Bye bye Adobe ...

[billtils]

I've had an on and off and on again relationship with Adobe over 20 years or so. The short version is I love Photoshop and have never had any problems with it but Lightroom - that's a different kettle of fish.

I've tried several times over the last 5 or 6 years and in pretty well each occasion have gone from an initial "Wow why don't I still use it" to "Stupid idiot, how many times do you need to try and give up before you accept it's not for you". To be fair like most of these things it's the user not the product - I think the main issue is that it's too similar but different to Capture One which has been my main library and editing program for 20 years or so, and too many of the things my brain automatically tells me to do just flatly do not work in LR.

Notwith standing all that I was happy to pay whatever it took to get Adobe Photo just for Photoshop and simply ignore LR. Those days look like they are numbered with the lastest price hike which includes an obligatory subscription to Adobe Cloud which is of no interest or value to me whatsoever. True, true, true - it's hardly a break the bank issue but now it has become too much of a value for money one, which when added to the user problems mean it's farewell.

[whited3]

Agree 100% re LR but its horses for courses. I've never understood nor liked LR and so have been using PS/Bridge/ACR forever. But I have acquaintances who swear by LR and don't get PS. That said I don't like Adobe's pricing structure nor their T&Cs.

Just looked at Capture One's pricing. Twice what I pay for PS!

[DanK]

If I read the Adobe site correctly (https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-clo...ccpp-20gb.html), this is what's happening:

--The 20 GB plan is going away for new subscribers but is grandfathered
--if you have the 20 GB plan, you can maintain the same price if you opt to pay annually. If you pay monthly, there is a substantial increase.
--Once the change has been made, you can upgrade from 20 GB to 1 TB for no additional cost.

Am I reading this wrong?

I have no use at all for the 1 TB, but I would be very reluctant to give up Adobe. I have invested countless hours in learning my way around the software. I don't want to repeat the learning process. I've never used Capture One, so I don't have the problem of confusing that with LR. I've used LR for many years. I used Jasc and Corel for a few years after going digital but then switched to Adobe.

Indeed, courses for horses, but personally, I love LR. Originally, it was a fairly good raw rendering package with good data management tools and very primitive editing. It's very different now. Its editing tools are now powerful, and while I use Photoshop a lot, there is a lot of editing that I would have had to use Photoshop for in the past that I can now do easily in Lightroom. I make some use of its data management tools, although not as much as many people. One can get plugins for all sorts of things. It has a excellent print module.

As one example, look at some of the videos by Christian Mohrle, a Danish landscape photographer. In the ones I've watched, maybe half a dozen, he does all of his editing in Lightroom.

I use LR as my home base. I import all my photos to LR directly from the card. If I edit in other software, Photoshop or something else, I bring the results back into LR, so I have all versions in one place. I upload to the web with a LR plugin that creates JPEGs to my specs, uploads them, and then deletes them, so I rarely bother keeping JPEGs on my computer. I do all of my printing from LR.

But again, courses for horses. The best software is what let's you do what you want most easily and most effectively. I know photographers who swear by alternatives to Adobe. Whatever works for you.

[LenR]

I concur with Dans observations regarding LR, particularly the print module. I have been using LR since version 2 was released. At this late stage of the game I would not want to change from the Adobe platform.....

[DanK]

I love the print module. I've pasted a screenshot below, but it's hard to see the details. But a few points:

Along the bottom is the film strip. It includes not only the base image--in this case, edited in Photoshop--but also all of the soft proof copies I've made and decided to store. So, in this case, if I want another print with the same paper, I just pick the soft-proof virtual copy.

Along the right you'll see the bottom part of the panel that includes all of the print settings in the software (not in the printer's firmware). On the left, you will see templates that I've stored. In this case, I selected the template for River Stone Satin Rag 11 x 14. Selecting that template means that every setting in the right hand panel is set for me, using whatever I had set before creating the template. This includes, for example, output sharpening.

The printer button near the bottom right calls up the windows print dialog, which is where one finds the settings for the print driver--media type, color matching (off), print quality, etc. Those settings are also stored in the template, so I don't have to fuss with them. Margins are also saved, so you can have templates that are identical other than margins. For example, I have some that have wider margins so that I can add a visible signature.

