What I find amazing about the CC subscription is that there's no discount for paying the full year at once. Every other subscription out there gives a discount for pre-payment.
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Adobe 'Doubling Down' on Lightroom in Wake of Apple's Aperture Announcement
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LR uses a folder structure to reference where things are kept on your computer, but is a database so your folders or images that get added must be imported before LR can see them. Just like Aperture except you can browse through all your work by folders exactly as they as organised on the hard drive. I use date/description folders for all my work and then add keywords, ratings etc for metadata sorting.
If you prefer, you can use metadata to organise your images either in dumbfolders where you just drag and drop shots into or smart folders that automatically add all shot of your cats that are female and tabby. Or maybe your 5 star images from all your holidays with the current girlfriend or photos taken on your Canikon with a 24mm lens that are 4stars+ and so on. Both physical folders and metadata organising have strengths and weaknesses, together they work very well indeed.
LR can be very fast, yet on a few computers for no real reason it can be a tad slow. Build standard previews on import and that'll help regardless. But scrolling though 1000s of images is a big ask for any software. Scrolling through a job of 700 raw 21Mb shots from the other day though and it whizzes through them. Scrolling through a set of folders in my collections and again pretty whizzy, but all previews have already been built.
My LR catalogue has nearly 400K photos and only uses about 2-3.5Gb of ram whilst browsing + building previews. Just tried scrolling through that - very fast once you have all thumbnails cached.
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Adobe better make some sort of aperture->lightroom migration tool. I switch over to LR from aperture a few years ago and because I had kept everything in the aperture library, the migration was incredibly complicated and took forever! And unfortunately, none of your edits transfer over. As I understand it, Aperture uses Apple's camera raw which is different from adobe camera raw?
Trying to get my 80 year old grandfather to switch to LR from aperture but the move is so tough I'm not sure it's worth it for him. I think his library is around 100k images over 8 years, seems too daunting to build the new LR library manually.
Trying to get my 80 year old grandfather to switch to LR from aperture but the move is so tough I'm not sure it's worth it for him. I think his library is around 100k images over 8 years, seems too daunting to build the new LR library manually.
You get Lightroom and Photoshop together for $10/month. Not bad when you factor in Photoshop alone cost $399 and you may upgrade ever 3 to 4 years. It works out about the same without having to shell out $400 at once. With the subscription you get the latest version without having to shell out another $100.
...and probably getting tinier:
First, if the new Photos app is significantly better than iPhoto its going to chomp away at the 'prosumer' end of the Aperture market.
Second, Adobe is pushing the 'Photography' Creative Cloud package which AFAIK includes Lightroom, which is going to nibble away at the top end of the market. Like it or lump it, Photoshop is still king (that's the only reason Adobe can get away with foisting CC on people).
Hopefully, Apple will have learnt their lesson from Maps and FCP and won't shoot Aperture in the head as soon as Photos debuts (they say they're stopping development, not withdrawing it).
Back in the day, Windows was a half-baked graphical shell running on top of a half-baked CP/M clone designed to run on a on a half-baked 16-bit processor - it wasn't technically capable of running the best software.
...but the DOS bloodline died with the introduction of Windows XP. Today's Windows is in a different league. Don't get me wrong, I prefer OS X to Windows, but the clear blue water that used to separate DOS/Windows from Mac OS isn't there any more.
...and, of course, its all basically the same hardware, now.
The deal with the prepayment is after 30 days you will get back 100% of your money minus the month used. On the monthly side you have to agree to a year and if you cancel after 30 days you only get 50% back.
This is a main reason I avoided Aperture and have used a date/description folder set up for organising all my work. That way it works with any OS, any software no problem. I also add keywords so I can do fast and clever metadata organising with software [like Aperture/LR] that supports such things. This means my library is not trapped in any one software and why I avoid Apple's crappy organising wherever I can, because Apple have a long history of leaving users in the lurch.
Photoshop is not targeted for the casual user. Never has been. If you don't need it then don't buy it.
There's no adequate alternative to Photoshop, which is their biggest product. Oh sure, many here could namecheck their favorite Mac graphics app, but they all pale in comparison to Photoshop's feature set and most fail at being even somewhat usable for professional use.
I keep hoping that Apple will take on Adobe directly by bringing out serious Photoshop and Illustrator competitors, but with the cancellation of Aperture this seems farther and farther from possibility. Apple says that they have no plans to cancel FCP and Logic, and I believe them in the short term -- Logic has had many updates lately, for instance. Perhaps Apple thinks being "in the mix" with film/tv/music helps their branding, while they don't see graphic design and photography as being sexy enough to justify products serving those professional communities. It seems to me that a feature trickle-down model similar to what Apple does with Logic->GarageBand could work with graphic editing, PhotosPro->Photos.
You don't seem to understand why people are irritated. That $10 a month works out (for me) as $600 over the past five years since I started using LR if I was paying for their monthly cloud BS.
Not to mention that I have to keep paying that monthly extortion or I lose access to my library.
