Adobe haters, I have a question for you

Adobe aren't bothered about you. Or tins, or raw materials.

They are bothered about shareholders.

It is quite possible that Affinity shareholders take over from Adobe shareholders as bogeymen.

But £70 a month for Adobe software forever is usurious.
 
I tried the free version of Capture One and thought it was loads better than Lightroom.
I found I could basically apply Auto on import and it produces photos that are much closer to how I like them, therefore saving me ages.
Not to mention I can pay a one of fee and have the software for life, not a fan of subscription.

It's actually a better suite - pulls shadows back nicer, colours nicer. Just nicer.
 
Assuming this is in response to my post, it's interesting comparison of different experiences. I've used LR since before version 1 (ie I started with the beta of Version 1) but never especially liked it and although I wanted to use PS, but never felt I could afford it

I was using C1 long before LR went to subscription (even though I still used LR for certain things) and the subscription allowed me to add PS, and still keep LR. So once I got used to the idea of the subscription, I was comfortable with it.

I'm more irritated with c1, who have gone from an £80 upgrade every 18 months to two years, to a £158 upgrade every year. Which makes the upgrade only slightly cheaper than their subscription price, even after someone has paid £300 for the perpetual license.

You don't have to upgrade C1 pro. Buy it...stick with the version you got and upgrade if you fancy the new one.

I don't hate LR, and like PS but not overwhelmingly in awe of them and find LR not that well laid out. In short C1 is better for my needs (RAW manipulation)
 
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Add me to the subscription avoiders list - I like LR 6 but don't use it sufficiently regularly to warrant anything more and probably don't use lots of its facilites (I haven't found the time to understand the manual). If LR6 stops to work for me I will have to look elsewhere.
 
You don't have to upgrade C1 pro. Buy it...stick with the version you got and upgrade if you fancy the new one.
Indeed I don't, but in terms of workflow and as a sort of "command centre" for all my processing I have found nothing better, and I've been using it since V6 so I am also very fluent in it's use.

I've also found that the "less-headline-worthy" upgrades of small workflow changes and increased speed of operation, which affect me every time I use it, make the upgrade worth it, even if the increasing costs irritate me and every year I still go through the same futile "can I justify the expense" debate with my self, before convincing myself there is nothing else I would be happy using.

I bought the upgrade as soon as the extra 20% off pre-release offer was advertised.
 
How much did the last stand-alone version of Photoshop cost? $600 seems to be what I remember. Under the current subscription rates, I'd pay that off in 5 years and own that 5-year-old software outright. But then I'm stuck with 5-year-old software that's getting older by the day.

My first bite at the subscription apple was with MS Office. I balked hard at that at first, but having used it now on a half dozen different computers across time, I'm comfortable knowing that the software will play nicely with any advances in hardware technology. And, I'm also sure I've always got the latest security and performance updates as well as the latest new feature updates that I may or may not use but many of which I'd miss if they were taken away from me.

Excel and Photoshop are the 2 best software packages ever written and it takes armies of software developers to keep them that way. There are plenty of alternatives to both, but none that come close to doing everything those 2 programs can. If you can live with a subset of features you can save some money. But if you want the best product, now and in the future, for a reasonable price, capitalism is the best way to get there.

There is definitely a place for open-source software. Linux killed the commercial server business. But most of the time I've found that open-source software tends to be quirky and clunky. Turns out good software developers want to get paid for their work. Go figure.
 
and my personal favourite:
You can put all these down as 'user error', of course, or of Excel being used outside its intended use case (which is obviously the case for the Covid stats). But I'm not entirely sure what a safe and appropriate use for this unpredictable data mangler is. Probably nothing bigger than a screen of data you can check by eye, not something where your important text field in row 600 might be silently corrupted into a date because it looks vaguely like one. Giving Excel to a naive user is like handing one of those toys labelled 'small parts, choking hazard' to an unsupervised child and wandering off to the kitchen to make lunch. And yes, I was using Excel earlier. Because it's 'quicker and easier', isn't it?:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1hCMKav3LE
 
I agree with drsilver. (4 posts above this one) When I bought my first full version of Photoshop it was Photoshop 5 Then I updated it a couple of years later to PS6 and shortly after that Cs and then CS2. The initial purchase was as far as I remember around £550 and each of the upgrades were over £120-£130. The subscription is under £10 a month or to put it another way it would not buy me a decent bottle of wine. The annual updates are fine, I have no problem with them and this ensures my system is as good as it gets. I have had a couple of problems but the Adobe help line has always managed to sort things out. The last one being I changed the hard drive on my laptop and it refused to load and that was due to the system thinking I was trying to go past my limit of 2 computers. They checked manually and all was OK.
 
