The "killer feature" that pushed me to CC was the haze filter in Lightroom.
Yeah, I've seen the haze filter in LR...I thought that came first in LR6...is it really CC only?
I don't remember precisely. I was on 5 at the time. In any case, it was cheaper on the short term to go with CC than to upgrade to 6.
It does work...but I believe that it is mostly a contrast control. I don't know for sure, but I think I read that somewhere and there is likely a way to de-haze with the other tools.
Hmm...that might just give me something fun to play with this weekend!!!
:)
When you de-haze, you can see other sliders moving when you move the de-haze slider. (This is more visible if, as do I, you have a midi controller with motorized sliders bound to the most used Lightroom controls.) So yes, there's probably a way to do it by making fine adjustments with other parameters. (Probably highlights, blacks, and contrast.) But in my case I had to process hundreds of photos in a very short time, and having a single de-haze slider was a huge time saver.
While Adobe has put out "some" upgrades and new features over these past few years of Creative Cloud, I frankly haven't found anything there to be groundbreaking, that I cannot work without. IMHO, the adage that if they don't have incentive to innovate (due to steady income stream no matter what) they won't. And I don't see that they have really.
I think that's pretty much true. The "killer feature" that pushed me to CC was the haze filter in Lightroom. I was on LR5 at the time and struggling with a huge batch of photos taken in a dark enclosed stadium with high windows all around and a bright day outside. Haze was bad. Switching to LR CC saved that shoot, but in the years since there hasn't been a lot of change.
That said, Adobe now has a new Lightroom in Creative Cloud, and have renamed their original product "lightroom classic", but the new product doesn't meet my needs, yet. It's possible that Classic will go away at some point, but I can't worry about that now.
In general I'm opposed to subscription-only software. I was extremely annoyed when Adobe adopted the model, and considered again, for the hundredth time, to drop them and find a substitute. (And again, it was easier to just continue with Adobe.)
Being on the Adobe subscription for awhile now, I have to say, it's not that bad. At $10 a month for lightroom and photoshop, the fee isn't onerous. You're not required to have a continuous internet connection, so you can still use the tools in the field as long as you call home once in awhile. You can have CC installed on multiple machines. Updates are continuous, instead of yearly or bi-yearly step functions, which makes the learning curve more gentle.
Interestingly, Adobe's current model of small continuous updates seems to have improved the quality of the updates as well. If I was going to update from, say, lightroom 4 to 5, I'd first spend significant time scouring the user groups, trying to understand what the bugs were going to be and how they'd affect my workflow. That particular version, as I recall, had a bug in noise reduction, and since I do mostly low light photography, that was a deal-killer for me until it was fixed in a later minor release.
After a few years on subscription, I've yet to have an update create problems for me. I think this is because the updates themselves are smaller, and they don't have to line up -- for instance, in the old days, if noise reduction isn't ready by ship date for a major release, they'd had to ship it anyway.
That said, I remain opposed to subscription to operating systems. I'm struggling to articulate why, but the OS is the *OS*, it's not an application. It just loads my programs and manages my resources. I don't care a great deal what the OS looks like as long as it's reliable. We're far enough up on the OS curve now that we're not going to see any really innovative changes in how to do work. A certain company, on the other hand, seems to think that the next OS release should have a different look and feel seemingly just to be different. And every significant change slows down my work while I try to figure out where the heck they put a particular resource management widget *this* time.
I understand that in enterprise installations there are service contracts for bug fixes and support, but that's a different thing.
I've said this many times, but it bears repeating -- if Adobe ever ported CC to Linux, Microsoft would never get a dime from me again.
I think I just threw up in the back of my mouth. I am absolutely not an M$ astroturfer. I'm a big fan of Gimp. I can install it anywhere for free and it'll do some things faster than Photoshop. But I still have to go back to photoshop occasionally for some of the advanced features. And in Lightroom, it's a matter of "right click, edit in Photoshop".