People like you are playing right into their schemes where everything is "pay pay pay" and never own anything. $10 might not seem like much, until there's no other game in town and they triple that to $30 a month.
In a world where you don't own any of the software you use and have to pay monthly subscriptions for all of them those costs are going to wind up being what a car payment used to be.
$30 for adobe software.
$50 for MS software
$30 for Quicken software
Do you see why people are irritated? It's like streaming movies. Pay $20 for a virtualized copy of a movie you can't download and watch offline. Maybe doesn't seem like a big deal until the company goes out of business, or loses distribution rights to that movie, or your internet is down for a weekend when you want to watch movies (like during a blizzard).
I said I was a casual user of Photoshop for the past two years, not a casual user of other Adobe products.
Adobe's "cloud" farted away a lot of business. No thanks, Adobe. Get a real customer service plan through software sales, not software rentals.
Of course, the only reason you're using Adobe's servers is that Adobe chose to roll their own cloud service instead of using iCloud like everybody else. So basically, you're paying Adobe a monthly fee solely because they designed their app to force you to pay a monthly fee. Still sound like a deal?
But when you factor in competing apps like Pixelmator that give you 99% of the commonly used functionality in Photoshop, and almost full file format compatibility, all for the cost of a couple months' subscription to Photoshop CC, that $120 annual fee starts to look like highway robbery.
Photoshop only commands the price they do because they have a monopoly among large prepress houses and similar. Everybody uses the same tools so that they can read each other's files. For everybody who isn't doing commercial work, you'd have to be crazy to stick with Adobe products. Their products are, for the most part, massively overpriced for what you get.
The big problem right now is that Adobe's management is incompetent. Way beyond incompetent, in fact. They're focusing solely on the needs of their large corporate customers, and basically saying that they don't care about anybody else. The problem is, those independent folks are preparing content using other tools now, at a growing rate. And in the long term, that's going to erode Adobe's stranglehold on the market from the bottom up, thus destroying the monopoly power that enables them to charge such exorbitant prices.
In ten years, one of three things will happen: Adobe will get bought by some other company, they'll cut a zero off the price of all their apps, or they'll go belly up. Those are really the only three ways that software-as-a-service companies go. Meanwhile, their execs will get large golden parachutes for running the company into the ground.
What a waste.
Aperture was always inferior in many ways, including the larger amount of disk space required.
To what? GIMP which has no real technical support? Actually it's probably quite the opposite. Typically companies would go outside the 3 year window that most software manufactures such as Autodesk and Adobe offered for upgrades. When they did upgrade after 5 or 6 years they would have to pay full price again which can be very costly. BTW have you ever read the licensing agreement of a perpetual license for software? You still don't own it.
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Of course, the only reason you're using Adobe's servers is that Adobe chose to roll their own cloud service instead of using iCloud like everybody else. So basically, you're paying Adobe a monthly fee solely because they designed their app to force you to pay a monthly fee. Still sound like a deal?
But when you factor in competing apps like Pixelmator that give you 99% of the commonly used functionality in Photoshop, and almost full file format compatibility, all for the cost of a couple months' subscription to Photoshop CC, that $120 annual fee starts to look like highway robbery.
Photoshop only commands the price they do because they have a monopoly among large prepress houses and similar. Everybody uses the same tools so that they can read each other's files. For everybody who isn't doing commercial work, you'd have to be crazy to stick with Adobe products. Their products are, for the most part, massively overpriced for what you get.
The big problem right now is that Adobe's management is incompetent. Way beyond incompetent, in fact. They're focusing solely on the needs of their large corporate customers, and basically saying that they don't care about anybody else. The problem is, those independent folks are preparing content using other tools now, at a growing rate. And in the long term, that's going to erode Adobe's stranglehold on the market from the bottom up, thus destroying the monopoly power that enables them to charge such exorbitant prices.
In ten years, one of three things will happen: Adobe will get bought by some other company, they'll cut a zero off the price of all their apps, or they'll go belly up. Those are really the only three ways that software-as-a-service companies go. Meanwhile, their execs will get large golden parachutes for running the company into the ground.
What a waste.
I can't run Pixelmator on my PC at work. I like that I can practically take Photoshop to any computer I want and use it. $120/year for LR and PS isn't what I would consider highway robbery. Highway robbery is charging $200 for a version number change. If your making money then $120/year for that level of software is a bargain. If you not making money off of it then your probably don't need it that badly. Seriously. Look at it this way with a perpetual license I would have to buy a Windows and Mac license at around $399 ea. That's almost $1000! The add another $400 for upgrades 3 years down the road. That's $1200 in as little as 4 years! It will take me 10 years to equal that assuming prices remain the same or close. In 4 years I've paid 1/3 of that cost for really unlimited machines with two being concurrent and cross platform.
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I don't think you get it. You can buy Lightroom outright. You can pay the subscription model if you want the additional cloud based functions. You always have all your files on your computer. You lose access to nothing except the software's functionality if you choose not to continue to subscribe. If you are at all interested in keeping your files safe you will have multiple backups as well. As a professional photographer, I find it amazing people are still propogating this rubbish so long after Adobe CC has been released.