Probably nothing bigger than a screen of data you can check by eye,

I actually read one of those articles. Thanks for linking. Here's a money quote.

"For a bit of context, Excel's XLS file format dates back to 1987. It was superseded by XLSX in 2007. Had this been used, it would have handled 16 times the number of cases. "

Speaks to the importance of keeping your software current.
 
Considering how much £550 was worth in 2000 then, compare that to todays values, I think ADOBE is actually quite good value (See my 1st post)
 
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Adobe aren't bothered about you. Or tins, or raw materials.

They are bothered about shareholders.

It is quite possible that Affinity shareholders take over from Adobe shareholders as bogeymen.

But £70 a month for Adobe software forever is usurious.

I had to look that one up!


Having read every reply on this topic, I am confused.

The Lightroom 6 I have doesn't have the multiple pictures exposre bracketing tool, or if it does I cannot find it (merge pictures?), where you take 3 pictures at different exposures to save highlights and shadows..... like HDR sort of thing. I don't know what it is called, but I would like to try to use it. I still have Photomatix but it won't work with the RAW images from my drone.

What editing programme can I get (not rent) that will do the RAW pictures and the HDR exposure merging like Lightroom does? OR even better, how do I find that 'editing trick' on my Lightroom that I have got? Please.

ps - what is DAM?
 
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Pound Coin said:
Adobe aren't bothered about you. Or tins, or raw materials.

They are bothered about shareholders.

It is quite possible that Affinity shareholders take over from Adobe shareholders as bogeymen.

But £70 a month for Adobe software forever is
usurious.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


£70 per month! That will include all the add-ons and alternate editing for video etc, for simple Photoshop with Lightroom and RAW I pay under a tenner.

If the user who pays £70 a month is a professional and needs all the other bits and pieces then it will be tax allowable so perhaps not a bad deal
 
Pound Coin said:
Adobe aren't bothered about you. Or tins, or raw materials.

They are bothered about shareholders.

It is quite possible that Affinity shareholders take over from Adobe shareholders as bogeymen.

But £70 a month for Adobe software forever is
usurious.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


£70 per month! That will include all the add-ons and alternate editing for video etc, for simple Photoshop with Lightroom and RAW I pay under a tenner.

If the user who pays £70 a month is a professional and needs all the other bits and pieces then it will be tax allowable so perhaps not a bad deal
Nope.

Have a further look.

For photographers, you might suck up the cost and pay your £9ish a month. If you want one more App, that's it. £70. There is no menu, no choice. I used to use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat.

Now I do not. I use Affinity, (and a grim PDF app). I did not need the other "bits and pieces" because I use a Mac and FCPX, I have no need for Premiere, so giving it to me "for free" if I needed InDesign was pointless. If Adobe gave menu options rather than £9 OR £70 they might have kept my money.

Hey Adobe, I'd like to use Photoshop,
Yay £9
Hey Adobe, I'd like to use Photoshop, InDesign
Yay £70 (could be £18)

But they don't. usurious.
 
They are not in it for love or the benefit of mankind they are a company and they have to satisfy their Board and shareholders. A Fact of life we cannot get away from it. Whatever price it is if you are a Professional and need it for your work then it will be tax allowable so it isn't so bad. If you are not, I cannot see the point of buying or paying for something just for the sake of it. For what I use it for, the cost is reasonable It is my hobby and some folk pay a lot more for items they use in a hobby than this. £120 a year is really in this day and age not a huge amount.,
 
I actually read one of those articles. Thanks for linking. Here's a money quote.