I check out the "best Lightroom alternatives" a couple times a year. Open source Lightroom alternatives tend to do really well for operations of basic-to-medium complexity. I do photography as a profession, and basic-to-medium often isn't good enough. Not to mention, the catalog needs to work well with a quarter million photos. On the plus side, raw support is pretty good with free alternatives. So maybe some day, and I'm really looking forward to that day. But not today.
The other thing is, I have an investment in Lightroom categorizing the aforesaid quarter million photos, so a migration path would be necessary. (Which some products have.) And finally, I know how to use Lightroom, and would have to learn the new tool. And, I have a midi controller with motorized sliders bound to the most used Lightroom controls, and that would have to carry over too.
It's not a simple problem. Many of the pieces are there, but not quite all. I'd be more than happy to keep spending my $10 a month to Adobe if I could work entirely on, say, Mint instead of Winders.
Adobe CC is the only reason I still have Windows. If there's a way to get it to run on Wine 3.0, it's bye-bye M$. It *almost* ran on the previous version.
I should be specific. I could live with just Lightroom and Photoshop. A stretch goal would be Premiere.
PC sales have been slow for awhile. I think it's partly due to PCs becoming more than fast enough for most uses. (Except gaming and some other performance-intensive tasks.) There just hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade.
I'm a heavy user of Adobe CC, and recently (about six months ago) upgraded from a reasonably top-of-line system built in 2005 (with graphics upgraded last year to an Nvidia card that Adobe would use to accelerate rendering) to a Dell T series workstation from 2014 or thereabouts. It was part of a load of scrapped workstations from a company that was apparently going out of business. 6 core Xeon, 32 gigs of ECC memory, toolless case, 8 TB helium filled Enterprise disk, two high end industrial grade CAD-purposed Nvidia graphics cards. At scrap prices. With that kind of hardware laying about, who in their right mind (except gamers and, I dunno ecoin miners) would buy new?
I regret ever trying to do business with Yelp. In my case it was trying to close my account when I realized it wasn't driving enough business my way to justify the cost. One of several problems is that your reviews don't go away when you terminate your account, and Yelp then has all the leverage of what reviews they want to display.
Part of the leverage is that Yelp controls the first several listings you get when you google a particular type of business. So people have to scroll way down before they get to my own professional website. It really does seem like the game is, you pay Yelp or, "you know, it's a terrible thing that can happen to a business. Just terrible. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?"
Yes, I think I said elsewhere, Comcast's next step is probably lobbying for a federal law banning municipal internet. I think the argument should be made that in this day and age, that's like a federal law banning municipal water.
I didn't say that Comcast would lose, (although I hope they do) only that this would be entertaining.
Wow, I haven't seen the bright side in eliminating net neutrality until just this moment. Once it's eliminated, Comcast will inevitably go back to data capping and throttling their competition, (because, hey, money) and people will have even more reason to go with municipal fiber instead. And of course, to keep up profits, Comcast will respond with even more draconian measures, which will cause even more people to quit. This will be very entertaining.
I live in Longmont, about 40 minutes south of Ft. Collins, and we have had fibre internet through the city for over a year. 1 GB speeds up/down and only $49/Month. Forever. It's on our utility bill. When they went live everyone left comcast and centurylink in droves, and I hope it happens over and over.
The sun is shining... the birds are singing... Wow, you really made my day there. Let's hope the trend continues.
I'd expect Comcast to try federal legislation next.
> You can see that Frankenstein was no scientist by the one thing that was never present in any of his plans: publication.
Well, you know, there was the book. Ok ok, just kidding. But seriously, that sounds like the outline for a story -- the unpublished lab notes of Dr. Frankenstein. Lessee, you need a sparky thing, and another sparky thing, and a bunch of cranky things... you know, I think I could do this.
When ordering online requires an email address that the vendor can then spam the dickens out of, having some dummy hotmail spam collectors can be very useful.
