Have any of you signed-up for Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan? Sounds like a good deal but I worry that I’m missing something. What does Adobe get from offering it for US$9.99 / month as opposed to making me buy the entire suite for ~ US$1000 (as in the past)? What are the pitfalls I should expect?
I’ve been able to use an old PS license on my work PC for years, but that (WinXP) computer has recently died. My boss has replaced the PC, but he won’t spring for a new PS license (though I may be able to talk him into $10/month). I am not a design professional and the business I work for is not even design-oriented. But i will cut, crop, edit, and annotate photos (and .pdfs) while offering technical assistance with our products.
But perhaps you guys could recommend another, comparable program. I want to work with layers and use the pen tool for selecting and cutting. I’ll occasionally adjust levels and colors; may use a blur or unsharp mask filter. Need to re-size (sometimes just the resolution) and crop, too. In the past I tried using GIMP but, since I always had PS, I never gave Gimp much of a try.
Additionally, I often used to pull a .pdf into PS so I could edit it, too. Any ideas on a .pdf editor? That CutePDF editor won’t let me edit the text and I need that functionality. Thanks.
I’ve been subscribing under that plan for about a year; I love it. For $120/year I get always-updated (if I choose) versions of PhotoShop and Lightroom. That’s probably less than a single upgrade fee for PhotoShop.
PS has no equal and very few close peers. It is hands-down the best raster and rasterizing image manager available. The only excuse for anything else has always been cost - you could get cheaper, you could get free (money-free, that is; most users I know of pay a huge cost in time and hassle to use things like GIMP) but you couldn’t get better and, with very few and narrow exceptions, you couldn’t get as-good.
But it is and always has been a pricey bastard, both to buy and update.
Making it available at this very low price - always the fully updated version, with complete Adobe Community support - is a boon to anyone whose budget for the task is $100 a year or more. Lightroom is useful only to active photographers, but if you shoot a lot and shoot at high res or in raw format, it’s hugely useful.
Did you have to pay for the full year up-front or was it truly a month-to-month agreement? And do I run the program on my computer or is this US$9.99 a cloud-based application?
Also, I’m not concerned that this is a good deal, i completely agree that it is. My question is as much, “how can Adobe afford to price it this way”? Is it that next year my price will be back to the full ~US$1000?
I love PS and really don’t want to use anything else. I’d probably pay the full price, but don’t tell them that
You run the apps directly on your PC. It’s the full versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. You have to install an Adobe Creative Cloud program that periodically checks in to make sure your license is active. If memory serves, it reauthorizes them for 30 days at a time, so as long as you connect to the Internet monthly, you’ll be good.
It is a monthly charge, but you have to enroll in automatic payments. It’s similar to a subscription service like Netflix.
They can afford to because, at this prices, they assume a lot of previous pirates / potential GIMP/Darktable users will pay. They’ve been very clear that this is not necessarily permanent pricing and is subject to change without grandfathering, but so far it hasn’t changed (it’s been available ~2 years, although the first year you needed to own a prior version PS or Lightroom to enroll).
No, it’s not. But you don’t need it unless you meet the above criteria: tend to shoot a LOT of images - 100 at a time, or 1000 a month, that need sorting, grading, cataloging, quick batch corrections, etc. Doubly so if you shoot at very high res (15MP and up) and/or in raw format.
It’s basically the perfect tool for the photojournalist and the wedding photographer. Everyone else… it’s far from essential. Use Bridge instead.
But I’m sure there’s a good book or a few Lynda.com courses that will help you grasp it.
Sorry for my late reply to your questions, shunpiker. I see others have already answered about the logistics (the software is downloaded to your PC) and payment (it’s monthly).
I should add that the license agreement allows you to install it on 2 PCs. I thought about installing a second copy at work, but it is so seldom that I need an image editor of that power at work and cannot wait until I get home to do it that I decided not to.
Lightroom is definitely the cat’s meow for photographers. I don’t use it so much for organizing and cataloging (thought it has great features for that), but with the editing tools built-in, I very very rarely have to open PhotoShop.
I guess I’m leery of tools that “do a little image editing” as a secondary task. I wouldn’t want PS saddled with advanced cataloging and sorting features, but I don’t really want to do automatic color correction in a filing tool, either.