So, in principle, if I have a relevant template stored, I can simply apply it and print. In practice, I do check the print driver settings and a few in the right-hand panel just to make sure I haven't messed up the template, but that takes seconds.

[billtils]

But again, courses for horses. The best software is what let's you do what you want most easily and most effectively. I know photographers who swear by alternatives to Adobe. Whatever works for you.

Agree completely. (Or as today's youngsters would annoyingly and impossibly put it "110%")

[billtils]

Thank you all the LR fans who responded. Yes, it's a great program and getting better every release but it keeps losing my images. I'd be gratefull if you could post your workflow for me to try out - I'm giving it one last shot with a 7 day free trial ...

[DanK]

Bill,

If LR is losing photos, the problem is almost certainly something to do with your folder structures. In my experience, this is where a lot of users' problems arise.

The logic is this. Lightroom can only see what is in the catalog. The catalog will mirror every part of your folder structure that you have told it to import, but it won't see anything else on your drive. If you import a folder into LR and later move it or rename it in the operating system, LR won't know where it is. You can reconnect it by telling LR to find it, but it's best to avoid this problem.

To keep this organized, I have everything I want Lightroom to see under one parent folder, which I have named (very original!) "photos". Beneath that, the first level is any classification I find useful. For example, I have one first-order folder for each of my sets of grandkids. Here is a screen shot of the top of my folder structure, taken from the library module:



This happens to be a folder I don't much use, so it's small enough to show on screen. Under the first level folders are folders for each shoot. I label them with a date and, in recent years, a few words to show what's in them.

So, let's say I did another shoot of abstractions today. I would do this:

--In the operating system, I would create a new second-level folder under "abstractions" named 2025_01_20_yada-yada.

--I would upload the photos to that new second-level folder.

--Lightroom won't see 2025_01_20_yada_yada because it hasn't been imported yet. But it will see the first-level folder it's underneath, "abstractions". So I click on "abstractions" and tell LR to import. LR will look for everything in the abstractions folder and will find the new second level folder and it's contents. The import screen comes up, and I import them all.

Done.

Now, occasionally a first level folder will have so much in it that LR becomes annoyingly slow in searching it for new content to import. In that case, I just start a new first level folder. I almost never have to do that, but did it for flowers and bugs. The simplest way to get the new first-level folder imported--but not the quickest--is to tell LR to sync the parent folder, "photos". then just go away and get a cup of coffee or a bit of Talisker and wait for it to finish.

The other way the folder issue messes people up is if they decide to move or rename a folder. If you do that in the operating system, LR gets confused and can't see it, so the photos seem to disappear. You can find them again, but that is a pain. The simplest thing is to avoid this problem. If you want to move or rename photos or folders that have already been imported into Lightroom, make these changes from within Lightroom. Lightroom will make the changes both in its catalog and in the operating system. the one exception is if you want to get rid of an entire folder and it's contents. You remove it first within LR and then go to the operating system to delete the now-empty folder.

This may seem complicated, but it becomes automatic after a short time.

The final step: what about images that you have edited in another program? That all depends on the external editor. If you execute Photoshop from within Lightroom and save (not save as) in photoshop, the Photoshop image will automatically be imported into Lightroom and will appear in the film strip next to the original, with "edit" added to the filename unless you rename it. With some other software, that's not the case.

For example, I use Zerene for stacking. It has a Lightroom plugin that allows me to select images in LR, send them to Zerene, execute Zerene, and load the temporary TIFF files into Zerene, all with a few mouse clicks. When I save the composites in Zerene, it willput them back in the source second-level folder, but it doesn't tell LR to import it. So I just click on the source folder and tell LR to sync again. It will then import the image.

One last little wrinkle: if at some point you are working on an image but don't see the source folder on the left or the other images in the filmstrip (this can happen, for example, if you import one new image, as I do from Zerene), just right-click on the image on the screen and select "go to folder in library".

Again, this won't seem complicated once you have done it a few times.

