was enough for me to:
- change up my workflow, avoiding raw so I can use simpler editing processes
- do way less editing
- take way fewer photos
It sucks, but I just can't justify their insane pricing scheme. I've been looking for Linux-capable tools for a while, and Darktable / Rawtherapee are a long way from what I'm after. What you describe sounds like a dream.
This seems like an overreaction that punishes you more than Adobe. There are a number of other tools - until fairly recently Capture One offered perpetual licensing, for instance. Giving up RAW to spite Adobe is like being angry at Microsoft Office subscription pricing and saying you'll abandon word processors and just use a typewriter instead.
Back when Adobe upended their perpetual licensing, Capture One was touted as _the_ alternative and I gave it a try since my new Sony camera's RAW format wasn't supported by the last perpetual-license Lightroom version anyway. And man, coming from Lightroom, Capture One was one of the most horrendous usability experiences I have ever had in a creative tool. Even after keeping on trying for a long time, I could absolutely not find a workflow that worked for me and that wasn't filled with obstacles, pains, slowness, inexplicable UI design choices and illogical workflows that totally broke the creative process. It made me miss and appreciate Lightroom so much. But as a photo hobbyist I couldn't justify Adobe's then-new licensing model anyway and the hobby just dwindled away. I ended up finding other paths to express my creative side instead.
If Capture One still is like this, I wouldn't really be surprised if there's truth to the other comment here claiming that their current owners are trying to offload them.
Well, C1 is still the best. But you need two monitors for a smooth experience. Image on one, tools on another. And it's a breeze. Lightroom is like trying to swim in a pool of mud with tin ankle bracers :D.
I don't have spite for Adobe, that seems like a projection on your part. But I can't justify the purchase, and have adapted the way I take photos as part of that.
It's more like finding the subscription for a CAD program too expensive, and swapping to something more primitive instead. If that offends you, I think you gotta have a long hard look in a mirror some time.
The point is that there are many options, at many different price points including free, that don't involve giving up 95% of the data your camera sensor provides and don't lock you into getting the exposure perfectly right the first time or else.
FastRawViewer, DxO, Affinity, Darktable, Capture One. Those are just the ones I personally have installed. There's also RawTherapee, a number of camera OEM-specific tools, and more.
I looked to see if any of these tools support the hdr gain map export that Lightroom supports, and of course, absolutely none of them do. I can't use these.
Capture One still offers a perpetual license for US$349... it's the option down at the bottom, of course. And they still do discounted upgrade pricing on that, too.
Like all software companies that go down the subscription hole, they do their best to hide it. You literally have to login and click on a bunch of things to get to that point.
And I'm sure this will all change when the new vulture capital fund that snaps it up tries to extract every last microcent of "value" from the brand.
I should also note I jumped ship to DxO as soon as C1 started going down the subscription hole. And frankly, I'm kind of glad they're struggling. I guess they thought they were going to replicate Adobe's "success" with subscriptions without first being a near-monopoly.
Absurd? What's with you folks and your strongly charged language?
Please recommend these "powerful alternatives", because I have explored the space and found nothing that replaces Lightroom in a way that I find acceptable. Please omit Darktable and Rawtherapee as I've already evaluated those.
Yeah that's a good point that I often forget about, thanks.
I wasn't looking for RAW hdr, just plain jane RAW support that handles moderately new cameras. I stayed on with the old Lightroom as long as I could, but a) it didn't handle my new Sony RAW files, and b) new Mac versions made it impossible to run.
I've moved away from Apple, as that was the last thing tying me to it. Photomator might be nice actually, maybe a good reason to dust off the iPad - cheers.
...
Edit: mobile editing has come a long way since I last checked. Photomator seems really great - between this and a desktop-first approach (Darktable / Davinci) I think this solves all my needs. Big thanks for the recommendation.
Great that it works for you. I gave my daughter my old Canon 70D and she needed a way to process pictures. She only has an iPad and I didn’t push her to adobe ^^. She produces great results with Photomator.
I need to do the jump myself to something better. The last update of Lightroom classic runs so damn slow on my Mac mini (M4). Was super annoyed yesterday while working on some pictures.
Fair. I am curious how many folks are able to get root access on their work machines across the software workforce. If you do, what sort of surveillance tech does your IT expect for you to have on there? Are you given special exemption compared to Mac or Windows company machines?
Presumably there's more efficient hardware foundations to perform these efficiently, and potential at the various abstraction layers for more efficiency. Obviously this is not unbounded - simple things would seem to have a physical limit to the potential improvement.
But if you think of the optimization space: different physical representations, different approaches (photo, quantum, etc), more parallelism - there's undoubtedly a lot of headroom even on the matrix multiplication side. I would imagine there's a lot left on the table when it comes to the abstractions we've built. Infinite? No, but lots of potential.
And what does a machine with a few orders of magnitude more power come up with? I'm not readily able to predict what something like that could create (maybe it's tapped out, but I doubt it).
It seems to come down to an article of faith (as referenced in the article) that there's a lot more potential to be extracted in our current exploitation paths. Which I think is probably reasonable.
Heck, even if a theoretical machine tops out at 3-5 orders of magnitude faster/more complex, I'm sure that could do some amazing things that look like magic to us.
People that only use their rear view cameras scare me. Move your head, be aware of your environment and the people (kids) around you. And use your cameras (again, kids).
Sometimes I sit in a coffee shop and very often see people just using their side mirrors (no rear cam, not looking back) ... scary.
Modern cameras give a way better view of what's behind and to the side of the car than you can ever achieve through mirrors. There's really no comparison. Yes, if you're comparing to older, inferior camera systems mirrors might be better, but not the modern ones.
I say this as someone who learned to drive and drove for a long time with no cameras. People saying this are just usually just used to mirrors and never bothered to take the time to learn to switch to the cameras for backwards maneuvering, or their cars just are not equiped with the latest tech.
Sorry I meant to say their mirrors - but rear view cams do not give much in the way of peripheral vision (yes, I have modern cars too). I've regularly had dumb people cross right into my rearward path even though I'm currently backing up, have the white lights on, etc.
What I meant was: people backing up just using their side/rear mirrors are scary. They don't have good spatial awareness of what's around them. A rear-view cam for them adds a whole lot of safety though.
And the camera's have been better for over a decade at thing point. I have to imagine people are just willfully antagonistic to them for some reason. How in god's name are you going to see a kid directly behind you, below your trunk height, with your mirrors?
That was a typo/thinko on my part - I meant to say mirrors. I find it scary when people just look from side to side, perhaps looking in the rear-view mirror, but not ever turning their head. This happens WAY more than you'd expect it to.
Using the rear-view cam in this context is definitely a lot safer (esp for kids!), though you really should also look around as well, the side mirrors are more for driving, not parking-lot type situations, and have a really limited field of view.
Every time I'd take my car to the shop they'd turn the lights off, and I find myself driving around in the dark with no lights on. Why does anyone want that? And we used to mandate "daytime running lights" in Canada, I didn't get the memo when we stop enforcing that.
"Always turn the lights off" makes some sense to a shop. Older cars don't have automatic headlights. The mechanics might not want to figure out which is which. If they guess wrong, the car may drain its battery and cause even more problems.
Plus, working around very bright lights, especially if the car has been elevated, can be really annoying.
Well there's always "don't fuck with the way they had it", or "put it back the way it was".
Also, in Canada "Older cars don't have automatic headlights" has not been true since the 90's. It's only recently we even allow them to turn off when it's running.
The point about not wanting lights in your eyes when working on it makes sense, but you're not going to have the car running very often when it's on a hoist.
Clearly this needs some JB-Weld :P
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