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The end of the standalone Lightroom version


PHDX
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Dear all,

 

 

I have been a Lighthroom user for years and been satisfied with it even though nobody's perfect and some other are better in some aspects. The announcement from Adobe That they discontinue the standalone version (LR6) and promote only The CC version (be it "Classic" or not) looks like a "take it or leave" message !

On a pure economic standpoint, I fully understand their interest : getting a permanent subscription fee at a minimum of 144€ per year should make the shareholders happy !

But, considering my needs, I do not see a lot of advantages in switching to the CC.

I understand the benefits of the cloud and the capacity to access to your pictures everywhere you are and with any type of device, but quite frankly I do not care.

Having the full LR version downloaded on my PC and on another portable is quite enough for me and I am not dependent on any internet / WIFI connection to do my posttreatment.

You also may argue on the security and the fact you can save your production on the Adobe cloud : fine, but having backups on several portable harddisks is sufficient for me, knowing that a lot of progress is made with those devices and you can find at least 2 Tbytes robust portable harddisks at a quite reasonable price.

There are certainly other advantages to switch to CC ,speed (?), permanent releases...but at the risk to be extremely oldfashioned, i am quite happy with what I already have.

 

Is there anyone sharing the same opinion or am I the only one ?

 

 

 

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Guest Jaf-Photo

I certainly agree with you. There should be a subscription plan for businesses and a standalone version for consumers.

 

I stopped buying LR when they went from version 5 to 6 with no real difference other than support for new cameras.

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Take a look at Affinity Photo for MAC or PC.  It is the top paid photo app at the MAC app store.  I recently bought the iPad version (US$20).  It works great.  It is a combination of LR and Photoshop having RAW processing, layers, HDR, panorama, etc.  I plan to switch over to the Affinity Photo for MAC by the end of the year. 

 

Adobe will regret the decision to go the subscription route at some point down the road. 

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I'd strongly suggest you look at Capture One Pro. They have a dedicated Sony version for only $50., instead of the $299. they charge for the non Sony version. The Sony version is in no way stripped down either.

 

I have Lightroom 6 also and have stopped using it as Capture One is MUCH more robust. I tend to use alot of adjustment layers and find Lightroom very limiting with what can be adjusted in those layers. Capture One has no such limitations. After I saw that Adobe is changing to subscription only, I won't be updating Lightroom ever- nor do I see a reason to use it.

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For $50 the CaptureOne for Sony is an absolute steal. I don’t use much of the photo editing options in the product as I mostly do sports photography so I have little use for layers/masks etc.. the rendering of the images is first rate. I suffered a little during the transition from Apple’s Aperture but after a while it has become second nature

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks guys for your quite relevant answers. I did start using Capture One and, although it takes time

to adapt coming from Lightroom, it seems quite powerful.

I need of course to learn and test much more (and presumably it will take some time to reach a good undersatnding of all the features) but the test I did with landscape pictures on Capture One sounds very promising.

 

By the way, I was so used to Lightroom that I had lost somewhat my creativity, applying very often the same corrections or changes to my pictures : switching to another system with a different philosophy and structure forces me to adopt a new behaviour.

As you all know, probably better than me, Photography requires patience and time, but it's defenitely worth the journey.

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  • 7 months later...
On 10/19/2017 at 6:44 AM, PHDX said:

Dear all,

 

 

I have been a Lighthroom user for years and been satisfied with it even though nobody's perfect and some other are better in some aspects. The announcement from Adobe That they discontinue the standalone version (LR6) and promote only The CC version (be it "Classic" or not) looks like a "take it or leave" message !

On a pure economic standpoint, I fully understand their interest : getting a permanent subscription fee at a minimum of 144€ per year should make the shareholders happy !

But, considering my needs, I do not see a lot of advantages in switching to the CC.

I understand the benefits of the cloud and the capacity to access to your pictures everywhere you are and with any type of device, but quite frankly I do not care.

Having the full LR version downloaded on my PC and on another portable is quite enough for me and I am not dependent on any internet / WIFI connection to do my posttreatment.

You also may argue on the security and the fact you can save your production on the Adobe cloud : fine, but having backups on several portable harddisks is sufficient for me, knowing that a lot of progress is made with those devices and you can find at least 2 Tbytes robust portable harddisks at a quite reasonable price.

There are certainly other advantages to switch to CC ,speed (?), permanent releases...but at the risk to be extremely oldfashioned, i am quite happy with what I already have.

 

Is there anyone sharing the same opinion or am I the only one ?

