The Online Photographer

If You Shoot With an Older Camera...

...You can get a copy of DxO Optics Pro 9 for free. Courtesy of DxO and DigitalCamera UK, which is a magazine.

Check the list of supported cameras first; most are more than two years old.

The free license is not upgradable. (Fair enough.)

The current version of the software is DxO Optics Pro 11. It's currently on sale for $149 from $199.

Mike
(Thanks to Eric Walter)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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C-E-R

Why we shouldn't say "post" or
"Photoshopping" any more.

-

By Michael C. Johnston
all rights reserved

Ctein hates the term "post-processing." It's one of those (unfortunately all too common) terms that grew up twisted and parasitic, like an invasive species in the forest. "It's clinical and has a disparaging connotation," Ctein wrote. "It implies that 'getting it right in the camera' is somehow inherently superior, like the snobbishness one used to get from the Kodachrome users—'we get it right the first time.' What a load of B.S...." (He went on to point out that slide-film shooters were just making a virtue of a necessity—okay, "putting lipstick on the pig" was how he actually phrased it—because with slides you really were stuck with what you got out of the camera. Maybe they got it right the first time—there was some virtue in that, actually—but it was because they had no choice.)

He said "we really need a better term than 'post-processing.' It's off-putting and unnecessarily divisive. Mind you, I've got my individual answer which is, I don't post-process, I print. But that doesn't solve the larger language problem."

He asked me to think on it. Bad terminology is a particular bugbear of mine, because language can't keep up with technology—it needs more time to evolve. Ctein said he prints, but don't get me started on print and its modifiers—print being both a verb and a noun, and a printer being both a person and a machine! Yikes. A word so nice we have to slather it all over everything like pesticide on a potato field.

I ran across an analogous situation in psychology recently. Adult attachment, a relatively recent field, divides people into "secure attachment styles" and "insecure attachment styles." The insecure types are further divided into "anxious attachment style" and "avoidant attachment style." Nice examples of exceptionally poor terminology—all those terms are too long, all use words that have different meanings and other commonsense connotations and are frequently used in other contexts, and none go from the collective to the individual case easily. E.g., what do you call an individual person with an anxious attachment style? An "anxious"? Thanks, that's helpful.

The only term making inroads on "post processing" is "editing," based on the fact that some image-modifying software programs are being called "editors." Again, totally hopeless, since "editor" is a staff member at a publication and "editing"—in photography—more commonly means selecting shots to use from a larger amount of shooting. (At least "sequencing" is a separate word for that separate task. Be thankful for small felicities.)

If I could correct any of this I would, but I appear to have neither a gift for neologisms nor any influence in getting new terms to stick. Well, apart from bokeh. (Michael Reichmann got pixel-peeper to stick, which was impressive.)

But Ctein is right—"post-processing" (often abbreviated just to "post") is hopeless. It's even potentially misleading, not only for the reason he mentioned but because it implies it's what you do after the processing...which in film days meant the onerous chore of developing exposed film into negatives. We don't do "processing" at all any more; we just import (or send) and open the files. Right now, we use "post" to mean anything from clicking an Instagram filter that puts clown makeup on a face, to spotting a film scan, to wholesale computer-generated imagery like constructing a background that never existed for a catalog product shot. It's hopelessly vague, an "umbrella" term that covers everything, and that keeps its meaning well hidden—wholly unhelpful except as an arbitrary label. A nonsense word would work as well. We might as well call it brillig (in the slithy toves).

"Thinking on it," as Ctein asked me to do, I'm aware that I can't change accepted convention. But if I could, I think I'd change "post-processing" to "C-E-R." Pronounced "see-ee-are," as in the letters of the alphabet.

• "C" for correction, meaning the continuation of all the choices you made before and during shooting. You chose what camera (sensor) and lens to use, you chose where to where to look from and what to include and exclude. You chose, or could have chosen, white balance and exposure level and aperture and focus point and a number of other variables. "Correction" after the fact, once the image is imported to software, just continues those choices, to include minor cropping (or the cropping you visualized when you shot if it's major), cast correction (if the camera's automation made the picture too cool—too blue—you can change that), exposure range correction (slight "HDR" to retain highlight detail and reveal shadow detail for instance). Color balancing. Minor cleanup when something went wrong, for instance if your sensor has a hot pixel or a dust spot that creates a blemish in a sky. This is the sort of thing we all do even to snapshots and record shots and is pretty mild and habitual for a lot of us.

• "E" for enhancement, the addition of visual effects that you think might heighten the impression somehow. Changes in what's now called "clarity" (because that's what Adobe labeled it in Lightroom—better than "reverse unsharp mask" which is what the same thing used to be called before there was a slider for it), heightened saturation, local contrast for effect, sharpness past what human eyes can see, rebalancing of the tonal properties, HDR effects, vignetting, or selective lightening and darkening of areas to call attention to certain things and make others less obvious. "Structure" in B&W, because that's what hyping the local contrast and creating pseudo edge-effects is called in Nik Silver Efex.

• "R" for reworking, meaning the wholesale adding, subtracting, or changing of elements and/or meaning. Take another look at the "before and after" GIF that reader chris_scl supplied the other day of Steve McCurry's rickshaw picture:

It becomes obvious how extensively the picture has been reworked. As several readers pointed out, the changes are many, and the extent of the reworking has changed the very meaning and feeling of the picture. How hard the driver is working, the busy-ness of the street, the mood of the passengers, and the signifiers of the presence of the photographer have all been altered. "Reworking" is currently called "Photoshopping," (or 'shopping or potato-chopping or any number of slang variants) which, again, as terminology, has so many things wrong with it I don't even have time to list them all.

"CER" as a term implies a progressive hierarchy of alteration to images in software, from very light correction to very heavy reworking, but you'll note that none of these three terms imply value judgements. Yes, formal photojournalism has restrictions in place against reworking, but photojournalists sometimes get away with enhancements that are pretty extreme—if this were a longer essay I could specify several examples. The other day I referred to reworked photographs as being "faked up," but that's really only a comment on my own personal value system—as a general descriptive term it's not helpful at all; for some artists and some enthusiasts, reworking is an indivisible part of their project and of the way they make their work or have their fun with imagemaking, and it can in some cases be planned or intended from before the moment of exposure. All three of the terms comprising CER are value-neutral.

And the three words, correction, enhancement, and reworking, are adaptable and have sensical* meanings. And they adapt to speech well, because you can just use the individual terms—"I have to do correction before I send the files." "She's an enhancer but she isn't into reworking."

And Ctein is right—there is utterly no intrinsic value in not doing CER. There's no such thing as "purism" in digital imaging (although each person or organization can choose their or its own principles.) It's taken for granted in digital imaging, and it should be (however you do it), because it continues the sequence of creative decision-making that characterizes the whole chain of image-making from initial idea to finished product. That whole chain is the "process," really. No part of it is "post" (i.e., preposition meaning after).

You'll never encounter the term CER again outside of this one single post about it by me. (See, there's that all-purpose word again, post.) Language settles where it settles, and like it or not we're stuck with the stinky little misshapen bastard term "post" for the software phase of digital imaging, and "Photoshopping" as a wholly unfair word for altering or reworking a digital image. C'est la vie.

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

*This is a made-up word that's a back-formation from nonsensical and commonsensical. It means something that has internal logic. I encountered it reading philosophy. It's not officially a real word, but I like it anyway.

P.S. I put my byline on this because some guy on Facebook ripped off my post from Sunday! He later apologized and posted a link, though, when Carl nudged him about it, so all is forgiven. But really, you can't steal stuff from the Internet just because it's on the Internet.

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Wes: "I prefer the term 'adjustments' to 'corrections.' I feel the latter has too much of a negative connotation in most people's minds, implying mistakes were made and need to be fixed. 'Adjustments'—while not perfect—is a much less negative, and still accurate, word."

Joe Boris: "File 'optimization' is how I describe post-capture workflow (charges) in my estimates and invoices. This seems to cover whatever final medium the image is being prepared for, whether for 'print' or 'electronic' display."