There really is not a comparable program to Adobe P-shop, its in a class of its own. What I use is Corels paintshop pro. Does everything that you listed and only costs about a hundred bucks, or less depending on where you pick it up. They have this funny language tho, that says that you can only have it on one puter, bzzzzzzzzzz, ya corel what ever.
But lightroom has some pretty serious power of its own. Photoshop is still the right tool for serious alteration, but Lightroom puts basic correction tools that are all geared towards photography at your fingertips.
Tweaking things like exposure, sharpness, color, and lens distortion is so much quicker (doubly so when you can easily apply batch adjustments to whole sets).
I will often take a folder full of dozens of photos and run one of PShop’s automate features to re-size them for emailing. I’m not enamored w/ the options or the results (and I could learn to do it better) but I don’t really need a stellar outcome when I’m just preparing them for emailing.
Would this Lightroom do that easier than my fuddling with PShop ?
Give Google’s free Picasa photo manager a try instead. It is much faster and easier to use than Lightroom, and can do about 90% of everything Lightroom does.
As a photographer who’s used Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, and Picasa for 20+ years combined, Picasa is by far the simplest of the bunch and more than adequate for all but the highest-end shooting and editing. Lightroom’s main strength over Picasa, in my opinion, is its ability to finely tune the dynamic range of RAW files* – if you don’t know what that means, it’s not worth all the headaches of Lightroom until you learn to use that functionality of your camera. If you’re shooting JPEGs, or don’t much manipulate your RAW lighting levels to begin with, Picasa offers a much better user experience with all the basic editing tools you need and you can always edit individual pictures in Photoshop if you need to.
(*Picasa can open and manipulate RAW files, but its lighting controls aren’t as fine-grained or as effective as Lightroom’s)
If you really insist on Lightroom, Lynda is indeed a good resource, or Adobe offers a bunch of free tutorials and videos too:
Paint Shop Pro is an excellent, often underrated, program. Corel sucks at marketing it, but it does a great majority of what Photoshop does, and it even accepts Photoshop files, filters, and plug-ins. It’s only $50 on Amazon and you get more bang for your buck than Photoshop Elements (though Elements isn’t a bad deal either).
But it’s a better image editor than a photo manager; Picasa or Lightroom would still be quicker for day to day photo management.
I have used Lightroom since version 2 and have been a subscriber to the Adobe Photography Plan for about 15 months now.
I should point out that I had purchased and installed Lightroom (Version 5) before signing up for the plan since the plan offered a relatively low-cost way to have Photoshop. Several caveats you should be aware of:
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[li]Lightroom Version 5 and Photoshop CC will install and run only on Windows machines running 7 or 8.[/li][li]Photoshop CC is sold only on a subscription basis. The current version of Photoshop is CC Version 2014.[/li][/ul]
I am not a professional photographer but I have about 12,000 RAW images catalogued in Lightroom. Lightroom allows me to automatically make backup copies of my files when I download off my camera card to any location. It also allows me to make many adjustments to photos right off the card and add keywords. Organizing your photos is really important if you ever want to go back and find one without having to do a visual search.
I have also used Photoshop since Version 3 and Bridge sucks and is not, IMO, comparable to Lightroom for organizing.
The bottom line is that Lightroom is a very specialized tool, of real use only to very prolific and/or professional photographers, and not many others. Yes, you can use it as a substitute for simpler tools like Picasa or Bridge or any simple gallery tool… but it’s kind of expensive and has a steep learning curve for that level. You can use it for basic photographic adjustments, quickly and in batch… but anything else and you’re into PS anyway.
“Lightroom: the wedding photographer’s best friend.”
Most other users are better off mastering Photoshop as the image manager, with Bridge and miniBridge for cataloging, even though the limits of that approach for pros is what led to Lightroom.
I am a professional photographer, I do shoot several hundred (usually studio or on-site) photos at a time and have to sort/grade/use them… and even with the complete CC set, I still can’t find much use for LR over PS/Bridge. To be fair, I tend to use one or two photos from a shoot, and not need to quickly sort, touch up and organize hundreds for a wedding or event album. That really is what LR is built for.
I’d go so far as to advise novices and amateur photographers to set LR aside for someday, and learn to do everything in PS first. You’ll get a deeper understanding of photo image manipulation, and eventually be able to use LR much more effectively.