 

 

 

While I sympathize with your point of view, and still have the legacy version on my laptop, the harsh reality is that LR6 is a casualty of advancing technology. I am disturbed that in order to process images I must be able to connect to the web. No more can I use otherwise worthless airplane time returning from a shoot to edit hundreds of images. It doesn't seem quite fair, but  I realized that LR6 was on borrowed time, I reluctantly subscribed to CC because, for me, there is no practical alternative.

I do secure sweet revenge, however, by making certain that before I exceed the provided capacity of the LR Cloud and face additional costly charges, I move images entirely out of LR elsewhere. I am vindicated each time I thwart Adobe's rapacious need for more revenue. ?

 

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  • 2 months later...
  • 9 months later...

To be clear, with LR CC you can edit completely offline. I do it all the time on the go or in remote areas. Then I get the benefit of cloud backup and easy sharing with my other devices as well as easy sharing through Adobe Portfolio when I am connected to the Internet. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I bought stand alone LR6 in 2017 but for some reason switched to the cloud. Like many I can't really see the point of the cloud as LR6 did everything I needed.

So I reinstalled LR6 but at the end of the process I had to log into my Adobe account to complete the installation.Lo and behold what popped up was the cloud version and not my LR6. Someone suggested opening an Adobe account with a different email address.This has worked, I simply log into the new account at the end of installation. I can now use LR6, I will terminate my cloud subscription at the end of my period.

There are features missing such as the de-haze filter but this can be overcome by using plug-ins, some are free, some there is a small charge. Adobe say that LR6 is much slower than cloud, that may be the case but I hardly notice it, probably because I'm slow anyway!

 

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good job mack 100 ! I must confess that using Capture One now since 2017, I have no interest in coming back to LR6, although it is a good toolbox. Capture one makes me quite happy for my two main uses : portrait and landscape. For those who want to do more than purely photography, like some mix of photos and Drawings, the Adobe products are still quite attractive; but I just try to do good pictures and improve within the time : to this respect, Capture One is perfect for me.

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13 hours ago, mack100 said:

 Like many I can't really see the point of the cloud

The main point is selling it,  and the concept of software as a service takes that to whole new levels.

That is not to say that it is not of any use. It has all the uses it had before anyone called it "the cloud," and more. But people should be very careful before letting themselves being sold  a cloud version of something that they are doing very happily already.

From Google Photos to Dropbox and more I use all sort of things, but will always follow what is now an old-school  computing model: my data, my programs, my hardware. I'd feel and follow the same, for primary resources, if I was still working in IT.

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Thanks a lot for your comment. I do agree with you.

It is true to say that the Cloud version includes new services. The question is do we need them ? I am not really sure yet.

One major argument in favor of the Cloud is the capacity to store your pictures in a safe environment (safer than your own local one) and also have the possibility to access to your data at anytime and from everywhere (provided that you have an internet connection).

Fine but, to my knowledge (may be I am wrong), once a file is gone to the internet, there is no obvious way to make sure that it is stored just in one location and no one can find it even if you did delete it.

Another issue is the safety of the clouds. I read a lot of articles on this subject and there seems to be no evidence or very clear answer.

It happens to me from time to time to work without an internet connection (there are still many locations where internet is hardly accessible) and I am happy to do my post treatment with the soft on my PC.

As far as the data storage is concerned, I use several hard disks kept in two different locations. I have started this process in 2001 and since that time never had any real issue. I do accept the very low probability that all my disks would fail at the same time : there is no zero risk. The only thing in my opinion to be concious of is that technology is moving ahead and you need to renew your disks from time to time. As a matter of example, I still use a 1To SATA disk which was bought in 2007 and also new SSD disks bought recently.The transfer rates are obviously not the same, and I don't use them the same way. So what ?

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I do wonder what the end result of the "trial" will be where Adobe have proposed a massive price hike in the conscription service and if this does go through then I suspect there will be many (myself included) that will leave the subscription service and go to another platform.

Many on here have been using Affinity or Capture One and I think many will go for one of these.

Perhaps a sad case of Adobe shooting themselves in the foot through greed?

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2 hours ago, Iansky said:

... conscription service ... subscription service

You got it right the first time!

Disclosure:  I have neither horse nor personal interest in this race. I do not use Windows, so this software is not available to me anyway.

Hey, I'd actually love to try Capture One! But not at the cost of what would be  a very difficult Windows installation, not to mention the money. And, as far as I know, Windows still wouldn't read my ext4-file-system  files anyway.

If I was still in the Windows world, I'd probably have given Photoshop and Lightroom a whirl, at least, by now. But not now, ever. Subscription models and economics as a pensioner don't go together.

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