Keith B.: "The term 'post processing' to describe processing makes no sense. Just like 'micro contrast' (very tiny contrast??). I suspect, but have not determined with certainty, that the terms 'post' and 'post processing' are misappropriated adaptations of the terms 'post' and 'post production' used in motion picture work. In movie work, 'production' is the actual shooting of the film. Actors, sets, lighting, crew...and photography. 'Pre-production' is the work that precedes this: Hiring actors and crew, planning the logistics, designing and building the sets. 'Post production' is all the work that follows the shooting of the film: assembling the pieces (editing), mixing and dubbing sound, special photographic or computer-generated effects, recording music, etc. What we do with digital still photography after we shoot is analogous to, but obviously not exactly the same as, movie post production work. How 'bout we just call it 'processing?'"

Richard Newman: "I can't agree with Ctein and you on this. 'Post-processing' is accurate and appropriate. Every image coming from a digital camera has been processed, in varying degrees, through the camera's on-board computer. Even with raw images. And of course, most cameras today offer in-camera processing options of great variety. As for CER, its a nice concept whose definitions open a whole truckload of worms. Is HDR C or E or R? Many will beg to differ, no matter which choice is made. Ditto many less complex modifications to the initial image file. And what about files from the variable focus cameras? If you change point of focus, is that C or E or R? Or....?? I think of it as post-camera processing. And the term 'photoshoping' as become generic, much as xerox did for photocopying. It may not be aesthetic, but it isn't inaccurate."

Andrea Blum: "So from now on I'll be 'corrhancing' my photo files because as awkward as that neologism is, the word better describes what I do who does not print much and who mostly avoids any rework unless it involves a stray electric wire. I never could figure out what I was supposed to do after processing a photo! Whatever term may eventually catch on, thank you for this article. I had begun to think I was the only one who hated the term 'post processing.' It is nice to find that I'm in such good company!"

David Cope: "As an ex slide shooter I can tell you there was nothing snobbish about being told to shoot an assignment for production where it was expected you would get 'get it right the first time'! Mildly terrifying actually. Whilst there was pride in ones work when one did get it right the first time, the reality had more to do with copious bracketing and the occasional rescue attempt with the slide duplicator! CER (assuming the rights for this are now in the public domain otherwise my agent will need to contact yours to sort out a deal!)—I like where this is heading and will adopt for my work if I may. I'm definitely a C type person, with a bit of E as needed and never any R. (Well, so far!)"

John Sparks: "I used to post my film at the Post Office to the photo shop for printing by the printer on their printer so they could post the processed film and prints back to me so I could edit the prints. Now I just Photoshop my images in post and then post them on the Internet."

Mike replies: Exactly.

John Denniston: "I always thought this was simple. Processing is colour correction, cropping, straightening, HDR if needed, and cleaning up dust spots. Post-processing is adjusting the picture for specific output such as converting it to CMYK, checking for highlight dot, maximum ink limits, USM, and cropping to size. Or, it can be re-sizing for the web, changing the profile to SRGB, etc. Softproofing is also post-processing as you're making adjustments for a specific paper on a specific ink jet printer."

Joe (partial comment): "In the days of film, it was called darkroom work. In the days of digital, maybe it should be called 'screen' work since you are looking at a computer screen most of the time."

William Furniss: "My quotations have line items for 'processing' and 'retouching.' If necessary I explain that processing is adjusting raw files for colour and contrast. My clients seem happy with that. Retouching is apparently well understood at this stage and it sounds more serious than Photoshopping which I think infers a hacks fix of something gone wrong."

Mike replies: That seems like the best practical distillation of the issues to me. As a practical matter no one's ever going to use "CER" as a term; but "retouching" is a well-established word that makes a (fairly) value-neutral acknowledgement of what, for instance, McCurry's people did to the rickshaw photo. Also, this should please the people who insist that there's no difference between the darkroom and Photoshop, because you could retouch and change the look of the picture in both media.

Victor Bloomfield: "Edward Weston's take on post-processing, from his Daybook on 4-29-30 as quoted in My Camera on Point Lobos, p. 74: 'In my work the final form of presentation is seen on the ground glass, the finished print previsioned complete in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure. The shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception. The first fresh emotion is captured complete and for all time at the very moment it is seen and felt. Feeling and recording are simultaneous, hence the great vitality in such pure photography and its loss in manipulated photography. The nearest thing to it is a quick line sketch, done usually as a note for further elaboration. And how much finer, stronger, more vivid these sketches are than the finished painting.'"

DxO With Older Image Files

John Lehet at his most recent solo photo show in
New Hampshire, October 2015

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Written by John Lehet

When you and I last spoke in person, Mike, at my last show in New Hampshire, you expressed surprise that I used DxO. I use it mostly for the reasons you point out in Tuesday's post, "Ah, the Night Sky (Old FF Dynamic Range)." While sensors have certainly improved a good bit, demosaicing and noise reduction algorithms have improved more quickly. So if you shot RAW in the past, your images can have an improved second life. Some of the images of mine that you saw hanging were made with older, lesser sensors and lenses, but I was able to coax some quality out of them.

I know that the other premium raw processors have their adherents, and probably for a reason, but I  settled on DxO as soon as I tried it. It was the first time I could reduce noise without degrading image quality. Also, DxO's deconvolution-based approach to lens correction corrects for lens flaws in lesser lenses of my relative youth.

Not only are my older RAW images from 2004–20xx getting essentially better sensors; it is also as if they are getting re-exposed with better lenses. I have to admit that I was ignorant in settling for some pretty mediocre Nikon zoom glass early on, especially on some trips where I made some good images. DxO doesn't help the bad bokeh, but it improves the sharpness and microcontrast as well as the noise so much that I have taken the time to re-process all the images on my site (over 250 of them!) since I started using DxO about a year and a half ago. This has taken a ridiculous amount of time, but it has made some much better images.

When I go to rework an image, I'm often quite startled at how much better the modern version is, to the extent that I'm embarrassed to have my old ones still on the site. They are mostly gone now. The benefit of using DxO is far less dramatic on the files from the D800e with primes than on 2007 files from the D200 with a zoom. The DxO difference does show up in the Micro 4/3 files even with good modern lenses, and it's possible those files will get even better in the future as software improves.

Robert Harshman said in the Comments yesterday that DxO, PhotoNinja, and ACR can each "do things the others cannot, and based on needs one may be much better than the other." I'll second Robert's comment: try DxO on older images.

John

©2015 by John Lehet, all rights reserved

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Peaking Photoshop Performance

Not enough RAM and a conventional hard drive will cause
performance to slow down just a tad.

Written by Ctein

[Author's note: I'm hard at work on the third edition of my book Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. It'll be out sometime early next year (I think). Meanwhile, here's an excerpt for your enjoyment and edification.]

Whether you're using Photoshop or some other image processing program, maximizing its performance is especially important when doing photographic restoration. It's easy to generate huge files, bigger than what you're likely to be working with from a digital camera. For example, an 8x10 photograph scanned at 600 PPI in 16-bit color yields a 30 megapixel, 180 MB file. I'll be talking about Photoshop, specifically, but if the image processing program you're running can make use of a scratch disk when it runs out of RAM, the same general advice will apply.

Here's the non-technical version: Stuff your computer with as much RAM as it will support. RAM is cheap. Less than 8 GB will badly cramp your style. Working on a large and complex restoration, double that is barely adequate. My 27" i7 Retina iMac has 32 GB of RAM, 24 GB of which are allocated to Photoshop. You want to leave enough RAM free for other machine functions so that they don't choke—75% is a safe amount to give Photoshop. I can still run out of RAM in Photoshop on occasion…but it's a lot less common now than it was on my old system, which only had half as much memory.

Next, after maximizing your RAM, get an internal SSD (solid state drive) and use it for your operating system, applications including Photoshop, and the scratch disk. You should also put the photograph you're working on there. That doesn't require a very large SSD. A 256 GB SSD will handle this with plenty of room to spare. You can put all your data files and photographs that you're not working on on a different drive. Of course, there's nothing wrong with getting a big one and putting everything on it, including all your data files, but they're a lot more pricey.

A hybrid or “Fusion” drive doesn't really cut it for photo restoration. They marry a small solid-state drive to a conventional hard drive. That speeds up activities that demand accessing only a few gigabytes of data, like launching and relaunching applications, working with text and spreadsheets, and so on. The thing is, the scratch files that your image processing program will generate when it runs out of RAM are huge. They'll swamp the solid-state part of the hybrid drive, and then it performs no better than a conventional drive. Don't get me wrong; they're a distinct performance improvement over a traditional hard drive—but nowhere near what you'll see with a pure SSD.

Practical comparisons
Now I shall get geekily specific. Those of you who don't care, you can skip to the end. You won't miss much.