Yes, they either suffer from the same problems, implemented the same solution, or already slowed the CPU down whether they shipped. This is a hardware limitation (so it could be done in software, firmware or hardware.) But batteries that can power a CPU at 100% when new cannot power that CPU at 100% when old. So, either you have to prevent apps from using 100% of the CPU, or the battery randomly cuts out when it's eventually using 100% of the CPU.
and/or they have a user replaceable battery.
But seriously, in all the years I've carried a cell phone, back to those huge military walkie-talkie-looking Motorola monsters, through multiple Motorola, LG and Samsung models, to my current rather elderly Note 3, I've not yet had the experience of random crashes due to a degraded battery. Are you sure they're not just making that part up? Earlier reports were that they slowed down the CPU to retain the illusion of useful battery life when the battery started to degrade. "Random crashes" sounds like a marketing invention to me.
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
You'd really prefer the random crashes instead of the degraded performance, ya?
A degraded battery, that is, a battery that goes flat sooner than it did when new, causes random crashes? I don't see the connection. Do you have an example?
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
b) Build their business model around the battery as a consumable (which they finally admitted in their apology) and make it easier / less expensive to swap out. (Whether this is a user action or something that can be done with a minimum of pain at the apple store is left up to them.)
What the user can do is switch to a product with a user replaceable battery, but Apple fans will probably not do that.
I'm glad they're finally figuring this out. Maybe batteries will become easier to replace?
Sorry, I don't know what came over me. Of course they won't. By the time the battery is significantly degraded, the next version of the product will be out.
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Yeah, I've seen the haze filter in LR...I thought that came first in LR6...is it really CC only?
I don't remember precisely. I was on 5 at the time. In any case, it was cheaper on the short term to go with CC than to upgrade to 6.
It does work...but I believe that it is mostly a contrast control. I don't know for sure, but I think I read that somewhere and there is likely a way to de-haze with the other tools.
Hmm...that might just give me something fun to play with this weekend!!!
When you de-haze, you can see other sliders moving when you move the de-haze slider. (This is more visible if, as do I, you have a midi controller with motorized sliders bound to the most used Lightroom controls.) So yes, there's probably a way to do it by making fine adjustments with other parameters. (Probably highlights, blacks, and contrast.) But in my case I had to process hundreds of photos in a very short time, and having a single de-haze slider was a huge time saver.
While Adobe has put out "some" upgrades and new features over these past few years of Creative Cloud, I frankly haven't found anything there to be groundbreaking, that I cannot work without. IMHO, the adage that if they don't have incentive to innovate (due to steady income stream no matter what) they won't. And I don't see that they have really.
I think that's pretty much true. The "killer feature" that pushed me to CC was the haze filter in Lightroom. I was on LR5 at the time and struggling with a huge batch of photos taken in a dark enclosed stadium with high windows all around and a bright day outside. Haze was bad. Switching to LR CC saved that shoot, but in the years since there hasn't been a lot of change.
That said, Adobe now has a new Lightroom in Creative Cloud, and have renamed their original product "lightroom classic", but the new product doesn't meet my needs, yet. It's possible that Classic will go away at some point, but I can't worry about that now.
In general I'm opposed to subscription-only software. I was extremely annoyed when Adobe adopted the model, and considered again, for the hundredth time, to drop them and find a substitute. (And again, it was easier to just continue with Adobe.)
Being on the Adobe subscription for awhile now, I have to say, it's not that bad. At $10 a month for lightroom and photoshop, the fee isn't onerous. You're not required to have a continuous internet connection, so you can still use the tools in the field as long as you call home once in awhile. You can have CC installed on multiple machines. Updates are continuous, instead of yearly or bi-yearly step functions, which makes the learning curve more gentle.
