If It Ain't Broke....

Written by Carl Weese

Not long ago Mike mentioned how annoying it can be when software manufacturers include changes in an update that disrupt our accustomed workflow. I’ve just encountered one of these situations and thought it might be useful to recount what happened and what I’ve done—so far—to cope with the changes.

As background, while I still shoot large format film and work on scans in Photoshop, with digital capture I do almost everything in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), the raw file development module of Photoshop Creative Cloud (PSCC). After a recent update of PSCC, the first time opened a capture from Bridge into ACR I saw that the main, or “Basic” panel of buttons and sliders was significantly changed. The top of the panel now begins with a Treatment line, with radio buttons for Color and Black & White. The next line is Profile, with a dropdown and an expansion option that turns out to offer a large number of profile choices. The pane where we used to do the b&w/monochrome conversion now has only the set of sliders for Black & White Mix. (I’m currently reading a book that quotes frequently from books and correspondence of late 18th century authors, and I’m amused to find that their use of Capitalization is almost as extravagant as Adobe’s.) Next I noticed that the very useful-if-you-don’t-overdo-it Dehaze tool has been promoted from the fx pane to the Basic panel.

Then I hit a snag. I’d just shot a session that I planned for B&W. Over years of working with ACR I’ve saved quite a lot of User Presets. Things like half a dozen frequently-used white balance settings, four different levels of vignette (lens falloff) corrections, something as simple as a setting that only invoked the monochrome/grayscale conversion of the HSL pane. I selected all the captures in the session, then went to the top menu for Edit > Develop Settings…expecting to see all of my custom presents. They were gone. Copy, paste, previous conversion, and ACR defaults were the only options. Those aren’t exactly difficult to use, but they’re nowhere near as convenient as having my own set of User Presets available.

So I headed to the Presets pane, and found a whole new set of dropdown menus: Color, Creative, B&W, Curve, Grain, Sharpening, Vignetting, and then finally, User Presets. I applied my grayscale preset to a single file, dropped back to Bridge, selected the rest of the session captures, then went to Edit > Develop Settings > Previous Conversion.

Later, I began to work with some new captures. There were just a few so I brought six into ACR, selected all and hit the new Black & White button at the top of the Basic panel. Yuk! The conversions were harsh and ugly. They were a terrible tonal representation of the color image before conversion. Hmm. The second line in the panel, Profile, read out Adobe Monochrome. I dropped back to Bridge and brought up one of the files I’d converted earlier, and found that the Profile read Adobe Standard B&W. What’s going on?

Back to the new files, up into ACR, and I opened the long list of Profile drop downs. Under B&W there were seventeen options. Most were harsh and ugly, but a few looked more promising. The last five clearly imitated classic pan film filter effects, B&W Yellow Filter, B&W Orange Filter, etc. Then I noticed that one of the dropdown options was Legacy, and sure enough, when I opened it, there was Adobe Standard B&W. Apparently, calling up my grayscale User Preset located this option under the hood and provided the grayscale conversion I’d been used to. It really is the Legacy conversion that used to be the default. Rummaging around a bit, I found that I could make Adobe Standard B&W a Favorite, and I could cut Adobe Monochrome from the Favorite list (if not consign it to an inner circle of Hell), making Adobe Standard B&W effectively the default if I hit the Black & White button up in the first line of the Basic panel.

On a more positive note, I was disconcerted when I first found the new and improved User Presets drop down, because, as I moved the cursor down the list of presets, the image in the Preview window jumped all over the place. Each Preset was being immediately previewed. Once I’d gotten the mono conversion issue at least preliminarily settled, I went back to look at this again, and have to say that I like it. Mousing over my set of saved White Balance settings and seeing the Preview image show the effect without actually committing to it is really quite cool. Same for my set of vignette correction settings. Not to mention my often used highlight recovery settings. I’m going to save more of those at a finer grade of distinctions because it is now so easy to preview their effect by just mousing down the list of User Presets before selecting one of them.

There’s some validity to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and changes like these can be annoying, especially if what’s going on is pretty opaque, but sometimes there’s really good stuff to be found in what the anonymous elves stick us with in each upgrade. I’m old enough that being forced to learn new stuff is supposed to be good for me, so I’m not all that annoyed.

Carl

Carl Weese, who lives in rural Connecticut with his artist wife Tina, has been teaching the esoteric art of fine platinum printing in group workshops and private tutoring sessions since the 1990s. He has had several Pt/Pd print sales on TOP.

©2018 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob de Loe: "Under the new model Adobe is following we are going to have to get used to frequent major changes like this. I actually like the new Profiles approach. I compared the Adobe Monochrome profile to the one I developed using the old camera profiles, and I prefer Adobe Monochrome. It brings out just a touch more separation between tones at the start, meaning that it gives me a bit more headroom to make adjustments using the other tools. My only worry was that Adobe will 'tweak' the Profiles in future versions, meaning that in a few years an image I open in Lightroom will be different than it is today because the foundational profile was changed behind the scenes. It's been suggested to me when I raised this elsewhere that Adobe won't do this; instead they'll preserve Adobe Monochrome as it is, and make a new version with a new name. This is the approach they use with Process Versions (so I have some hope that this may be how they do it)."

Eric Chan: "Here is some more information about the new Profiles feature in Camera Raw (also applicable to Lightroom). And here's a video that provides an overview of the feature as presented in Camera Raw. Rob, we are definitely sensitive to preserving the appearance of your existing (already-edited) images. If we find ways to improve the quality of the profiles, we would be creating new or additional profiles (instead of changing the appearance of existing profiles). Cheers, Eric Chan, Camera Raw Engineer."