To convey to you a sense of just how much difference sufficient RAM and an SSD can make, I ran a set of benchmark tests using Lloyd Chambers Photoshop benchmarking actions. They're designed to stress the heck out of Photoshop. For these tests, I used the medium scale benchmark, diglloydMedium, because the small one simply ran too fast on my new machine to do accurate timing, and it didn't push huge amounts of data to the scratch disk.

I first ran the benchmark with Photoshop allocated its full 24 GB of RAM. That's enough RAM that Photoshop didn't have to use the scratch drive. It ran diglloydMedium in a little over 11 seconds with a maximum CPU usage of over three cores (300+%), and it ate up about 15 GB of RAM.

Good enough. Then, what happens when Photoshop runs out of RAM, as it will on an under-equipped computer? I cut the Photoshop allocation back to 4 GB of RAM and ran the same benchmark with the iMac's internal SSD as the scratch drive. Even though data transfer to the scratch disk peaked out at over 900 MB/sec, the time to execute the benchmark almost tripled, to 30 seconds, and CPU usage barely exceeded 100%.

Next I took the SSD out of the picture. I changed the Photoshop scratch disk to a fast external conventional hard drive. This, by the way, is the way you should be running if you don't have an internal SSD as your system drive. If your system drive is a regular hard drive, putting the scratch files there only sets you up for what's known as “drive thrashing.” The disk head has to bounce all over the place to keep up with the competing demands from the OS, the running programs, and the scratch space, and that slows things down horribly. Not a problem with an SSD.

With 4 GB of RAM and a conventional hard drive disk, performance just cratered. The runtime was two minutes with a peak data rate of 150 MB/sec to the drive. CPU usage barely got to 30%.

In summary, running with insufficient RAM and a conventional hard drive slowed the benchmark by a factor of ten!

'Nough said?

Ctein

Photo-writer, sci-fi novelist, photographer, and physicist Ctein is TOP's Technical Editor.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Where Can You Buy Custom Profiles?

Folks, I'm spinning this off as a separate topic.

The title pretty much says it all. If you are using custom  printer profiles and you're not rolling your own, who's making them for you these days? I used to recommend Cathy and Eric but they've long been out of the business.  (That's “long” as measured in Internet-years, which is a lot like dog-years… except faster.)

Readers, what are your recommendations? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

 

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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What Photoshop CC Costs

This is the best info that's come in yet about the cost of Photoshop CC, from Rick Popham. It's accurate as far as I can tell.

"The Photography Plan (PS & LR) $9.99/month requires a yearly commitment which cannot be turned on and off as far as I know. (I've been unable to find any information about that on Adobe's website, but I'd be happy if it were true). You can get an individual monthly single app subscription to PS (or any of the apps) which you can turn on and off, but that subscription is $19.99/month. And yes, you can get a $29.99/month deal which gets you the whole shebang. But this is only available to previous customers who have CS3 or later. The $29.99 price is only good for the first year, after which Adobe will charge you the regular price of $49.99/month."

UPDATE from Rick Popham: "I have a correction to the information about the single app monthly plan: The $20/month price is for a one year commitment. If you want a month to month plan for a single app (that you can turn off and on), the price is $30/month."

I (Mike) subscribed to the one-year plan for $9.99 per month, for which you only get a 50% refund of what's remaining if you cancel.

UPDATE from Mike: I was contacted by Jeffrey Tranberry of Adobe, who says that Adobe will help if you have lost activations due to hardware failure or inaccessability: here's the link for that. Also, he says you can download and install Photoshop CC on as many systems as you like (Mac and Win), but that you can only use it on two of those systems at a time. Furthermore, a recent refinement is that if you log in on one system and want to use Photoshop CC, but find it's already activated on two other systems, you can sign out remotely from one or both of the other two from the computer you're on:

"When you log-in and encounter that you're signed in and activated on two other systems," Jeffrey writes, "you will be asked if you want to deactivate the other systems (similar to iTunes) so you can sign-in and start using the current system immediately. This eliminates lost activations from dead systems or systems you don't have ready access to. Cross platform licenses and roaming activation are both new features of Creative Cloud which hopefully adds a level of convenience not available before."

Mike
(Thanks to Rick and Jeffrey)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Paul Bradforth: "What's not to like? I too am subscribed to this. You'll get every update to both apps without having to worry about a thing! Above all, it's so much easier than going the 'yearly update' route. You'll love it and I'll bet you never even think of cancelling!"

Patrick: "No sense beating a dead horse on the issue. You either like the concept, don't like it but tolerate it, or don't like it and find an alternative. I'm in the last category. I don't begrudge anyone who chooses to go with Adobe's new plan, but at the same time I don't want to be 'sold' or "convinced" how much better it is.

"For what it's worth: 1) Some people actually don't want every update that comes along. I've had plenty of 'upgrades' over the years that have ruined the software in one way or another. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. 2) Some people are very uncomfortable with the overbearing requirement for constant connectivity in this world, and this is simply one more example of it. Call me reclusive, old fashioned, or just plain paranoid. I don't like having to be part of the collective just to perform the same tasks I've always been able to do independently. I could go on. No point."

Photoshop Breaks

S. and I discovered a beautiful historic building yesterday—the Rockingham Meeting House, originally a Congregationalist Church and now the earliest public building in the State of Vermont in nearly original condition (one earlier building still exists, but it's been extensively altered). I got what I think will be a great picture of it, under unusual light and transient conditions.

...But I can't, um, show it to you quite yet, because I don't have the tools I need. Long story, but I didn't know you have to disable Photoshop on old computers in order to use it on newer computers; and I don't have a license left to open my Photoshop CS6 (for which I paid full price) on my traveling laptop. I've been resistant to committing to a monthly fee for software that I'm accustomed to owning. So I guess that means Photoshop has finally "broken" for me, and I need to start in on the potentially hellish task of finding new editing software.

I'm unhappy about this. I've been loyal to Photoshop since I started using it in 1994—21 years ago, unbelievably. I'm no expert, but I can do what I need to do with it and the plugins I use will work with it. Obviously I can still use my last CS6 license with my home computer, but I'm going to need something else to use on the road.

The Vermont view we woke up to on Sunday morning

A little background: one of the keys to success in life is to accurately appraise your strengths and weaknesses, and play to the former while hopefully sidestepping or minimizing the latter. I attended Dartmouth (which I visited this past weekend, to find it hugely changed from the place I remember) just after then-College-President John Kemeny, a former research assistant to Albert Einstein, had instituted universal student access to the college mainframes, the first college in the United States to do so if I recall correctly. (The building that housed the mainframes—rumored to be 60th on the list of the Defense Department's backups in case of nuclear war—is gone now.) I learned my lesson: I was adept at communicating through the Xtalk chat programs*, but quite inept with the computer generally. One of the sensible reasons I chose photography as a career (while many friends sensibly chose computing careers) was because photography had nothing at all to do with computers! As I keep saying, I hate irony.

So I'm not good with software. I think this actually makes me better at reviewing cameras—I'm not so adept with their electronic aspects that things come too easily to me that are difficult for many others, which is, ironically, a weakness of some "expert" reviewers. But it's why you've never read a review of software written by me on this site.

I suppose I could use Lightroom, but I dislike the interface and I have no use for its extensive digital asset management (DAM) features—I don't need another cataloging system. Plus, there are some features I need that it lacks. Maybe some free online editor like Repixl or Pixlr would work (there's another one, a new one, I tried recently, but I can't remember what it's called). I wonder if there will soon be an Adobe Comp for camera images?

Meanwhile, though, Photoshop is continuing to slowly break for me, and I see the grim handwriting on the wall.

Mike

UPDATE: I went ahead and subscribed to The Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan. I figured maybe I should just go ahead and try it since writing about that sort of thing is, after all, what I'm supposed to be doing a living. Even if I don't write about software.

So I'll try the Creative Cloud and let you know how this mild computerphobe fares with the experience.

So here's the Rockingham Meeting House:

It sits high on a hill; S. saw it as we drove past, so we stopped on the way back. It was built between 1787 and 1801 and is said to be Vermont's finest surviving example of an early American building. The two-story interior features "pigpen" (box) pews and there is an extensive "burying ground" with hundreds of old slate headstones, many of which tell stories; for instance, on the miniature grave of a three-month-old girl it says something like "God has called thee to thy rest / Thou art gone, He thought it best."