"For a bit of context, Excel's XLS file format dates back to 1987. It was superseded by XLSX in 2007. Had this been used, it would have handled 16 times the number of cases. "

Speaks to the importance of keeping your software current.
Thanks for reading my rant. It's been suggested elsewhere that they were probably using recent or cxurrent versions of Excel - the older file format might have been chosen for compatibility with something else (xls is easier to parse than xlsx). But in any case, for me the take-home message of that article is:

"Excel was always meant for people mucking around with a bunch of data for their small company to see what it looked like," commented Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge.
"And then when you need to do something more serious, you build something bespoke that works - there's dozens of other things you could do.


This is one of the many use cases where Excel is simply the wrong tool, and the 'solution' to this particular issue (splitting the data into smaller chunks that fit in 65k rows) misses the point. The wider problem is, Excel is the wrong tool a lot of the time, arguably most of the time.
 
£120 a year is really in this day and age not a huge amount.,
We've gone a full circle here :D
I don't think it's about the money. As discussed on first couple pages most people including myself can afford it no problem. We don't like their business model/ethics.

And if they are not, they should be in it for love and benefit of mankind as you put it. that doesn't mean not making a profit. There are many good companies who look after their staff and customers very nicely and in the long run a lot of them do better than companies that just think about appeasing their shareholders.
 
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For photographers, you might suck up the cost and pay your £9ish a month. If you want one more App, that's it. £70. There is no menu, no choice. I used to use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat.
That combination used to be available for about £1000 in the CS6 days as the Design Standard package (perpetual licence, at least until Adobe switches off the activation server). Depending what terms you get full CC on, that only pays for 13-20 months of rental. I think for academic pricing, 1 year of CC is a little more than the CS6 DS perpetual licence. People who did not buy every upgrade are seeing a major price hike, and nobody has the option of continuing to use the sofware when their subscription runs out. I have a copy of PS7 from 2002 that runs well under the latest build of Windows 10.
 
That combination used to be available for about £1000 in the CS6 days as the Design Standard package (perpetual licence, at least until Adobe switches off the activation server). Depending what terms you get full CC on, that only pays for 13-20 months of rental. I think for academic pricing, 1 year of CC is a little more than the CS6 DS perpetual licence. People who did not buy every upgrade are seeing a major price hike, and nobody has the option of continuing to use the sofware when their subscription runs out. I have a copy of PS7 from 2002 that runs well under the latest build of Windows 10.
I bought every other upgrade.

they have lost my money. I was paying them c£350 par year, but they now want £700 per year. @darkroom12 says for a business that is acceptable. I’m not aware of many businesses that happily pay twice as much for the same service, and at the same time, lose acces to their files if they stop paying.

he/states that businesses need to make money, to satisfy their Board and their shareholders, Well, that’s what they have chosen, not what I have. They lose my business.

it is perfectly possible to make a profit without ignoring your customers.
 
The answer is quite simple. If you don't like Adobe - don't use it! Complaining on this platform is not gong to change anything
 
Not sure about that...

educating potential and current users will change things.
 
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I had to look that one up!


Having read every reply on this topic, I am confused.

The Lightroom 6 I have doesn't have the multiple pictures exposre bracketing tool, or if it does I cannot find it (merge pictures?), where you take 3 pictures at different exposures to save highlights and shadows..... like HDR sort of thing. I don't know what it is called, but I would like to try to use it. I still have Photomatix but it won't work with the RAW images from my drone.

What editing programme can I get (not rent) that will do the RAW pictures and the HDR exposure merging like Lightroom does? OR even better, how do I find that 'editing trick' on my Lightroom that I have got? Please.

ps - what is DAM?


Select the photos you wish to merge, click on "photo", go to "photo merge" and then HDR. Bingo!
 
Thanks for reading my rant. It's been suggested elsewhere that they were probably using recent or cxurrent versions of Excel - the older file format might have been chosen for compatibility with something else (xls is easier to parse than xlsx). But in any case, for me the take-home message of that article is:

"Excel was always meant for people mucking around with a bunch of data for their small company to see what it looked like," commented Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge.
"And then when you need to do something more serious, you build something bespoke that works - there's dozens of other things you could do.


