AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

From RAW conversion to image editing and printing
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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Mike-Photos wrote:Haven't been here in years since I moved off Sony into Fuji. I was still subscribed to this thread, though.
You can still post. I switched to m4/3 in 2012 and David said it was still okay to post here.
Mike-Photos wrote: LightRoom CC was looking like a big con job to me a few months ago. Worsening performance, no real new features, and it was all supposed to be much better because we were paying every month.

I switched to Capture One, expensive, but a FAR better product than LightRoom. It's image quality is SUPERB, and it's speed is great, since it's built to handle 200mp medium format images. It also has layers, and many more processing features than LightRoom. The new main feature, luminosity masks, in LightRoom Classic is already in Capture One and is far more powerful.
Although I have had LR/PS CC for 2 years I am not a big fan of the subscription model. I don't use the cloud. From time to time I think about switching, but I have tens of thousands of edited photos in LR using non-destructive editing. That is a big lock in. The same, of course, is true with any non-destructive editor since they are all proprietary. I like LR a lot and the new LR Classic has gotten a pretty nice speed up. I am concerned about what other changes Adobe may spring on us in the future though. Also rental price increases will probably come along.

Actually I wish instead of $10/month for LR/PS that they had a $4/month for LR only. I never use PS CC. The few times I want to use a bit-mapped editor I have to use PSE 9 because the 2 plug-ins I use for film scans are 32-bit and they don't work in PS CC.
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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bakubo wrote:
Although I have had LR/PS CC for 2 years I am not a big fan of the subscription model. I don't use the cloud. From time to time I think about switching, but I have tens of thousands of edited photos in LR using non-destructive editing. That is a big lock in. The same, of course, is true with any non-destructive editor since they are all proprietary. I like LR a lot and the new LR Classic has gotten a pretty nice speed up. I am concerned about what other changes Adobe may spring on us in the future though. Also rental price increases will probably come along.

Actually I wish instead of $10/month for LR/PS that they had a $4/month for LR only. I never use PS CC. The few times I want to use a bit-mapped editor I have to use PSE 9 because the 2 plug-ins I use for film scans are 32-bit and they don't work in PS CC.
I also don't use Photoshop, I agree $4 per month is more reasonable for Lightroom only. Firstly, I now have layers and more processing capability in Capture One. Secondly, for the occasional stuff, I use the free GIMP software. Supports plugins, not sure about 32-bit ones.

My biggest fear of moving was exactly the thousands and thousands of photos that I would lose the ability to edit. But that was before Capture One. If I edit an old photo I now WANT to re-edit it in Capture One, because I can do better with it.

Bit of a rant here, apologies:

I'm not in principle opposed to rental, but the Adobe promise was that because they have a regular income stream we would receive many feature updates, even if in smaller batches, over time. Not only has this not happened, but the software itself has large performance issues which keep on getting worse. Maybe CC Classic helps with that.

The fact that Topaz and OnOne have both now created stand-alone software that reads RAW files and doesn't require Adobe as a starting point any more, speaks volumes about Adobe's falling behind. There are others, Luminar, I think, and more. These tiny companies are emboldened enough and take the risk to develop software that competes directly with CC, simply because Adobe have dropped the ball.

Another issue specific to me is that Adobe have acknowledged officially three years back that their Fuji processing is not optimal, and that they are working on fixing it. Lightroom Classic has a new process engine and Fuji processing remains unchanged. When I opened older Fuji files in Capture One to test it, I was just astounded at the extra level of detail it presents. I hear from others that it's not just with Fuji files, Capture One is just better at RAW demosaicing.

There's a ONE MAN company that has developed a preprocessor to read Fuji RAW files and feed them into Lightroom. Gives the same kind of detail as Capture One. One man. Adobe can't be bothered.

I pay $6 per month to Microsoft to get the full Office suite AND 1TB of cloud data. All my files, including all my photos, are in the cloud (as well as on the computer of course). I can access these on my iPhone any time I want. My emails, contacts, and calendar are in the mobile Outlook app and fully synced.
Actually, I can have up to four users on this same account, each with their own 1TB of data. That's 4TB of data for $6 per month and the full Office suite. And OneDrive, their cloud system, evolves the whole time. Sure, they have a larger market than Adobe, but what I get is not comparable.
Mike
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ValeryD
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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Mike-Photos
After I read you post, I downloaded Topaz studio. It's not bad and it's free. I'll stay with Phase one, for big files from Sony 42mp it's the best software and I definitely not going to an any subscription model. Just useless for me. First it's too many pictures for the clouds, second I'm really worry about safety in Adobe Clouds as in Microsoft Clouds too, they been "cracked" so many time. Why I have to trust them again?
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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I use LR CC which has been renamed LR CC Classic. Not using the cloud.
Mike-Photos
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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Now there's this coming this month, looks amazing! Combination of Photoshop and Lightroom (but no catalogue until next year), better image quality than Lightroom, all for $59!:
http://www.photographyblog.com/news/new ... _lightroom
First look:
https://blog.thomasfitzgeraldphotograph ... minar-2018
Mike
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ValeryD
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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Mike-Photos wrote:Now there's this coming this month, looks amazing! Combination of Photoshop and Lightroom (but no catalogue until next year), better image quality than Lightroom, all for $59!:
http://www.photographyblog.com/news/new ... _lightroom
First look:
https://blog.thomasfitzgeraldphotograph ... minar-2018
:lol:

Yah... So many companies make a "better" software, :) but Adobe Lightroom is the best for photo editing. I prefer LR than C1 or others. The bad thing happened with LR 6 and LR CC, I can't use LR 6 with files from a99-II, too slow.