*What this means is that I've been "online" since 1975, which must make me a graybeard in that respect.

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Keith B.: "I don't get it: Isn't a Photoshop CS6 (and Lightroom) license good for your choice of two computers, as long as only one of the computers is operating at a time?"

Mike replies: It is, but one license was used for my old iMac, which I wiped clean and sold several years ago, neglecting to deactivate Photoshop. So Adobe's system thinks I now use Photoshop on two computers: my old iMac and my newer iMac, leaving no license free for my laptop. As numerous people have reported in the comments, it may sometimes be possible to get Adobe to restore the lost license by calling customer support.

Steven Willard: "For a different approach: download your files to your iPad, but save the files for later download to your desktop. Use instead Nik Snapseed, PS Express, and Stackables, for a good starting place. These apps cost practically nothing. They're remarkably capable, and, with some practice, you may find they will suffice for many of your images depending on use. When they don't you can still edit them on your desktop where it's much easier to see what your doing.

"The argument could be made that you owe it to yourself to be familiar with these new tools also."

Kenneth Tanaka: "I subscribed to The Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan too, Mike. Maybe it's the neo-spring weather we're having here today, but after reading this piece I came to terms with the fact that resistance (to Adobe's CC) is futile. I spend many times that $10/mo. on services that don't give me nearly the enjoyment or benefits that Photoshop gives me. The final shove over that cliff was the simple realization that all of the future innovation initiatives will be devoted toward benefiting the CC subscribers, not the CS 'owners.' Yes, that includes eventually issuing new RAW image file support.

"So I could hear the voice of Jesse Royce Landis's exasperated character telling Cary Grant to 'Pay the two dollars' in North by Northwest as I anted up my money."

latent_image: "The tonality in the Rockingham Meeting House photo is why I love B&W. I challenge you, Mike, to print it. From my own attempts at digital printing, I think it will be very difficult...and very satisfying if you pull it off."

Mike replies: I agree. I'll have to look long and hard at the various options for tonality in this one...because a lot of this one will be about the tonal relationships. By the way the shot looks good in color too.

Photoshop is 25

An upcoming ad that will appear on the Oscars will celebrate 25 years of Adobe Photoshop. Loudly, I might add, so turn your sound down before you click the roll button.

Photoshop: a verb, and definitely a useful tool for photographers; I don't think I could get along without it. But as to its general overall contribution to culture, hmm...this commercial seems designed to induce a dose of ambivalence in people of a certain maturity. Although the music indicates the ad is aimed straight at the 50-and-over crowd.

No matter. Happy birthday, Photoshop. And congratulations to everyone we know at Adobe.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Patrick Dodds: "Loudly in both senses."

Mike Farrell: "Congratulations, Adobe!

"This may come across as heresy to Photoshop's early adopters and those who've become proficient with it, but for me, Lightroom is Adobe's real gift to photographers. I've always found Photoshop to be time-consuming and unforgiving for basic image-editing tasks and was very pleased from the start with Lightroom's more intuitive approach—a workflow that takes me (after much practice) almost seamlessly from image selection to development to printing with highly satisfying results. Now I only open Photoshop if I want to add something graphic such as text or a custom border.

"Again, just my opinion. I know Lightroom has its detractors and others use a little of both programs. Camera Raw makes it possible to stay in Photoshop and still have access to 'non-destructive' edits.

"I'm curious, is it only a question of habit? Are the two programs just different means to the same ends or is there a reason many seasoned pros have stuck with Photoshop and stayed away from Lightroom? Might be an enlightening conversation/debate among your readers."

Glory Be! (Data Recovery Update)

I'm happy to report that SanDisk RescuePRO Deluxe worked like a charm, in the end, on my accidentally overwritten SD card.

To recap: I had a few travel shots I wanted on a 32 GB, 30 MB/s SanDisk Ultra card, but when I did the speed tests on the new UHS-II card the other day, I reformatted and made new shots on the beginning of the older Ultra card not once but several times—before downloading my latest shooting. Oops.

When I reported this, readers recommended data recovery apps in a quick flood of comments. After checking several of the apps out, I decided I could really only test one, so I chose the app made by the maker of the card, and bought the "Deluxe" version; my reasoning was that if I was going to fail, it would be better to give the app its best chance, and fail with the turbocharged luxury version.

Note: TOP Tech. Ed. Ctein tells me that different toolz have different skillz. So if one recovery app doesn't work for you, another might...even on the same lost data. (He also noted that it's a good idea to lock the card you're recovering data from before you insert it in the card reader or SD slot, which I hadn't done.)

At first the app didn't seem like it was working. It appeared to make progress for a little while and then choke. So I read the instructions, and watched a YouTube video showing how to proceed, and started over again. The progress report seemed wonky—for "time remaining" it was giving me numbers as high as 2,000 minutes, and progress was stuck on 34% for well over twelve hours. All in all the program took about 36 hours to run on my laptop (an early 2014, 13" MacBook Air 1.7 GHz core i7 with 8 GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD). After seeming stuck for a day or so, the "time remaining" began to plummet and the remaining progress percentage rose steadily until...

...Voilà. I got back all the pictures I wanted...

...Most of which were of this strange atmospheric phenomenon I saw out the airplane window. Ctein, many of whose best photographs in my opinion are of the atmosphere or what's beyond it, informs me that this is called a "glory"—a full circle rainbow of restricted circumference that sometimes happens when you look into water vapor from the exact same direction the sunlight is coming from. Glories (they're sometimes called "the glory of the pilot" because they're most often observed from planes) have an angular size of 5° to 20°. That depends on the size of the water droplets in the clouds. The shadow of the airplane often appears inside the glory, as here, and the glory "follows" the plane like its shadow.

Ctein says, "the physics of it is actually pretty complicated, and interestingŠ if you find physics interesting."

The SanDisk RescuePRO Deluxe recovered a great deal from the card, I must say—not only what I was looking for, but at least most of the last six or seven shooting sessions I used the card for, going back more than a month and half. Note that the pictures I wanted were the first forty or so shots on a "clean" (formatted) card, and that I had reformatted the card and reshot at least three batches of more than 50 shots on top of the pictures I wanted. The recovery app got them back anyway.

As for the glory, it seemed more vivid to the eye than to the camera; the plane's windows were unfortunately both dirty and noticeably scratched up and damaged. It was one of those old jets that had a cloth label stitched to the back side of the headrests that read "Seat bottom cushion may be used as a flotation device." As I quipped to my girlfriend, I'm glad I didn't have to rely on it for that, as it wasn't even working very well as a cushion.

Wikipedia says, "In China, [the glory] is called Buddha's light. It was often observed on cloud-shrouded high mountains such as Huangshan Mountains and Mount Emei. Records of the phenomenon at Mount Emei date back to A.D. 63. The colorful halo always surrounds the observer's own shadow, and thus was often taken to show the observer's personal enlightenment." I'd say if you need a sign in the clouds to signal your enlightenment you're probably not enlightened, but seeing your own shadow inside a glory must be glorious indeed; the unusual sight does seem tinged with a touch of magic, and must have seemed more so before the age of traveling above the clouds made it more common.

Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Memory cards

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

Matt: "The reason your shots, and many others, were still around, is a thing called 'wear levelling' which basically makes the card overwrite the oldest files on the card first. The memory only has a certain number of uses, so without this technique, the cards wouldn't last nearly as long.

"This is done on the bit level, not on the level of files, but the effect is the same, since we're not randomly flipping bits in files, but writing large blocks of information at the same time."

Arne Croell: "The glory is also known as the spectre of the Brocken. The Brocken is a peak in the Harz mountains in Germany, which is often shrouded in fog; it is also known as the mountain where the Witches Sabbath happened in Goethe's Faust."

Jim in Denver: "Glory (and I'm a jet pilot professionally, so I'm more than somewhat familiar with the phenomenon).... Essentially the airplane is the 'lens,' not dissimilar from a drop of water, and that makes a rainbow directly in-line with the shadow of the airplane. The cloud is just something to see it projected on. The glory gets bigger and smaller depending on the distance you are from the cloud. It only exists (viewing) with your back to the sun. They actually happen without clouds, but are much harder to see—but next time you are coming into land, it's a clear,sunny day, and you are on the down-sun side of the airplane, you can sometimes see it on the landscape rushing by as you get fairly close to the ground."

Best Photography Term of the New Century (so far)...

..."Committing Slidercide."