This is one of the many use cases where Excel is simply the wrong tool, and the 'solution' to this particular issue (splitting the data into smaller chunks that fit in 65k rows) misses the point. The wider problem is, Excel is the wrong tool a lot of the time, arguably most of the time.
Last post on this. Wrong place.

Who is Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge and what does he teach? I bet it's not business. Anybody who works with numbers for a living, from office clerks to C-Suite executives, uses Excel. It's the user interface for their numbers. An aggregation tool. They use it to record the present, compare it to the past and plan the future. Walk down to your accounting or finance department and tell them they shouldn't be using Excel. They're a dour bunch. They'd probably enjoy a good laugh.

You can have something "bespoke" built but it will probably cost 6, 7, 8 figures, take a year or 2 to develop, then be buggy for a couple of years after that. Even then, the users will probably pump the numbers produced through Excel one last time just to be comfortable.
 
Last post on this. Wrong place.

Who is Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge and what does he teach? I bet it's not business. Anybody who works with numbers for a living, from office clerks to C-Suite executives, uses Excel. It's the user interface for their numbers. An aggregation tool. They use it to record the present, compare it to the past and plan the future. Walk down to your accounting or finance department and tell them they shouldn't be using Excel. They're a dour bunch. They'd probably enjoy a good laugh.

You can have something "bespoke" built but it will probably cost 6, 7, 8 figures, take a year or 2 to develop, then be buggy for a couple of years after that. Even then, the users will probably pump the numbers produced through Excel one last time just to be comfortable.

This ^^^
Although we're not such a dour bunch in Finance. ;)

I often here that Excel "is just a spreadsheet" but it's so much more. I've been using it intensely for over a quarter of a century and have still barely scratched the surface.
 
Nope.

Have a further look.

For photographers, you might suck up the cost and pay your £9ish a month. If you want one more App, that's it. £70. There is no menu, no choice. I used to use Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat.

Now I do not. I use Affinity, (and a grim PDF app). I did not need the other "bits and pieces" because I use a Mac and FCPX, I have no need for Premiere, so giving it to me "for free" if I needed InDesign was pointless. If Adobe gave menu options rather than £9 OR £70 they might have kept my money.

Hey Adobe, I'd like to use Photoshop,
Yay £9
Hey Adobe, I'd like to use Photoshop, InDesign
Yay £70 (could be £18)

But they don't. usurious.
Where are you getting £70 per month? - it's just under £50 for the full Creative Cloud. You also quote Photo package plus one more app at £70 - for Photography Package plus InDesign it's £9.98 (photo package) plus £19.97 for InDesign
 
Th
Last post on this. Wrong place.

Who is Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge and what does he teach? I bet it's not business. Anybody who works with numbers for a living, from office clerks to C-Suite executives, uses Excel. It's the user interface for their numbers. An aggregation tool. They use it to record the present, compare it to the past and plan the future. Walk down to your accounting or finance department and tell them they shouldn't be using Excel. They're a dour bunch. They'd probably enjoy a good laugh.

You can have something "bespoke" built but it will probably cost 6, 7, 8 figures, take a year or 2 to develop, then be buggy for a couple of years after that. Even then, the users will probably pump the numbers produced through Excel one last time just to be comfortable.
Just some guy they made a Fellow of the Royal Society for his fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of routing data through computer networks. I bet those guys in Accounts could teach him a thing or two. :)

Frankly, I'd be surprised if the problem of combining a few CSV files the PHE developers bodged (and botched) in Excel couldn't be handled better by a few dozen linex of Perl or Python, but that's probably why I'm not paid 6 figures.

The gene name example illustrates one of the main dangers of Excel, which is that it does unexpected things without warning you. Imagine you've imported 20,000 rows of data. Everything seems to have gone perfectly. You run your eye down the column of abbreviated names, and it seems to be absolutely fine. But somewhere in that column, a dozen or so fields have been silently converted to dates, corrupting them irreversibly. Excel is trying to be 'helpful' but it isn't clever enough to catch that treating a tiny proportion of entries in a column completely differently is rarely a sensible thing to do, and is neither what the user wants nor expects. MS Access copes with this much better, forcing the user to specify a data type in advance for anything you import and giving you a list of every field that doesn't fit. But then Access is a database, and is designed to be (relatively) robust where Excel can be flaky. But because Excel is so easy to use it's routinely used, inappopriately, in place of a proper database. A bit like using MS Paint because you can't get to grips with Photoshop.
 