Interestingly, Adobe's current model of small continuous updates seems to have improved the quality of the updates as well. If I was going to update from, say, lightroom 4 to 5, I'd first spend significant time scouring the user groups, trying to understand what the bugs were going to be and how they'd affect my workflow. That particular version, as I recall, had a bug in noise reduction, and since I do mostly low light photography, that was a deal-killer for me until it was fixed in a later minor release.
After a few years on subscription, I've yet to have an update create problems for me. I think this is because the updates themselves are smaller, and they don't have to line up -- for instance, in the old days, if noise reduction isn't ready by ship date for a major release, they'd had to ship it anyway.
That said, I remain opposed to subscription to operating systems. I'm struggling to articulate why, but the OS is the *OS*, it's not an application. It just loads my programs and manages my resources. I don't care a great deal what the OS looks like as long as it's reliable. We're far enough up on the OS curve now that we're not going to see any really innovative changes in how to do work. A certain company, on the other hand, seems to think that the next OS release should have a different look and feel seemingly just to be different. And every significant change slows down my work while I try to figure out where the heck they put a particular resource management widget *this* time.
I understand that in enterprise installations there are service contracts for bug fixes and support, but that's a different thing.
I've said this many times, but it bears repeating -- if Adobe ever ported CC to Linux, Microsoft would never get a dime from me again.
I think I just threw up in the back of my mouth. I am absolutely not an M$ astroturfer. I'm a big fan of Gimp. I can install it anywhere for free and it'll do some things faster than Photoshop. But I still have to go back to photoshop occasionally for some of the advanced features. And in Lightroom, it's a matter of "right click, edit in Photoshop".
I check out the "best Lightroom alternatives" a couple times a year. Open source Lightroom alternatives tend to do really well for operations of basic-to-medium complexity. I do photography as a profession, and basic-to-medium often isn't good enough. Not to mention, the catalog needs to work well with a quarter million photos. On the plus side, raw support is pretty good with free alternatives. So maybe some day, and I'm really looking forward to that day. But not today.
The other thing is, I have an investment in Lightroom categorizing the aforesaid quarter million photos, so a migration path would be necessary. (Which some products have.) And finally, I know how to use Lightroom, and would have to learn the new tool. And, I have a midi controller with motorized sliders bound to the most used Lightroom controls, and that would have to carry over too.
It's not a simple problem. Many of the pieces are there, but not quite all. I'd be more than happy to keep spending my $10 a month to Adobe if I could work entirely on, say, Mint instead of Winders.
Adobe CC is the only reason I still have Windows. If there's a way to get it to run on Wine 3.0, it's bye-bye M$. It *almost* ran on the previous version.
I should be specific. I could live with just Lightroom and Photoshop. A stretch goal would be Premiere.
Exactly.
PC sales have been slow for awhile. I think it's partly due to PCs becoming more than fast enough for most uses. (Except gaming and some other performance-intensive tasks.) There just hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade.
I'm a heavy user of Adobe CC, and recently (about six months ago) upgraded from a reasonably top-of-line system built in 2005 (with graphics upgraded last year to an Nvidia card that Adobe would use to accelerate rendering) to a Dell T series workstation from 2014 or thereabouts. It was part of a load of scrapped workstations from a company that was apparently going out of business. 6 core Xeon, 32 gigs of ECC memory, toolless case, 8 TB helium filled Enterprise disk, two high end industrial grade CAD-purposed Nvidia graphics cards. At scrap prices. With that kind of hardware laying about, who in their right mind (except gamers and, I dunno ecoin miners) would buy new?
Right, they have to actually make the effort. But it's far easier to file a lawsuit. Especially if one has lawyers on tap paid for by tax money
A $319 thermostat. So that I can use Cortana.
Well I guess if you can't care for oil properly that means *no more oil for YOU*.
Oh if only the world were so lucky then we could switch over to wind/solar/nuclear in under a year.
Sue the Oil Companies out of existence and we will have to do that you know..
The survivors would anyway.
Reminds me of a reporter's conversation with a young lady during Occupy Wall Street.