Coined by Kenneth Tanaka of Chicago, Illinois, USA (unless he got it from somewhere else—what say ye, Ken? The term doesn't come up on Google). Meaning, of course, to ruin one's images by overdoing it with the sliders in Lightroom, Photoshop, or other photo editing software.

Brilliant!

Mike
(Thanks to Ken)

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Kenneth Tanaka: "Yeah, I think this is one term that I just dug out of my own little noggin, Mike, as least as far as I know."

Robert Roaldi: "It's not often you get to witness the birth of a new word. Ken, we owe you."

Camera Raw 8.4

Does anyone know how to download ACR 8.4 for CS6 on a Mac? I keep hearing it's available but all I can find is the download for DNG 8.4. Any help or elucidation appreciated!

Management

UPDATE: Success! Thanks. Dumb mistake on my part: under Help > Updates, I saw "Camera Raw 7," but I failed to realize that there was a drop-down menu under that, which was hiding v. 8.4. When I ran it, it updated.

ACR 8.4., of course, has RAW support for the Fuji X-T1. I've just opened the first few RAF files, of shots I took to deliberately torture the sensor, and I'm starting  see why Fujifans are so high on their Fujicams' IQ. More on this (and Sigma Photo Pro) next week.

DxO Film Pack for Free, and Salgado's Method

Written by Kevin Purcell

An interesting free offer that TOP readers might like to try:

Sony and DxO together are offering Film Pack 3 Essential for free download for Mac or Windows. It previously cost $79. It runs as a standalone application or a plug-in for Aperture, Lightroom, or Photoshop. It's a Nik Silver Efex Pro and Color Efex Pro competitor and does a similar job. The offer is good until October 31st.

It's not upgradable to later versions. Current version is DxO Film Pack 4, so the web page for the current version doesn't say much about the old version, and the Film Pack UI has changed too.

You give them your email address to get the activation code (you can turn down email solicitation and still download the software). The email you get contains the activation code and links the download for the software (should you need to redownload it or get both versions). For the Mac it's a 166MB download.

Visit this URL to download Film Pack 3

The PDF manual for DxO Film Pack 3 is on their support website. (Take care not to download the manual for Film Pack 4.)

It lists the supported film simulations. It looks (to me) like most of the major films from Fuji, Kodak, Polaroid, and Ilford are there.

See the text file "Download DxO Film Pack 3 Essential films" for a full list of supported film simulations extracted from the PDF.

Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (right), president of Brazil in 2006, receives the book Trabalhadores ("workers") as a gift from the photographer Sebastião Salgado. Photo by Wilson Dias.

You might notice that one of the endorsements for DXO Film Pack on the current Film Pack page on the DxO website is from Sebastião Salgado. From a variety of interviews and public comments, and forum threads*, here's a reconstructed summary of Sebastião's digital > film negative > darkroom print workflow:

1. Shoot with a digital camera
2. RAW demosaic (+ exposure correction, I suspect)
3. Process with DxO Film Pack for Kodak TriX 400 or TMax 3200 film simulation.
4. Print that image to a 35mm technical film internegative (so you have a real negative whose image simulates his favorite old films without adding grain).
5. Print the internegative to silver halide paper in Parisian darkroom using his regular printer** (with dodging and burning for the Salgado look).

This workflow lets him shoot digital images that look identical to his film images and result in a silver halide archival print and an archival negative (that can be printed from in the future).

I think many photographers today have no idea about darkroom printing annotation and pro printers (see for example "Magnum and the Dying Art of Darkroom Printing" on The Literate Lens). They can add enormous value to a print.

Salgado gets the best of both worlds. He (or his assistant) doesn't have to carry 50 lbs. of film to remote locations (and through many Third World X-ray scanners) but he ends up with a negative and print as he did with film.

I don't know if any other photographers have taken this route. I'd be curious to find out. I know that Daido Moriyama (well, his assistant) uses Nik Silver Efex Pro to get his film look with the image from the compacts he shoots with, but he doesn't bother with an internegative (as far as I know).

Kevin

*Citations:

• Testimonial
• Interview
• Interview in Portuguese
• Commentary (especially on the lack of silver in modern film)
• Forum comments
• Forum comments

[**Regular TOP readers know who that is. —Ed.]

©2013 by Kevin Purcell, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

Jack Nelson (partial comment): "What a great marketing idea. Give the customer a free un-upgradable copy and on the download page include a link to a discounted new version. I'll bet they get a few people who would not otherwise use their product to try it out (like me) and of those I'll bet they get a few that like it and buy the discounted version 4."

Jim Bullard: "I've played with DxO as a trial program and even did a review on my blog that compared it with other B&W conversion packages. In the end I went with Nik Silver Efex Pro because my object was to produce the best conversion for my intent, not to make it look as if it had been shot on film. The Nik software can add film grain and rendition but that's not its primary intent nor is it mine."

Warning! Lightroom 5 has a Potentially Catastrophic Bug

Jeffrey Friedl's Blog details a potentially heartbreaking bug in Adobe Lightroom 5 that could conceivably cause you to unintentionally delete master copies of your files—maybe without even realizing it. The "Silent Killer" Bug.

"Bug" is such a small, innocent word. In the auto industry, there are recalls, and there are recalls. One might be because one corner of a floor mat starts to fray on a very small number of cars. Another might be because copious numbers of the affected vehicles are spontaneously erupting in three-story-tall James-Bond-movie fireballs if you tap the wrong place with a ball-peen hammer.

Okay, I'm exaggerating. But thus with bugs: it's a range. My conception of photography is that there is an awful lot of dross and only a little gold—so the rare "hits" you get amongst all the "almosts" become precious; a lot of not-quites go into one genuine success. This bug strikes us as at least shading into the catastrophic end of the range—anything that can end up in the accidental loss of one of those rare, precious, and needed files is very bad behavior on the part of processing software indeed. BEWARE!!!

At least it's not as bad as the 2000 Multidata Systems International bug at the National Cancer Institute in Panama City, Panama, which caused software to miscalculate radiation dosages for patients undergoing radiation therapy. That bug resulted in eight deaths and severe radiation overdoses to at least 20 other patients—and led to the doctors, who were contractually bound to double-check the dosage calculations manually, being indicted for murder.

So, okay—could be worse. But still. Tell your friends.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael Tapes)

UPDATE wednesday a.m.: We heard from the Product Manager of the Adobe Lightroom Team, Sharad Mangalick, who says, "We're well aware of this particular issue and are assessing potential options, but I just want to point out a workaround: When viewing images in the Publish Service panel within the Library Module, ensure that you are selecting images using the Filmstrip. This will ensure that the correct images are selected."

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Kenneth Tanaka: "This is unquestionably a potentially hazardous bug that Jeffrey was well justified in calling out last June. It needs to be fixed before the next official release. That said, it certainly does not merit the blanket condemnation of LR. I've always used the Export facility to send images online, and never the newer more push-button Publish facility, and have never encountered a problem."

Mike replies: I was assuming that LR users (of whom I am not one) would care to read the entire piece at the link, and was perhaps remiss in not pointing out that it continues over four pages, through several "Continued here..." links at the bottom of each page. The last update is dated August 2nd concludes that the bug is not fixed in LR 5.2 as even he originally reported.

I absolutely don't agree that this is not very serious. Maybe for you software ninjas it is not, but for ordinary schmoes like me who struggle with software and its Byzantine complexity, the idea of being innocently led into doing something serious to your own archive while a) not meaning to and b) not being aware of it after it's done is the kind of thing I live in horror of. I did it once in 2003, and the memory still stings.

The fact that it lurks in an out-of-the-way corner of the program and is seldom encountered makes it worse, not better, because it increases the chance of accident whereas a front-and-center bug would be better publicized and more widely understood. Serious indeed.

ADDENDUM from Kenneth Tanaka: "It is noteworthy that Adobe lists this as a 'top issue' onits  Adobe Labs developmental site. So it has their attention."

daniel francisco valdez: "I was bit by this bug...when I deleted a virtual copy, the original file was also deleted from my hard drive! Luckily I had exported a 16-bit TIFF and I had the original unformatted SD card. I downloaded and installed his plugin so I feel confident deleting files again. Coincidentally, I have been using his Export to Zenfolio plugin since day one and have been supremely satisfied with it and with his update schedule."

Michel: "Back up! It might make an interesting article to cover backup strategies for hobby photographers. Just a thought."

