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?