My Year of reassessment - Or the return of adobe
“I’m surprised by how little drama there is. I downloaded the trial, created a set of catalogs, pointed each one at the proper folders. Within an hour most of my reflexes were back, my memory had pulled-in all those old shortcuts from my addled brain’s dusty attic. I’m editing as if nothing has changed.”
“The point being: every DAM out there can do the job just fine. Each has its idiosyncrasies, its strengths and weaknesses, but we are adaptable beings. At the end of the day, I know I can achieve results regardless of the app I’m using.
...ROI matters.”
I'm calling 2022 the year of reassessment.
After Craft and Ulysses, and with days to go until renewal, I cancelled my Capture One subscription last week. May as well go out with a bang.
Which means that, yes, I'm using Lightroom again.
This probably reads like a knee-jerk reaction to the company's recent licensing changes, but the email they sent merely acted as a trigger. I was on the yearly subscription plan, so none of it affected me directly. That said, what are they thinking? As I understand it, after January 30th a perpetual licence will now provide bug fixes for a year, but no new features, regardless of what's released during that time. Those would require another purchase. I think. It's not quite clear. Points for...originality?
I think they should've just gone full subscription, told everyone V23 would be the last perpetual license version (before releasing it), and supported it fully for the next year. Instead, they announced a major shift just weeks after an upgrade campaign, with the promise of a "loyalty program" to be disclosed later. This brought me back to their eerily similar handling of the affiliate program termination [1]. I'm sure they have their reasons, but these are questionable moves, in a now ongoing series of questionable moves. This, after multiple pricing increases; the export dialog fiasco; the add-on iPad app; the "Live" feature, which includes one free session (another change of heart) but adds another monthly fee if you want more; the lacklustre 22 upgrade; and an even more dismal 23 offering. It's a lot. And it makes me feel guilty, after having introduced several people to the software over the years.
Plus, on a personal level, the announcement came just as I started to struggle with serious (and still unresolved) performance issues on my MacBook [2]. So this wasn't about ethical grandstanding: I was forced into evaluating other options. And I figured I should at least look at the latest LR Classic version and give it a proper whirl. So I did. I processed a variety of images. I processed those same raw files that C1 was suddenly struggling with, without a single hiccup. Then I compared the asking price, the included apps...and made my decision.
Evolution
Lightroom Classic is still as fugly and frozen in time as ever, but the October update brought new AI masking options and content-aware brushes, features that are a lot more useful to me than anything recently added to Capture One. And while C1 still has the edge in prettiness (by far), as well as the number of tools it provides...when taking into consideration the entire ecosystem, I no longer feel that's enough. Even disregarding the app's current performance on my machine, the overall value isn't there anymore.
The truth is, Lightroom isn't in the state it was when I left in 2018. The fact that I was able to easily recreate my 1EYE SOCIETY styles as LR presets last summer, had already made me well-aware of this. At the back of my mind, I knew it now represented a potential exit strategy.
I'm not going into this blindly: I still believe everything I've ever written about Adobe. I still feel uneasy about Classic and its long-term future. But Capture One is proving to be even more lacking in transparency, just as untrustworthy, and now it's become a more expensive (and troublesome) solution to boot. Given the choice between two evils, I may as well use the one that actually works the way I need it to.
SIDEBAR
Things I'd missed from Lightroom (but didn’t realize how much):
Survey mode: the fact that it can display more than 12 images, and that images can be moved around and re-ordered—much quicker for storyboarding.
The Attributes and Metadata bar in Library mode: I'd forgotten how useful this was.
Printing: I'd also forgotten just how versatile and effortless printing was in Lightroom, compared to Capture One. It's another crucial feature that I'd hoped would evolve, but never did. The difference is extreme.
Mobile: just knowing it's there, without jumping through hoops.
The identity plate is back :)
Agnosticism
My biggest takeaway is this: switching isn't the huge deal it once was. And that's because I've made it a point to export all my final images [3]. Everything I've processed, rated 4 stars or more, or published. Nothing crazy, just SRGB JPEG files, but full res and with minimal compression—enough for printing, sharing etc. This means that 1) edited versions don't vanish overnight, and 2) it provides a guide if I ever need or want to re-process the originals in whatever new app I'm using. I have "prints" and their negatives. In fact this is precisely what I did to ease back into Lightroom, and to figure out if I really could recreate the same looks for the same images. Of course, any internal organization is lost, but this doesn't really bother me. The base metadata remains, and metadata is agnostic. (see addendum 2...)
The other important bit: no processing is sacrosanct. While DAMs usually offer comparable tools, they don't share algorithms, and they won't alter files in identical ways. Apps are like musical instruments—they don't all sound the same, so they lead us to different places, and other melodies. I like that. I'm ok with that.
Bluegrass anyone?
…
Addendum 1: On Saturday December 10th, I woke up to an email confirming my subscription was now officially deactivated. Out of curiosity, I went downstairs and launched the app:
Adobe can certainly be shady, but this needs to be said: they don't lock you out of Lightroom when you stop paying. You can still access and browse the library, and you can still export your pictures.
I’ve now deleted Capture One 23.
Addendum 2: while browsing Capture One discussion forums I noticed several people recommending an app called Avalanche, as a migration solution. Its sole purpose is to convert to and from various photo catalog formats: Lightroom, Capture One, even Photos and Aperture. I downloaded the trial, ran a test...and then bought it on the spot. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly good—enough to provide a much better starting point than unprocessed files. What it does achieve perfectly, however: organization. Not only did it import all the added metadata, but the conversion recreated all the folders and subfolders from my C1 library, and transformed albums into collections.
Thanks to this app, I've lost very little work. I'll be converting all my C1 catalogs with it.
……………………………..
This was never public, but suffice it to say they handled it very poorly. It showed the same lack of transparency that now seems part of their motus operandi. Ironically, they timed this just after a major upgrade campaign as well.
Image refresh in Capture One (when making adjustments) now takes 3-5 seconds with raw files. It's unusable. On our Slack channel, 1EYE member Eric sent me this possible solution, but it didn't resolve the issue.
They all get ingested to Photos and iCloud as well, so they're available anywhere, from any device.