After that, my workflow depends on the images. I generally do what I can in Lightroom before moving the image to Photoshop, if I use Photoshop at all. For example, I do most global adjustments (tonality, vibrance, texture, etc.) in Lightroom, and the selection tools have become so good that I do some local adjustments also. To take one example, I do a lot of candids of kids, which means that I have a lot of images with random cluttered backgrounds that I want to darken or occasionally blur. This is now trivially easy in Lightroom: tell it to select the subject, invert the selection, and then do whatever to the background. takes just seconds. I make some virtual copies, for example, if I want to compare two ways of editing side by side. I then export to Photoshop for stuff I want to do there and save in Photoshop to bring it back to Lightroom. I do softproofing in Lightroom and save the proofs, which makes virtual copies in the filmstrip labeled with the paper name.

Even when I use Photoshop, I often save some final edits for Lightroom. For example, I usually save the final cropping for Lightroom so that I retain flexibility. Sometimes I'll notice something I missed, say, a bright spot, and I just edit in LR.

I hope this helps.

Dan

[billtils]

Thanks Dan. That looks straightforward enough but disturbingly like what I was doing! I'll set it up this time exaclty as you describe here and let you know how it goes after a few weeks of use. If you don't hear by then it means I have totally given up, sold all my gear, and am using my iPhone and its software.

[DanK]

Thanks Dan. That looks straightforward enough but disturbingly like what I was doing! I'll set it up this time exaclty as you describe here and let you know how it goes after a few weeks of use. If you don't hear by then it means I have totally given up, sold all my gear, and am using my iPhone and its software.

This does work; I've used LR for many years and have never lost a photo. However, it's specific enough that it's easy to make a mistake. Maybe put off the Talisker until you have it done...

I really do think it's worth it. After all, as a Canon shooter, I have an arguably better raw rendering package for Canon raws, Digital Photo Professional, available free, but I never use it because LR integrates so many of the other things I need to do with photos.

[Geoff F]

Like you, Bill, I have tried Lightroom a few times but have never made any sense of it so now I don't bother to have it on my computer. It seems to me that if you use Lightroom you have to do everything the Lightroom way. Dissenters who want to work in a slightly different manner to suit themselves will not be tolerated.

But, if just using Photoshop, you really also require Bridge which is a free bit of add on software. Some people don't like Bridge but I find it is very easy to use and couples in to the Adobe Raw Converter (ACR).

Also, like you, I have no need for cloud storage so I would willingly give up on that option. With UK broadband speeds and the size/number of my images it would simply take too long to upload anything.

As far as I can understand Photoshop pricing, from Dan's link, there will be no increase if you pay annually which I do. Although there may well be a substantial increase next year.

Before switching to Photoshop, I used Serif Photo Plus (now Affinity) which worked reasonably well and you only paid once for the software on a DVD. But I believe Affinity is now a subscription programme, like Photoshop and many others. Maybe, if there is a substantial future increase in Adobe pricing I might have another look at Affinity.

[DanK]

It seems to me that if you use Lightroom you have to do everything the Lightroom way. Dissenters who want to work in a slightly different manner to suit themselves will not be tolerated.
.

Honestly, I'm not trying to persuade anyone to use Lightroom, but that's really an overstatement. The one thing you do have to do the Lightroom way is to get images into the catalog, by syncing and importing. However. once that's done, you are free to do what you want. The ACR and LR raw rendering and editing engines are nearly identical other than the interface (and the interfaces are more similar now than they once were), so there really isn't a Lightroom way: you have precisely the same options and constraints in LR that you would have opening a raw file in Photoshop and hence in ACR. If you want to ignore LR and open an image that has been imported into LR directly into ACR or photoshop, or into them via bridge, you can do so.

The reason NOT to do that is that if you bypass LR, LR can lose track of what you are doing. So, for example, I have a lot of TIFF files that have been edited in Photoshop after Lightroom. If I want to make further changes, I could simply open them in Photoshop. I almost never do that because I want LR, which is the repository for all of my images, to know what I've done. So I open the image in LR and tell LR that I want to edit it in Photoshop. It then opens photoshop and loads the image. When I save the image in Photoshop, it is automatically imported into the catalog, so LR is still showing me all versions of the image, ether lined up next to each other or stacked.

The real stumbling block for most people is getting used to importing into the catalog. Once you have that mastered, you can chose how to proceed. I haven't kept track, but as far I can recall, everyone I know who has explained why they are frustrated by Lightroom has had problems mastering the catalog.

[LenR]

Dan, agreed. Familiarity makes it easier.
At the end of the day, like many things, it comes down to personal preference and what works for the user.....