About Luminar, it's only one "exiting person" on the video. I spended 5 min to hear how this guy so happy with Luminar... :)
:)
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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bakubo wrote: The new Lightroom Classic released last week is faster. About time. 5+ years waiting for it. :) Adobe says there will be further improvements in speed soon.
Lightroom Classic CC: is it faster than CC 2015?

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/artic ... 2015-1065/

So is Lightroom Classic CC actually faster than Lightroom CC 2015.12? In most cases, yes, it is significantly faster!
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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I bought LR 4 and then later bought LR 5 (to get support for a new camera) and then a couple of years ago I switched to LR/PS CC to get support for a new camera. I never use PS CC so I would prefer a much cheaper rental plan for LR only. Adobe will probably never do that though.

Since I got LR 4 almost 6 years ago there have only been 3 things that have changed in LR that I care about:

dehaze
transform
speed up (in LR Classic)


Other things, of course, have been added since LR 4 such as panoramas, hdr, and lots of mobile syncing stuff, but I don't use any of those so I don't care about them. If it wasn't for the occasional new camera support that I need there is almost no difference and almost no gain for the money I spent since LR 4: LR 5 (I bought it rather than pay for an update) and the 2 years of CC rental fees I have paid for LR/PS CC.
Last edited by bakubo on Thu Nov 09, 2017 11:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Mike-Photos
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by Mike-Photos »

bakubo wrote:I had LR 4 and then LR 5 (to get support for a new camera) and then a couple of years ago I switched to LR/PS CC to get support for a new camera. I never use PS CC so I would prefer a much cheaper rental plan for LR only. Adobe will probably never do that though.

Since I got LR 4 almost 5 years ago there have only been 3 things that have changed in LR that I care about:

dehaze
transform
speed up (in LR Classic)

Other things, of course, have been added since LR 4 such as panoramas, hdr, and lots of mobile syncing stuff, but I don't use any of those so I don't care about them. If it wasn't for the occasional new camera support that I need there is almost no difference and almost no gain for the money spent since LR 4: LR 5 (I bought it rather than pay for an update) and the 2 years of CC rental fees I have paid for LR/PS CC.
Yes, that's my issue too. At some point, I just realised that I was being conned into the monthly payments and I was getting nothing for it. I love how Lightroom works, but I'm just being robbed, especially when you look at the capabilities and pricing of the companies ramping up to compete with Adobe.

There are a number of commentators saying that licensing is the only way forward for software to be successful. I don't disagree with that, but licensing is a two-way partnership - you expect to get something back for the money you are paying.

So Luminar, Topaz, OneOne, to name a few, are coming in at far too low prices to sustain a business. They are in it now to get users, and for the one(s) that succeed, a $5 monthly payment would be sustainable both ways. Even $10, with frequent feature updates, is well worth it in my view.

However, we don't know who will survive, and I have decided in the meantime to stay with Capture One. They aren't going away, and they are constantly enhancing. They realise many of their users are close to being able to dispense with Photoshop, so they are upgrading their layer, masking, and general retouching features at a rapid rate.
Mike
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by Mike-Photos »

This came today:

http://joelwolfson.com/photo-raw-2018-released/

"After 10 Years of Using Lightroom I’m now transitioning to ON1 Photo Raw 2018"
Mike
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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Before CC came along there were these 2:

Photoshop CS6 -- $999
Lightroom 4 -- $149

Now there is the CC plan that combines Photoshop and Lightroom for $10/month plus tax. I suppose most people pay about $11/month. If they had a $4/month plan for just Lightroom then that would be better for me and many people, I think. I just don't use Photoshop for the reasons I mentioned a few days ago in this thread. Actually, based on the huge price differential between Photoshop and Lightroom back before CC maybe $1/month for just Lightroom would be more fair. :lol:

I have so many photo edited using non-destructive editing in Lightroom that it makes it difficult to step away from it. Each day I import more and edit more. The second year of my CC contract ends next month so I suppose I will feel forced to sign up again. Even with the monthly payment plan you still have to sign up for a year at a time.

I looked at ACDSee for awhile a few months ago. It looks quite good. Darktable is free and available for Mac, Linux, and recently Windows. Some people like it a lot. Also there is Aftershot Pro 3 (when I started this thread it was Aftershot 1, based on Bibble). I expect that there will be a new version of ASP soon since they usually come out with one soon after there is a new version of LR.

Then there are also various newer options such as On1, Luminar, etc.
Mike-Photos
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

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bakubo wrote:Before CC came along there were these 2:
I have so many photo edited using non-destructive editing in Lightroom that it makes it difficult to step away from it. Each day I import more and edit more.
That was my problem, too. But after testing Capture One on older images, I found two things:

1) My editing techniques are far better now, even in newer software.
2) Capture One's image quality is so much better, I can do a far better job of editing an older photo from scratch.

And finally, I asked myself realistically how many older photos I really edit, and there aren't many. Much of the time, editing older photos means editing photos I recently worked on. Maybe the crop is wrong, or it's too dark or too light.

One potential catastrophic issue moving away from Adobe is if you convert your images to DNG. I never understood the benefit of it, I just saw the danger of tying my RAW files to Adobe. Of course it's marketed as an obsolescence-free format.

EDIT: Let me add, if you are still worried, that you can always sign up again any time if you find you really need to. Maybe in a year or two, once Adobe get the message, they'll pull out all the stops and produce a GREAT upgrade. You can rejoin the fold then.
Mike
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bakubo
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Re: AfterShot Pro and Lightroom

Unread post by bakubo »

Here is another thread about a similar subject:

http://www.photoclubalpha.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=9070
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