Bojidar replies to Michel: "I've written such an article here. I would be very happy if Mike republishes it and if people help me extend the article and turn it into an active Internet reference.

"Same thing with the article 'Best Practices' for photographers about image security while on the road, available here."

Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud, Part II: The Good

This week's column by Ctein

Last column I told you what is wrong with Adobe's Brave New Photoshop, and we had a jolly good time bashing the Big A, didn't we! Now we've got that out of our system. (and please don't repeat the same rants this week, pretty please? You've had weeks to vent. Let's move on.) This time I'm going to talk about how I've come to think this is a really good idea. Seriously.

Last October, I was on an airplane thinking high and lofty thoughts (I need an airplane to get there) about Adobe's plan to, several years down the road (ahem), move their products to a subscription system. It had not been a prospect that pleased me. But as I followed said thoughts along, an epiphany occurred: This could prove to be the best thing that could happen. For Adobe and, more importantly (to me) for Photoshop users.

And, so, on that flight, I became a convert. While it holds a great many potential "gotchas," I think subscription licensing allows Adobe to solve a whole bunch of problems for them and for us that would otherwise be nearly intractable. I shall explain:

Part 1 of the epiphany: A company like Adobe, with a mature market and an expensive, mature product, is looking at a gloomy future. We are not just entering the post-PC era, we're entering the $.99 application era. Increasingly, people are expecting to pay very little for a piece of software. That trend is even stronger among newer users. It's not a purchasing attitude that is terribly compatible with $500+ programs.

The situation is even more extreme when you look at tablet applications. Adobe just has to be looking hard at those. Aside from it being the major growth market now, a tablet is just such a perfect tool for a traveling photographer. While Photoshop-iOS is just a bit much to hope for with current technologies, think of what you could do with full-fledged Lightroom or Bridge plus ACR on an iPad! But, how many iPad apps have you seen that are priced above $10? Uh huh. Serious disconnect with the market.

(Sidebar: in fact, I'm really surprised that I haven't seen Lightroom or Bridge for the iPad, yet. The hardware is up to the task and even the current desktop interface design works fair-ta-middlin' on an iPad. I think it's gotta be the code port, which isn't trivial. But I'm waiting, he said impatiently.)

Adobe ain't stupid. They can see the handwriting on the wall. Figuring out what to do about it is another matter.

Part 2: The prevailing revenue model for companies like Adobe screws everybody over, badly. Their economies and cash flows depend on new version releases, because the market isn't growing enough anymore to give them significant revenues from new customers. They have to make their money on releases. It's feast with a new release and try not to starve until the next one. This is a destructive and hurtful system.

Ask code jockeys how often they'd like to see new product releases and they'll tell you no more frequently than once every 2–3 years. That gives them enough time to figure out the improvements they'd like to make, write reasonably decent code for them, and properly (fingers crossed, here) debug them.

Ask the folks who control the bank accounts how often they'd like to see new product releases and they'll tell you once a year. Because they need to keep the money coming in, and they need their balance sheets to not fluctuate wildly from fiscal year to fiscal year, and most importantly they need to deal with the plutocracy who actually own their asses and have the attention span and farsightedness of mayflies.

Do you really think the big institutional stockholders give a damn whether the product you buy is buggy as all hell or really has enough new features to be worth the price of upgrading? Nope, not so long as things don't get so bad that you stop buying. Which you won't, because we've all gotten used to the idea that lame and half-baked are adjectives that inevitably accompany version X.0, which will be very quickly followed by version X.1 that fixes a whole bunch (but by no means all) of the crap that should have been fixed before the product was ever allowed out the door.

Except...properly fixing all those known bugs or getting the new feature to really work right would have delayed shipping by so many weeks, and there'd go Someone Important's dividend or stock price.

This gets reflected in the way these companies work. You'd think that mature, well-established companies wouldn't operate like garage startups. Except, they do. They perpetuate a culture that expects their employees to work absurdly long hours without any additional compensation in the weeks/months just before release, to ensure that the product can get rolled out on the schedule the moneymongers have demanded. Doesn't matter that it's an insane way for people to have to live and work. The folks in charge certainly don't care, because they know full well that if you're too sane to put up with that kind of madness, they can likely find someone else who's just as brilliant and more servile (or at least hungrier and more desperate) than you.

All of this is hard to change, especially the too-early, half-baked buggy releases, when your company is entirely dependent upon selling those new releases to stay in business.

What does a subscription economic model do? It gives a producer a way to drop its (perceived) price. In the few years that Adobe has been pursuing this course, it has been steadily pushing the price down. Not as far as I think it needs to go, yet. $19.95 is not a magic number. $9.95 is. It's sales psychology: inflation be damned, single-digit prices still sell hugely better than double digits. (I'll bet you anything that by the time the "introductory year" is up, that first-year price of $9.95 a month will become the permanent price for installed users.)

On the whole, consumers find it more palatable to pay $10 a month on an ongoing basis, than to have to spring for $150 every year or two. It's not about how much it adds up to, it's about how much it hits the cash flow and how it's perceived psychologically. Equally importantly, more people find it palatable. There's been some fallacious thinking that the photography world is divided into three groups: Those who pay for Photoshop, those who pirate Photoshop, and those who don't care at all about Photoshop. Wrong; there's a very large untapped market of people who would get into Photoshop if it wasn't going to cost them more than half a grand. A very large fraction of that group won't think twice about paying the monthly subscription fee; frankly, it's not a lot of money for most photographers, or even for many college students these days.

Want to expand your market? Making your product more affordable is a sure way to do it, and a monthly subscription is definitely perceived as more affordable by more people.

Which is why this is a good deal for Adobe, even at $10 a month.

But what about the rest of us? I mean, personally, I don't care about Adobe getting a good deal. Why do I think this'll be a good deal for me? Because, it makes it possible to break that cycle of abuse that's created by profit-driven product release cycles and that saddles us with half-baked software.

If people are subscribing and they're satisfied with the product they're getting (that's important!), a steady cash flow is assured. There's always some subscriber rot that has to be balanced by new subscribers, but it's predictable and even, not boom or bust like release cycles.

That means there's a lot less pressure to release a new feature until it works really right and there's no pressure to release a new full version. You don't have to rush a half-baked, buggy hunk of code out the door by Date X, tricked up with cooler tailfins and more chrome on the grille, just to insure the rich get even richer. This is good for thee and me: there are fewer changes and the ones there are are more meaningful and useful.

The transition's rocky. You've got to give people an incentive to make the switch, which is why Photoshop CC has the usual panoply of new bells and whistles, both astonishing and trivial. Once that switch is made, though, there's little reason for people to stop subscribing unless a competitor comes out with something preferable. This relieves the code monkeys of much of the burden of trciking out next year's model, because there doesn't even have to be a next year's model. They can concentrate on rolling out new capabilities as they develop them and on fixing the deficiencies that bother users the most rather than on what will sell upgrades (they're not the same thing).

Is it guaranteed to work out this way? Oh, most definitely not. Never underestimate people's ability to figure out ways to screw things up. But it allows for the possibility—even (in this case, I think) the probability. The release-driven profit model just doesn't give you a chance.

There you have it. That's my epiphany, and I'm sticking to it.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Ctein (it's his entire legal name) has been writing for photography publications for more than four decades. This is his 288th column for TOP.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Andre: "I work in the software industry, and Ctein's absolutely correct that businesses that run on a subscription model (or get most of their income from ongoing support contracts) have less external financial pressure to 'get something out the door this quarter.' Whether that will translate into better products in Adobe's case remains to be seen. There are a lot of other drivers of 'bad behavior' in big software houses that can still result in dumb decisions regarding release schedules, feature sets, and product quality."

Doug Howk: "I think the Adobe coders and QA people may see it differently. Its one thing if new features stand alone; but that's unlikely with a huge code base such as Photoshop. Without a target release that all coders/QA etc. are pushing for, you will have more buggy small releases. Its like coding for the cloud: one forgotten update for a file that actually impacted more than one new feature will affect everybody using that code base, i.e. users. Stable releases that have been QA'd as a whole are a lot safer."

Chris Morse: "No Lightroom for iPad? Have you seen Photosmith? Disclosure: I'm co-owner/co-developer."

Gato: "First, I think this is a great deal for new users. Second, I think younger people are far more open to subscription than we older folks. Together that sounds to me like a win for Adobe—and many of their customers. Depending on what assumptions/guesses you make about upgrades and pricing, it looks to me like a new user is ahead for at least five to seven years in terms of cash outlay. Longer if they put the costs on a credit card and pay interest. A lot of people who couldn't afford Photoshop (or Creative Suite) before will likely be jumping in.