Reporter: "But what about all the people that would die?"
Young lady: "Well, people die."
That was actually pretty clever.
Good luck with that.
I regret ever trying to do business with Yelp. In my case it was trying to close my account when I realized it wasn't driving enough business my way to justify the cost. One of several problems is that your reviews don't go away when you terminate your account, and Yelp then has all the leverage of what reviews they want to display.
Part of the leverage is that Yelp controls the first several listings you get when you google a particular type of business. So people have to scroll way down before they get to my own professional website. It really does seem like the game is, you pay Yelp or, "you know, it's a terrible thing that can happen to a business. Just terrible. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you?"
Yes, I think I said elsewhere, Comcast's next step is probably lobbying for a federal law banning municipal internet. I think the argument should be made that in this day and age, that's like a federal law banning municipal water.
I didn't say that Comcast would lose, (although I hope they do) only that this would be entertaining.
Wow, I haven't seen the bright side in eliminating net neutrality until just this moment. Once it's eliminated, Comcast will inevitably go back to data capping and throttling their competition, (because, hey, money) and people will have even more reason to go with municipal fiber instead. And of course, to keep up profits, Comcast will respond with even more draconian measures, which will cause even more people to quit. This will be very entertaining.
I live in Longmont, about 40 minutes south of Ft. Collins, and we have had fibre internet through the city for over a year. 1 GB speeds up/down and only $49/Month. Forever. It's on our utility bill. When they went live everyone left comcast and centurylink in droves, and I hope it happens over and over.
The sun is shining... the birds are singing... Wow, you really made my day there. Let's hope the trend continues.
I'd expect Comcast to try federal legislation next.
> You can see that Frankenstein was no scientist by the one thing that was never present in any of his plans: publication.
Well, you know, there was the book. Ok ok, just kidding. But seriously, that sounds like the outline for a story -- the unpublished lab notes of Dr. Frankenstein. Lessee, you need a sparky thing, and another sparky thing, and a bunch of cranky things... you know, I think I could do this.
This is true. I've worked for places that were entirely run by their HR departments. Even chiefs were afraid of them.
I mean, from a technical and sales standpoint, the business was coasting, but boy did they have processes in place!
Which monster?
When ordering online requires an email address that the vendor can then spam the dickens out of, having some dummy hotmail spam collectors can be very useful.
"How about spam, eggs, long signatures and spam? That don't have much spam init."
Yes, they either suffer from the same problems, implemented the same solution, or already slowed the CPU down whether they shipped. This is a hardware limitation (so it could be done in software, firmware or hardware.) But batteries that can power a CPU at 100% when new cannot power that CPU at 100% when old. So, either you have to prevent apps from using 100% of the CPU, or the battery randomly cuts out when it's eventually using 100% of the CPU.
and/or they have a user replaceable battery.
But seriously, in all the years I've carried a cell phone, back to those huge military walkie-talkie-looking Motorola monsters, through multiple Motorola, LG and Samsung models, to my current rather elderly Note 3, I've not yet had the experience of random crashes due to a degraded battery. Are you sure they're not just making that part up? Earlier reports were that they slowed down the CPU to retain the illusion of useful battery life when the battery started to degrade. "Random crashes" sounds like a marketing invention to me.
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
You'd really prefer the random crashes instead of the degraded performance, ya?
A degraded battery, that is, a battery that goes flat sooner than it did when new, causes random crashes? I don't see the connection. Do you have an example?
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
b) Build their business model around the battery as a consumable (which they finally admitted in their apology) and make it easier / less expensive to swap out. (Whether this is a user action or something that can be done with a minimum of pain at the apple store is left up to them.)
What the user can do is switch to a product with a user replaceable battery, but Apple fans will probably not do that.
I'm glad they're finally figuring this out. Maybe batteries will become easier to replace?
Sorry, I don't know what came over me. Of course they won't. By the time the battery is significantly degraded, the next version of the product will be out.