Is It Just Me? Software Rant!!!

[russellsnr]

Hi, Is it just me that is fed up to the back teeth with photo software developers?
I decided that I did not want to go down the subscription route with Adobe so thought try something else and bought Affinity Photo and also splashed out on the Skylum offerings Luminar and Aurora HDR. The one thing that I really use a lot is the X-Rite ColourChecker to make my own camera profiles and also use it for white balance across multiple images taken around the same time of day. This option has been requested by users of Affinity Photo over two years ago but still nothing although recently you could get Affinity Photo FREE with an X-Rite Colourchecker (but they are not compatable!!!), lucky I kept my Lightroom 6 option. Skylum on the other hand bombarded the photography forums with there offerings all those expert photographers telling you how good this software was and smiling at the same time.
Skylum have just released an updated version of Luminar to Luminar Jupiter and they state "Inside there’s over 300 improvements and updates to make Luminar more responsive and useful. We have made some significant performance enhancements that allow you to edit your photos much faster. In fact, some users report seeing speed gains of up to twelve times faster!" Problem is for Windows it does not work and not only not work but overwrites the installed software and makes that none usable, they no this now but still have it advertised all over the web. Don't no about other countries but in the UK I beleive that a product must be suitable for consumer use by law? Just seems to me that software companies are so money Oriented that the customer always being right has gone out the window and from what I read here and on other sites Adobe are not much better on many occassions. Put anything like this on there Facebook pages and it is removed quicker than an object from an image could ever be. Rant Over, Thanks for reading. Russ

[NorthernFocus]

It's not just you, Russ. It seems like software developers never use their own products. It also seems like missing an advertised release date is the one mortal sin for the industry. I've noticed a trend, at least in photo related software, that they are very good at hitting release dates but in doing so rarely deliver the product with all of the advertised functions and/or bug free.

I've got a simple example of how user friendly Adobe can be. I use the "perpetual license" version of LR6. Late last year they released the final update and this past week I just got around to updating my primary editing machine. The final update is version 6.14. I think I was still on v6.10. At any rate, after finally locating the link buried deep within Adobe's maze of attempts to make you upgrade to the subscription version, I downloaded the update from the Adobe support site and installed it. When I opened LR and checked the version.... IT WAS BACK AT V6.0!!! After half an hour or so of reading instructions and FAQs on the Adobe support site I finally resorted to Google in search of update instructions. I found a post in the Adobe "community" forums with the resolution. It seems me and one other guy who posed the same question of the forum were the only people on earth who didn't twig the obvious. You don't just update LR like most other software. First you uninstall the old version. Then reinstall the most current release and voila, you're up to date. How could I be so stupid?

[Manfred M]

In my view, software engineers should never be allowed to design user interfaces, but they do.

The issue that Dan alludes to is all too common in product development, especially in software work. The small companies like Serif (Affiinity) and Skylum (Luminar) simply do not have either the market or the resources to compete with the "Big Boys", so these types of issues are not unexpected. The marketing departments over-promise. The project managers are overly optimistic with their delivery dates. Their users find critical "bugs" in old versions that need to be fixed quickly and that takes the software engineers away new product development work.

As Dan has pointed out, even the "Big Boys" like Adobe and Microsoft who deal with large corporate customers screw up from time to time. It's not just the individual users that have problems, but also corporate users. I was involved in projects where we had a couple of HP engineers from California fly in to address some critical hardware failures and have seen a lot of resources from Microsoft deployed to handle a serious glitch in one of their products that we were using / testing before we started a corporate wide migration.

It's not like any of the major car companies have ever recalled products or that camera companies with lots of experience like Canon and Nikon ever ship faulty products that had to be recalled.

I am not a fan of the "Big Boys" more than anyone else. Their products tend to be more expensive and because of their leading market positions, they do make decisions that we don't like. That being said, I have found that dealing with them does have one significant advantage. If something goes wrong, it also affects their big customers and these companies will not take accept any problems that affects their businesses, so the problems that they identify will get sorted out quite quickly. We individual consumers benefit too; the fixes to the issues that the "big boys" have identified trickle down to us as well.

[xpatUSA]

You don't just update LR like most other software. First you uninstall the old version. Then reinstall the most current release and voila, you're up to date. How could I be so stupid?

You are not alone with your LR experience.