Thomas Knoll: "Mark presets as Favorites to have them appear in the Bridge menu. It is now common to have hundreds or more presets installed, and we needed a way to keep the menu usable."

[Thomas Knoll of Adobe Systems is the original creator of Photoshop. —Ed.]

Carl replies: Marking presets as Favorites to have them appear in the Bridge menu works nicely. There are only a few user presets I frequently want to apply to large groups of files, so it was easy to add them back to the Bridge menu as Favorites and have them back again.

Howard: "Let me recommend an enlightening book that will help with these changes: Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson, M.D."

Comments

[Rick Denney]

My experience with things put in "Legacy" categories suggests they hope people won't find it so they can dispense with it altogether in the next update.

And this is one fear I have with the Creative Cloud. My time is precious, and frequently spending time trying to reverse engineer what some 20-something software writer thought was my use case would invade that scarce commodity. My old version of CS6 might be obsolete, but so are most of my cameras, lenses, methods, and thought processes.

I can handle learning a new system about once every five years. My next major learning curve may well be for some product not made by Adobe. I think I'm going to start with ON1, since PhaseOne has blocked Pentax from Capture One. Sustainability is a problem in all aspects of photography right now.

[David Bateman]

This is why I like fixed versions of software. Sometimes things get broken. The constant update cycle I don't think we really need.
But apparently hackers and crackers are lurking to steal all our info, so we must constantly update.

[Stephen Scharf]

I'm finding that I'm using Lightroom pretty much only for DAM and as a "plug-in portal" these days. For selects, all my sharpening for Fuji RAF files is done using Iridient Developer as a plug-in, and then often tweaking the image in Luminar Jupiter 2018 (also used as a plug-in). I find Luminar provides a level of control over making tweaks that is more comprehensive, yet simpler, easier and faster than using LR's tool panels.

Regarding B&W conversion, I'm pretty much only using Skylum's (makers of Luminar) Tonality CK with has lots of very nice preset that make selecting and tweaking B&W conversion a snap.

Once Skylum has added DAM to Luminar, Adobe is going to be looking over its shoulder; Luminar is coming and closing strong.

[Carl]

Rob, I think that the fact Adobe Standard B&W is there in the Legacy dropdown menu bodes well for them keeping profiles available even if they issue "improved" versions.

[Jim Grey]

I make software for a living, and have for going on 30 years. What Adobe is doing is how it's done across the industry now. And it alienates users everywhere.

The other side, however, is that if a software package doesn't get tweaks, updates, and even redesigns -- it grows stale and can lose its market position.

I personally don't mind much the changes Adobe made in PS this time. What I don't like is that there was *zero* warning of the changes. I got the notice that a new version was available, I installed it, and then I had to re-learn a bunch of stuff just to do some quick processing of photos in the RAW editor. Grr. There needed to be some level of "here's what's new" documentation.

[Kerry]

Changing software for no good reason while hiding controls is infuriating, and leaves me not knowing how to do what I previously easily accomplished. Companies want to make sales, but as a customer, I have the final vote. My response to companies disrespecting users in this way is to happily use 15-20 year old purchased software (no subscriptions!) on 10 year old hardware, which is all way more than good enough and also avoids lots of unneeded expense. (Old hardware still works great with added memory, solid state disks, and larger hard drives. If forced to upgrade operating systems for security reasons or because hardware has to be replaced, I'm likely to just keep using the same old software unchanged, but running in a virtual machine.)

[Christopher Crawford]

Like Rob, I prefer the new version for B&W conversions. The old version's B&W was flat and lifeless, with poor midtone separation. The new one is much better, and requires far less use of the controls that increase contrast, like Clarity.

I made a video on how to use the new profiles for B&W conversions.

https://youtu.be/_jdMCqJdC2E

[Herb Cunningham]

The inner circle of Hell should be reserved for the trolls that change stuff on software menus-
if you don't spend many hours/day on this kind of work, it is a colossal PITA to re-learn all their needless changes.
Adobe need to lay off half their programmers!
Then they won't have time to mess with us.

[Richard Barbour]

This is exactly why I stopped my subscription to Photoshop/Lightroom/Camera Raw. I am now forever stuck with PS CS6 but don't have to worry about any more interface/feature changes which were driving me crazy. I have DXO PhotoLab to do raw conversions for new cameras and can keep processing there or export to PS. Also have Adobe DNG converter as an option. I'm a much happier camper.

[Bahi]

Two positive changes in these updates. One is that it puts the choice of camera profile up at the very top of all the basic adjustments in Lightroom, where it should always have been. Another is that (for my camera), the new Adobe Color is much better at reds, oranges and yellows than the previous Adobe Standard profile. Good enough that I may skip making my own camera profiles this time around—something I've never considered in the past.

The Adobe Standard profile delivered reds that veered a little towards magenta, at least for my cameras. Now, they render a satisfying, well saturated red where it's called for. Hong Kong taxis photographed in the sunlight appear close enough, at last, to the way I remember them. (I'm using a wide-gamut display, carefully calibrated and profiled!) I'm very pleased.

[Wayne]

It is heartening to hear there are others out there who become satisfied with software, not comprehending the utility of "advances/features" bestowed upon us.

I remember, years ago, Microsoft Word used to have a "fit to one page" button allowing, in cases where your lines were a few too many, compression of a two page document so as to generate a one page document. I used it frequently. I recall expressing my disappointment at its elimination to a young IT person. He diplomatically explained that I was correct, and that this change was, indeed, a "feature" associated with the most recent Word update.........I felt very alone.