Lightroom CC is now Lightroom CC

http://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

Adobe updates Lightroom CC to being a platform agnostic cloud based service that lets you edit photos on different devices because it stores all your full size photos in the cloud (up to 1 tb). The old version is now Lightroom CC Classic.

Once upon a time I used Lightroom, but it’s all about Capture One Pro for me.

$300 is pretty steep though. I’ve looked into Corel After Shot Pro. Supposedly Capture One Pro has a much better RAW engine.

I don’t want Capture One Pro, i want the Capture One Pro CAMERA. Just the minor problem of them being $40,000.

A long time ago, back when I was still doing tech reviews, I got a review code for Lightroom 5. I am so thankful for that. Lightroom hasn’t changed much over the years, and the older version still works fine for me.

You can usually get it 50% off before they release the next version. And when you choose to upgrade to the latest version it’s only $99. (And look to the Capture One blog; they usually have a discount code that saves you another $10.)

I’m still rocking version 9, as im skipping over version 10. Will probably upgrade to 11 when it is released. Generally that happens in December.

And, yes, the RAW converter is really good in C1P.

Lightroom 6 will be the last version for me. Not sure if I’ll look for an alternative or exit the hobby (not because of Lightroom, I just haven’t done much photography stuff lately).

Yep. It’s… never use Lightroom again good.

OTOH, i just got back from Jemez Springs over the holidays and… i didn’t have RAW files saved on the Olympus. #chrisfarleystupid

Capture One raised their upgrade price to $120 recently, which created a lot of debate. At that price, if you upgrade every year you might as well give Adobe the $120 and get the Lightroom and Photoshop subscription.

However, Capture One does let you upgrade from two versions back, so you can hold off upgrading every other year. That makes it more like $60 a year. They also reportedly send you an email right before they cut you off, so if you’re feeling risky, you could probably go three years before upgrading, but you risk missing the upgrade window and having to pay full price.

Arise, ye thread!

For various reasons related to switching from Canon to Sony, I’ve also switched back from Capture One to Lightroom. However, instead of using what is now known as Lightroom Classic CC, I’ve signed up for Lightrom Creative Cloud, Adobe’s $9.95-per-month subscription that gives you access to their “next-generation” Lightroom as well as 1TB of cloud storage.

The verdict thus far? I really, really love it. And I’m really, really annoyed with it.

First, some explanation.

I’ve frankly never been a big fan of Aperture, Lightroom Classic, and Capture One’s ideas of catalogs. I’m sure it’s a godsend for professionals who have dozens of major clients and terabytes of images to keep organized, but I had absolutely no use for them but was still forced to use them. This resulted in all sorts of fragmentation of my photo catalogs, as I jumped from different computers or RAW developers. Attempts to import and unify catalogs were a gigantic pain-in-the-ass, too. So I stopped trying. As a result, my photos are on a half-dozen different drives. It sucks.

The beauty of Lightroom CC is that everything I import goes into Adobe’s cloud. All the original files. The RAWs are no longer on any device, but they can be accessed on edited on your desktop, laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android phone, or even just a web browser at an Internet cafe. If I edit a photo on my desktop, the changes appear in seconds on my iPad Pro. (This makes sharing of images so much easier, as I can edit them on my computer, and simply pick up my phone and share it to Instagram).

If I don’t have a fat data pipe at the moment, anything I upload to a device I can still edit and work on, and once I do get fast Internet connection, the files and edits get uploaded to the cloud and removed from my device (We’ll go into the pros and cons of all this data usage in a later post, perhaps).

And let me just say, having all of my photos in ONE depository, independent and seamlessly accessible from any device, is the Holy Grail. If I could have started doing this back when I bought my first DSLR, I would have.

On top of that, Lightroom is A LOT better than the last time I tried it out, and it’s making photography fun again. I’m getting great results within seconds. Adobe’s distortion-correction is phenomenal. I had no idea what I was missing.

(On a related note, part of the reason I switched was Capture One’s growing lack of features compared to Lightroom. And, more importantly, Capture One’s complete lack of lens-correction profiles for most of my glass. It’s ridiculous they don’t have profiles for my Sigma lenses, even though damn near every Sony APS-C owner swears by them. But I guess they’re not high-end and professional enough for Capture One’s demographic of fashion photographers.)

Now, the downside.