"A lot of those prospective users are of a generation already used to buying their music, television, movies and more on subscription. One more $20 tick on the credit card is mostly invisible to them, I suspect.

"For the record, I am a convert. Adobe introduced the subscription model at a time when I desperately needed to buy InDesign and Illustrator. At first I felt forced into the subscription model, but the more I played with the math on the cost the better it looked. By now I've gotten several really useful upgrades, plus I have picked up Premier Pro and attempted my first videos. My next self-assignment is learning the collaboration features in the cloud. That will let me partner with a new business in the next town down the road. I'm supposed to be retired, but I'm using Adobe for some kind of personal or business project almost every day of the week. I'm sure the cloud plan will not work for everyone, but it sure works for me."

Rob: "It seems contradictory to refer to Photoshop as a mature product, while praising the new subscription policy as a means to promote greater innovation by the developers. 'Mature' implies that there are few major innovations remaining to be added to the program. Therefore, periodic upgrades will most likely consist of minor tweaks and frilly features. Nevertheless, Adobe is asking users to pay continually for the privilege of using software that may not be improved substantially over the coming years. It is clear how this is to Adobe's advantage, but not so clear how it is to ours."

Will Frostmill (partial comment): "Ctein, Your scenario is lacking drama and complexity—it is in fact quite dull. And therefore likely to be quite accurate. Good job!"

The Ideal Editing Software

This might be the most interesting comment from the Editing Software post, which came in rather late in the day from Camilo Polymeris. Camilo points out that not having one program do everything would be a-feature-not-a-bug:

I prefer small, light software that does only one thing and does it well, and am perfectly fine with using one program to organize, one to develop, and one to edit photographs. Plus a bunch of smaller tools to do specialized stuff like panoramas, perspective correction, or HDR, if that is your thing.

In fact, that makes most sense to me. In part it might be my UNIX background, where that approach is standard, and in part the conviction that it leads to overall more flexible and powerful environments, by allowing each user to select the tools that fit his or her workflow the best. So, more than one tool to dominate them all, I would love to see more open intercommunication standards, so each of us can chose their own manager, developer and editor and they still would work nicely together.

Of course we have something approaching this with plugins, although many of those are add-ons to what are already supposed to be full-featured programs. (The more successful plugins then seem to be appropriated by the mother software like the Blob smothering its enemies). It might be interesting to see a "program" that was essentially an empty framework for open-source editing apps that anyone could provide, from which each user could then pick and choose. I don't know enough about it to know how viable such an arrangement might be. It sounds more 21st-century, at least.

Photo Ninja (ya see what I did there?)

I've been experimenting with the nifty Photo Ninja (again) and mean to give PhotoLine a try, too.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Dave: "I wanted to comment on the original post but didn't have the time...I think we can look at electric guitar for an example of where things might head with image editing software. Guitarists have relied on various effects pedals to modify their tone since the dawn of amplified music. With the digital revolution various guitar effects companies came up with all-in-one digital effects pedals. These all-in-one devices were kind of like Photoshop in that they were designed to be a one stop signal processing solution. However, now that the dust has settled from the guitar digital revolution, most guitarists still use multiple pedals. To get a signature sound a guitarist might use a mix of vintage pedals coupled with some newer digital effect. Guitarist have a very diverse set of tools to choose from. I'm hoping that photography is headed in the same direction."

SerrArris: "I am also following the for-each-purpose-one-program approach. That makes my collection of tools kind of large, but I can work very comfortably that way.

• Scanning—Vuescan
• Fast edit and finalizing from 16 bit TIFFs—Fixfoto
• Batch processing—Irfanview (Fixfoto could also do that, but I am used to the Irfanview GUI for that matter)
• RAW Conversion—DxO Labs and Filmpack
• Noise reduction (not used any more)—Noise Ninja
• Printing—Photoline (Cheapest program that can use ICC profiles)
• Multi layer edit, dodging and burning—Gimp
• Panoramas—Hugin

"As said, I am confortable with that approach. In fact, the complete software package did cost me less than $400 (with DxO being the most part of that), spread over years. And all the software runs on my outdated Thinkpad T61! Amazing."

Stmpjmpr: "I agree that separate, focused tools would be ideal, but it in order to maintain one of the main benefits of apps like Lightroom and Aperture, nondestructive editing, some standards would have to emerge that communicated the effects of the application as instructions instead of rendering the image with the effects applied. Given that this is a technologically huge hurdle, and that the vendors wouldn't agree to any presented solution that didn't put them at the center (witness RAW formats), we're probably stuck with applications that are too monolithic."

Clueless or Calculating?

I didn't actually know this when I wrote yesterday's post about photo editing software—I'm generally more clueless than calculating—but it turns out that Adobe is about to release the newest edition of Lightroom, Lightroom 5. You can order it now, available for download from Amazon, or as a download or in the box from B&H Photo. (I don't know about you, but I prefer to have a disc version of my major software products. Why? Because I needed to, once. Once was enough.)

Do I need to try LR? I'm quaking in me boots...I have too much to do lately already, what with the great home reorganization project soaking up the leftovers of my rather minimal supply of personal energy.

And by the bye, did that post set a record for the number of Featured Comments in the shortest time? I think maybe it did.

Mike

P.S. Speaking of calculating...the nod for the funniest idea in the Comments recently came from Ed in the Netherlands, who speculated that maybe TOP is put together by a team of professional writers doing a canny imitation, for commercial purposes, of one person with a distinct personality. Made me laugh. Actually, I really am a person (just one), and I really do cobble TOP together from an 11x11' room in a small ranch house in the wilds of Wisconsin. No foolin'.

Here's the calculating part, though: remember that if you buy your software through our links, you make B&H and Amazon share their profits with ol' Mike. And how cool is that?

The Staff, in cracked bathroom mirror

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

robert e (partial comment): "It surprises me that you don't already use LR, Mike, if only because it's an editor that seems to have been designed by digital-savvy former film photographers for their own use. It's got one foot in the old days and one foot in the new days. Which I think is why it suits me so well. (I don't feel it's in any way hindered by the analog paradigm, either.) I think it would be well worth an hour or or two of your time. It shouldn't take more time than that to download, install, and poke around enough to see if you're compatible with each other."

There Is No Good Photo Editing Software

Home sweet home for me...Adobe Camera Raw (ACR)

I've been thinking about this for the past few days now, and I've been struck by an idea that won't leave my head: Is it possible that good photo editing software just doesn't exist?

I use ACR and Photoshop CS6 myself. ACR comes closest for me (I'm happy that Zalman Stern, a member of the core of the ACR development team, is a TOP reader), and I use it for 90% of what I do—but it doesn't do everything and it isn't available separately. To my mind, it would be the best basis for an all-in-one photo editing program for photography. But partly that's because it's still simple, and added complexities have so far been useful and have not (yet?) become pointless or gratuitous.

Lightroom, on the other hand, now does the trick for most photographers, but it too has shortcomings because, like ACR (which it incorporates), it's intended to be used in conjunction with Photoshop. (Lightroom is essentially the greatly expanded distant descendant of Bridge, with DAM capabilities emphasized.)

Second-tier programs such as PWP and GIMP have serious weaknesses or limitations—PWP's Mac capability is a patch, and GIMP is 8-bit only.

Tiny independent RAW-converter-based editors such as Photo Ninja are cool, but haven't penetrated the market or become standard, and most of them don't generate the capital for continuous improvement (I'm guessing). Every now and then a genius like Fabio Riccardi comes along with a better mousetrap, but the marketing and public acceptance aspects of managing a commercial product create substantial walls that impede success (and there's that capital problem...maybe; I don't know).

Aperture and DxO have strengths and weaknesses and seem to offer real alternatives, though it's widely agreed that neither are perfect.

And Photoshop itself isn't it, because photo editing is actually a fairly small part of its overall functionality, it's vastly too complicated even for some regular users (ahem), and it's too expensive...even before CC. It might be the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink software, and the one all the pro graphics and printing people use, but that doesn't make it ideal.

So is it possible that, when it comes to photo editing software, there's just nothing really, well, good out there? Nothing that works well with all files, is reasonably standardized, is intended mainly for photographers, doesn't need to be used in conjunction with other products, and that does most of the things that most of us want it to do but doesn't do most of what we don't need it to do? And that works well, and is reasonably simple to learn and straightforward to master? And that is reasonably affordable, and updates often enough but not too often?