Select the photos you wish to merge, click on "photo", go to "photo merge" and then HDR. Bingo!

Where do I find this 'photo'?

My screen in 'develop' has the options down the right: histogram, basic', tone curve, HSL, split toning, detail, lens correction, effects, camera calibration.
On the left: navigator, presets, snapshots, history, collections.
Across the top: library, develop, map, book, slideshow, print, web.
Bottom: copy, paste soft proofing, synch, reset

I cannot find a button marked 'photo' anywhere.
 
Where do I find this 'photo'?

My screen in 'develop' has the options down the right: histogram, basic', tone curve, HSL, split toning, detail, lens correction, effects, camera calibration.
On the left: navigator, presets, snapshots, history, collections.
Across the top: library, develop, map, book, slideshow, print, web.
Bottom: copy, paste soft proofing, synch, reset

I cannot find a button marked 'photo' anywhere.

"Photo" is one of the menus at the top after "File", "Edit" etc.

Screenshot 2020-11-23 at 22.20.38.png
 
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Where do I find this 'photo'?

My screen in 'develop' has the options down the right: histogram, basic', tone curve, HSL, split toning, detail, lens correction, effects, camera calibration.
On the left: navigator, presets, snapshots, history, collections.
Across the top: library, develop, map, book, slideshow, print, web.
Bottom: copy, paste soft proofing, synch, reset

I cannot find a button marked 'photo' anywhere.

In the library menu select the photos you wish to merge - click the first picture, hold down shift and then click the last picture.
Right click on one of the selected pictures to open a menu.
Find Photo Merge part-way down, click it and then choose between HDR and Panorama.
 
Where are you getting £70 per month? - it's just under £50 for the full Creative Cloud. You also quote Photo package plus one more app at £70 - for Photography Package plus InDesign it's £9.98 (photo package) plus £19.97 for InDesign
Ah, only £50, that’s alright then.

when I made my decision to dump Adobe it was £70.

so a small price reduction has no effect. it is still usurious
 
On to Excel.

excel is brilliant for crunching numbers.

Not so brilliant as a database, or when spreadsheet designers don’t protect sheets, so cells with formulae cannot be overwritten. Or when complicated formulae have errors in them.
 
I don't have any of that... my top row is LIBRARY DEVELOP MAP BOOK SLIDESHOW PRINT WEB

Are you using OSX or Windows? I've never used Lightroom on Windows but does it not have File, Edit etc somewhere above LIBRARY DEVELOP MAP BOOK SLIDESHOW PRINT WEB? I'm talking about menus, not Lightroom Modules.
 
On to Excel.

excel is brilliant for crunching numbers.

Not so brilliant as a database, or when spreadsheet designers don’t protect sheets, so cells with formulae cannot be overwritten. Or when complicated formulae have errors in them.

Actually, while spreadsheets are great for simple storage and "quick" looks at small quantities of data. You touch on why they aren't that brilliant at crunching numbers when you mention errors in formulae, which can run through all your analysis, be difficult to notice in the first place and then difficult to find.

The core problem of Excel for serious number crunching is that it works back to front. The raw data, that should never be changed, is "in your face" with Excel, and much of the number crunching physically adds to, alters or manipulates that raw data. While the actual bit that changes things (the formulae) that you need to keep a handle on is hidden. This has been confounded by Excels long history of making errors with both calculations and data manipulations.

With professional number crunching tools like SAS, S-Plus and R, the data is normally hidden and protected, and it’s the equivalent of the Excel formulae that are "in your face" where it's easier to see errors and you are only ever looking at a "view" of the raw data which keeps the raw data secure.

There is a lot of Spreadsheet best practise advice around because its well recognised how easy it is for major errors in both data management and data analysis to go unnoticed, but the best, "best practise" for most (all) serious users, is normally not to use a spreadsheet at all.
 
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