[rant] Sigma is quite wacky in that regard and their SPP upgrade behavior seems to vary with succeeding versions.

For example, I had V3.5 on my machine and installed V4.2. V3.5 disappeared! But my prefs didn't (nice of them). Irritated, I re-installed V3.5 and, lo, now I had both available on my machine.

It got worse in a different respect when their V6.x came out. Any raw file opened, edited and saved in V6 could no longer opened in any previous version. Even in their V5.5.3, if you try to use Monochrome Mode (not monochrome WB) up comes a warning that your raw file will be incompatible with 5.4 or any previous. [/rant]

Moderators, please pardon me for mentioning a converter that "most of us" don't use ...

[davidedric]

Interesting. In the case of Lightroom, that's the first example I've heard. I've upgraded many times, both the older version, then the subscription version and never had this issue. The normal route has been for a new major release to be installed alongside previous versions, and for minor releases to replace the latest version. I have never needed to uninstall. Maybe Adobe got careless with their "obsolete" version?

[DanK]

Interesting. In the case of Lightroom, that's the first example I've heard. I've upgraded many times, both the older version, then the subscription version and never had this issue. The normal route has been for a new major release to be installed alongside previous versions, and for minor releases to replace the latest version. I have never needed to uninstall. Maybe Adobe got careless with their "obsolete" version?

my experience was the same

[Manfred M]

It seems me and one other guy who posed the same question of the forum were the only people on earth who didn't twig the obvious. You don't just update LR like most other software. First you uninstall the old version. Then reinstall the most current release and voila, you're up to date. How could I be so stupid?

In my experience, Dan, all software works that way. The installer programs simply mask the process from the end user and they remove the old software before installing the latest version of the software.

[NorthernFocus]

Interesting. In the case of Lightroom, that's the first example I've heard. I've upgraded many times, both the older version, then the subscription version and never had this issue. The normal route has been for a new major release to be installed alongside previous versions, and for minor releases to replace the latest version. I have never needed to uninstall. Maybe Adobe got careless with their "obsolete" version?

Ergo my confusion this time. For series updates all I ever recall doing in the past is clicking on help, update, e voila. Done.

I'm sure that someone on high within Adobe made the decree that they weren't to spend another dime/manhour on the non-subscription version and that was a bug that didn't get worked out. But at present I'm choosing to personalize it

[NorthernFocus]

In my view, software engineers should never be allowed to design user interfaces...

For example, if you use plug-ins for editing photos in LR, once in a while the software gets confused as indicated by a little "!" indication on the thumbnail of an image. When you click on the thumbnail a box pops up with the following:

The metadata for this photo has been changed by both Lighroom and another application. Should Lightroom import settings from disk or overwrite disk settings with those from the catalog?

And you have two buttons to choose from, "Import settings from disk" or "Overwrite settings".

Huh? Could you please repeat that in English? Queen's or Mercan I don't care just something intelligible to the average person. How about you ask me if I want to keep the setting from the external application or those from LR? Is that too hard?

[Manfred M]

Huh? Could you please repeat that in English? Queen's or Mercan I don't care just something intelligible to the average person. How about you ask me if I want to keep the setting from the external application or those from LR? Is that too hard?

I suggest that it is hardly surprising as most university Computer Science departments started either in the Mathematics Department or the Electrical Engineering Department. Both groups are well known for unintelligible jargon that is only understood by initiates. These people tended to pursue these fields because English (or any other language) was not their strength.

[DanK]

And you have two buttons to choose from, "Import settings from disk" or "Overwrite settings".

Yes, I too found this incomprehensible and had to search for an explanation. You have two competing sets of edits. Don't they both reside on the disk? And couldn't they indicate which one had been read to render the image so that you could tell whether you wanted to the other to overwrite it?

These labels have been there for years. You'd think by now someone would have noticed that no one understands them.

[NorthernFocus]

...You have two competing sets of edits. Don't they both reside on the disk? And couldn't they indicate which one had been read to render the image so that you could tell whether you wanted to the other to overwrite it?...

Exactly. I sorted it out by figuring Adobe would only use the term "catalog" in reference to the LR data. Never mind the fact it's also on the disk.

I have at least figured out how/when it occurs. The main plug-ins that I use can also be used stand alone via right clicking in LR and choosing the "edit in" option. Whenever I access the software that way I get the confusing message afterward.