Lightroom CC is nowhere near feature-equilateral with the beast that is now known as Lightroom Classic CC. Even thought Lightroom CC has desktop clients, they’re very clearly modeled on the mobile versions, as the interface is kept to minimums everywhere. And while the key editing features are in Lightroom CC, all the stuff that makes Lightroom Classic a beast for professionals are not.

I cannot customize workspaces. The information displayed is kept to a bare minimum, so if I’m editing a photo and I want to know what f-stop I used, I need to tap the I key or the info button on the screen, and then tap back to go back to the editing panel. Even though I’m using a 4K monitor with tons of width, I can only keep one panel open at a time on the right side, even though there’s plenty of room to display more panels. Nor can I cannot compare photos side-by-side. The list of missing features is long and distinguished.

Adobe is slowly adding more features to Lightroom CC, but at their current pace, it’ll take years before it’s even close. Maybe even never. But if they added in just the stuff I mentioned directly above, It’d remove the majority of my pain points with the software.

Anyways, that’s what I’m up to. Anyone else using Lightroom CC?

I’ve used Lightroom on and off for years. I tend to try other things for a bit and move back. Capture One I played around with a few years back. My step father is a Lightroom geek…spends all his waking hours taking photos and using Lightroom and photoshop…retirement sounds fun.

I’m using Acdsee Ultimate now and really enjoy it…but I’m sure I will go back to Lightroom…especially after I get a new Nikon Z6 soon!

I use the old standalone LR5. I am tempted to move to CC mainly for the reasons you mentioned: maintaining the photo library is a hassle. I also fully expect some macOS update to introduce a bug with the old app that will render it unusable.

That said, for what I use it for and how often I don’t take pictures, I’m hesitant to pay $10 a month for the app. I use Affinity Photo as my photoshop app.

Can Lightroom CC use external filters like my beloved Topaz filters?

Subscription is annoying, yes. But it’s a value call. I was using Capture One and it has a choice of subscription and stand-alone license; if you work out the math, the subscription was basically the price of the stand-alone based on yearly upgrades.

If it makes you feel better, Lightroom CC and Lightroom Classic are worked on by separate teams. So I can’t see Lighrroom CC introducing something that would break Lightroom Classic. And they stopped updating Lightroom 5 years ago, so you’re safe. Your big issue is that they no longer support or update LR5 with new camera and lens profiles. If you buy an unsupported camera, you’d have to convert your RAWs to DNG before bringing them to LR5.

Lightroom 5 is also from 2013. You might be surprised by the new features you’re missing out on.

Lightroom CC does not have support for direct plugins, but it does have support for third-party presets.

I am not opposed to the sub, but I need to take enough photos to justify it. It looks like CC2019 supports external editors.

Fair enough.

I’m slowly putting my archives back together. This is forcing me to work my photos. I’m weeding out all the bad ones (tons of those), and editing the good ones into shape.

It’s an inadvertent side benefit, as it’s giving me something to do now that I’m self-isolating amidst this virus outbreak in Washington state.

Just fyi but i signed up for a subscription to Capture One 12 through Amazon pay, for some reason, and i have no idea how to cancel it. It doesn’t show up under any account nor under any Amazon Pay subscriptions, but i still get charged every month.

I’m searching for Capture One Subscription on Amazon and seeing nothing.

Maybe go to Capture One’s web site? That’s where I managed my license.

I’ve taken advantage of Comcast lifting their broadband caps during this emergency and uploaded about 550GB of photos to the Adobe cloud!

While the originals are in the cloud, it’s really nice to keep local copies on your primary editing machine. My mobile devices don’t have that kind of storage, so they’ll download images on the fly.

But all those photos ate up almost all the remaining room on my 1TB NVMe drive, which is my boot drive and game drive. Seeing that my motherboard has two NVMe slots, I ordered another 1TB NVMe SSD, which Amazon delivered this weekend. Lightroom transferred the original files to the new drive with just a couple clicks.

(I could have offloaded onto a hard drive, but when loading an album with thousands of photos, it’s nice to have the speed of NVMe.)

Lightroom’s geometry tools are FANTASTIC. It’s breathing new life into a lot of my old photos! Check this out: this was an old jpg I shot back in 2006.

Before

After

My next task is to trim down my catalog, throwing out the bad ones and working on the good ones. I’m the kind of shooter who takes 10 photos at a time. And, god, I literally have thousands of photos of the Blue Angels, dozens of which might be of a single plane doing a banking turn. Fun, fun, fun, but it’s not like I have anything better to do during this lockdown.