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For the answers to most questions from the horses mouth regarding Adobe CC
http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/faq.html
Even $600/year is a pittance compared to what I make using the software. CC isn't really designed for users making $5 logos on fiverr, it's designed for working pros. While I feel sorry for amateurs wishing there were cheaper options, TBH $600/year isn't that much money. And $10/month for just LR and PS? Can you not book enough clients?
I hear you about losing access to files but there's other software that reads DNG files if you choose to convert those. And you don't suddenly lose access to all your raw files over the years, they're just folders on your computer.
The other thing is, I don't know where Adobe would draw the line here. Is it after a year of subscribing would you "own" the previous version of the cloud? Or 2 years in? And then what about when Apple upgrades the OS every yeardo you expect your old copy of CC from 3 years ago to work in it? What about tech support?
That's really the problem and subscription is really the solution. Having to support 3 different versions of software is a developers' nightmare; getting everyone on the same codebase has a lot of benefits for everyone, the least of which you get more frequent updates to software which what I love about the cloud.
In a sense, you don't really "own" a car. You pay a bunch of money up front but you still pay money to keep it going. And then when it reaches its shelf lifeprobably 10 years is what people are keeping them for and moving on?you get another one. You pay the piper now or later really. My tax guy says even if you don't have a car payment, put money aside because you'll need another one at some point. I hate the car analogy but in this case, it's true. So thinking you save money in the long run because you just aren't paying perpetually is foolish.
Okay, but why can't I just keep using Aperture? Is there some major compelling reason I need to spend even more money to buy a new app just because my current app's company decides to stop updating it? In fact, Apple said they'd make sure Aperture was Yosemite-compatible, so that's a sign it could have been worse. Unless that's the thing, being unsure the next OS after Yosemite will keep supporting Aperture?
Did someone already ask this and have it answered?
Did someone already ask this and have it answered?
LR is still available as a permanent license, $149 full price, $79 with student discount.
You don't lose access to your library if you quit CC, the image files and the library are still on your computer. If you wan't to access the library after quitting CC, just get the permanent license.
That being said, there are other RAW-processors with varying levels of functionality available, and most of them available for OS X too. None of them have subscription based licensing, AFAIK.
I "dream" photoshop, working with for for more then a decade now but lightroom is by far the most professional photo editing tool out there while I use photoshop for making designs togetter with illustrator.
Lightroom is fast, very fast, and has brilliant futures!
I just signed up to Photoshop CC. I paid 1 year up front. I'm diving right in as Adobe will at least keep supporting their products, and I'm also looking forward to learning Photoshop. I have Pixelmator, but there is SO much training material available for Photoshop, I feel like the potential will be higher using photoshop.
And you won't lose anything if you want to stop using Lightroom. I just learned today that you can write the settings from the develop module to your EXIF info at any time. If you know you will be canceling your subscription at some point, you can do a one time dump of all the develop module settings to your photos and then always have that data available in the future if need be.
And you won't lose anything if you want to stop using Lightroom. I just learned today that you can write the settings from the develop module to your EXIF info at any time. If you know you will be canceling your subscription at some point, you can do a one time dump of all the develop module settings to your photos and then always have that data available in the future if need be.
Yeah, that's the part that worries me. I'll wait to see what Adobe does with Lightroom.
In my mind the subscription and required internet connection is what makes this a 'cloud' based service, not just storing data on a server somewhere. I don't see how it benefits me in any way to be locked into a monthly payment and have to connect to the internet just so software can call home for the sole purpose of remaining functional.
Also, I tend to keep my media work related computers off the internet and use only specific computers for internet access. The work systems are on a local network for transferring files to/from backup drives and other computers but they are dedicated and dialed in for specific uses to minimize problems and don't get used for anything else.
I want to buy the software once, upgrade it as needed or desired, and not have to worry that it will stop working because the the operating system is not 'current' and the company cancels the subscription and it ceases to function. For example I have one MP with 10.6.8, CS4 Production Premium, FCS3 and Shake 4.1 that still kicks butt. I have other older systems that are frozen at a certain level of OS and software that work as intended without any additional hassle, from OS 7.5.5, OS9.2.1, OSX10.4.11, OSX10.6.8 etc. I even have some old dual boot 9.2.2/10.4 systems that work fine.
But I understand... it's becoming an iDevice/cloud, all-in-one, disposable type of world.
That's my plan - keep using Aperture until I see what Photos looks like. I figure I'm good through the end of 2015 at the earliest. At that time other alternatives may have appeared on the scene.
My main use of Aperture is as a DAM with good photo editing. I need a balance of the two. A wonderful photo editor with poor organizational capabilities is useless for me.
switching from iPhoto to Lightroom problematic!
I would switch from iPhoto to lightroom but I have no way that I know of to move ratings from iPhoto to Lightroom and I have about 20,000 photos rated. Any recommendations?
I would switch from iPhoto to lightroom but I have no way that I know of to move ratings from iPhoto to Lightroom and I have about 20,000 photos rated. Any recommendations?