Seems to me we just all sort of muddle along with a) what we've been muddling along with in the past, b) some combination of programs we happen to own or be familiar with, and c) what we can afford.

Or maybe I'm wrong. I'm the first to admit I'm not an expert on software (I'm really not, I'm not being modest)...just observing the passing scene.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Charles Lanteigne: "Just so I can understand where you're coming from, what would you like ACR/LR to do, that they don't at the moment, that would make them what you'd call 'good photo editing software'?"

Mike replies: As I said, I don't use LR, but I'll answer your question with a question: if LR is everything anybody needs, why are so many people so upset about Photoshop CC?

Bill Pierce: "For a long time, I processed digital images exactly as Mike does—ACR and Photoshop. As Photoshop expanded (understatement alert) to meet the image processing needs of non photographers, a lot of us slipped over to Lightroom, bouncing into Photoshop when we needed to retouch pictures of our wife or girlfriend.

"But, if you want to do it all in one program, from RAW file to print or screen display, here’s another alternative in addition to the ones that you mentioned that’s pretty good—Capture One. Their base interpretation of color and sharpness for a specific camera file can be different from that of the Adobe programs, but is quite good (I think better at times). and, of course, the files are completely adjustable if you want to change their interpretation. They are usually fairly fast in expanding the program to handle the RAW files of new cameras. You can set Capture One to store and retrieve your images either from your existing filing system or in a filing system established by the program. And they promise to always have the latest version of the software downloadable and not updated from the 'cloud.' They usually have some kind of trial period that will let you try out the program for a short period of time without paying for it. The program’s controls are close enough to the Adobe programs that the leaning curve isn’t too horrible. People might want to add it to their list."

David Paterson (partial comment): "Perhaps Photoshop Elements ticks most of the boxes you mention? I don't know—I'm only suggesting; I have very little experience of Elements. My wife uses it but I find the interface so off-putting that I can scarcely bear to use it."

Markus Spring (partial comment): "The former Bibble, now AfterShot Pro, might be quite close to what you look for—nondestructive, extendable, fast, allowing to restrict modifications to regions, it does at least for me 99% I ever needed. And it works on Mac, Win, and even Linux (where it is the only commercialRAW  converter available). The problem with it? The last update from Corel, the new owner, dates back ages, and new cameras' RAW files are simple not known to it...."

Speed (partial comment): "Is it possible that a definition of 'good photo editing software' just doesn't exist? Or is different for each user? It is said in the context of a large and complex application that nobody uses more than 15% of its functions but everybody uses a different 15%. My experience is that when I start with a new application I don't know which 15% I need, and with time my use changes and grows."

Kevin Pfeifle (partial comment): "I could not agree more! I'm using both DxO and lightroom. Neither has layers, which I think is a huge problem, but I refuse to pay for Photoshop (too expensive and too many things I don't need or want). LightZone was starting to move in the direction I wanted....

Jack: "Yeah, welcome to the digital world. You could write that third-to-last paragraph about almost any kind of program, from the lowly word processor on up. My pet peeve is that in the digital world there are no experts. It seems that the time it takes to master a new technology advancement is longer than the time to develop a new advancement. It used to be, not that long ago, that you dedicated yourself to learning something, became an expert at it and you were set for a long time. Not any more."

Mike replies: Yeah, that bugs me too. A lot. It always makes me chuckle when somebody asks me to write a detailed comparison of all the major editing programs. That would require mastering them all first. I'll start in on mastering the second one as soon as I master the first one, but I've been working on mastering the first one for 19 years now, and I'm still not close, so they shouldn't hold their breath.

John Yuda (partial comment): "I don't know if they're fully there yet, but Pixelmator and Acorn are both getting very close from my perspective. They're Mac-only, and built on Apple's Core Image technology...."

Ed (partial comment): "You seem to forget the RAWTherapee and that my dear freind is missing out on free greatness."

Jim Kofron: "You indirectly mention Lightzone (Fabio Riccardi), which continues to be my favorite photo editor (even with its warts). I'd like to let you and your readers know that although Fabio closed up LightCrafts, he graciously has donated the code to an open source project that has been gaining some significant momentum since the beginning of the year. The site is Lightproject.org, and I'd encourage your readers and any developer types to participate in this effort. The first couple of times I tried Lightzone, I just didn't get it. On my third trial, something just clicked and I thought to myself—'Brilliant.' It's a great paradigm for photo editing, even if it's missing the 'pixel pushing' tools like a healing brush. I was more than happy to buy the 'lifetime' license, and have used it to finish my photographs ever since. But yes, I think it's safe to say that there are no good (or great) photo editing software packages out there...."

JTW: "I absolutely agree. Software always seems to have the tendency to try to be all things for all people, and ends up being too ponderous, too unwieldy, and too complex (and too expensive). Two examples: Microsoft Word, and Photoshop."

Adam Isler: "I think your title is too strong. Surely there's no 'perfect' photo editing software that has just the right set of features for what you want and no more, with an intuitive interface that makes it a breeze to use. But there's certainly 'good' photo editing software. I myself have standardized on Lightroom with Nik plugins and the occasional use of Photoshop CS5 (and I'm considering whether CC will be worth it for me—waiting to hear from Ctein on Wednesday).

"Am I overjoyed with this set-up? Is it perfect? No. But it's comfortable enough and, while I miss the scent of hypo and acetic acid mixed with sweat from my old bathroom darkroom, this is way better."

Dennis Mook: "I would like to see Lightroom Plus. Take Lightroom, add 50% to the price and give us about 15 of the most commonly used tools we utilize in Photoshop. That would give us database capability, non-destructive initial editing and then the commonly used attributes we go to Photoshop to use for what we now can't do in Lightroom. That would be perfect for me."

Gordon Lewis (partial comment): "Let's remember that image editing (meaning manipulation, not deleting weak images) is an option, not a fundamental requirement."

Stephen Scharf: "Have to respectfully disagree. Despite Adobe's Machiavellian behaviour of late with respect to Creative Cloud, Adobe Lightroom rocks. If you ever had to go through a day's take of 1000+ RAW images for your PR director at the racetrack, identify selects, and burn to a disc in time for deadline press, you'd know what I mean!  ;-) ."

Harold Merklinger: "Even before Photoshop existed, I believed that there were certain fundamental principles that guided software developers.  The rules go something like this:

1. Every software package must contain at least one highly useful 'killer' feature or capability not available in any other package.
2. Every software package must lack at least one essential feature or capability found in nearly every other competing package.
3. No software package may be entirely free of bugs.
4. Every software package must contain at least one undocumented feature that every user needs to know.
5. The native file format must be incompatible with competing software packages and preferably incompatible with earlier versions of the same package.
6. Where possible, there should be multiple similar, easily confused pairs of functions or capabilities. Any documentation supplied must describe both functions of a pair in a single paragraph and any examples must use both functions in such a way that it is impossible to determine precisely which function does what.

"I believe my list eventually contained a total of 37 such design rules. Suffice it to say that the first two principles alone determine that everyone needs all available software packages.

"That said, I must say that Photoshop has been for me the best of all the software packages I have used. I started with version 2."

Fazal Majid: "Lightroom was not designed as a Photoshop adjunct. Most users report it has the opposite effect—PS usage declines dramatically once you start using LR. Also, in genesis it was a skunkworks project at Macromedia Labs before the company was even acquired by Adobe. Apple's release of Aperture forced Adobe to release LR, albeit for internal political reasons with the tag 'Photoshop' attached to the product name."

Rob (partial comment): "I am a recent convert to Photo Ninja, which I think puts ACR deep in the shade as a raw convertor. At this early stage of its development, PN does not have many of the features and workflow enhancers that can be found in programs such as Lightroom, Aperture and Capture One, but I find that PN's output is so good that I have much less need for additional tweaking in Photoshop than I previously did with other raw convertors."

MJFerron (partial comment): "Actually PS Elements 11 is a nice affordable option."

Marc Rochkind (partial comment): "There's nothing at all in LR that requires, or even suggests, that Photoshop plays a role in the workflow. You can go to PS and back smoothly, which is nice, but this is definitely not central to what you do in LR."

Dan Gorman (partial comment): "The key thing that keeps me coming back to P'shop is the ability to work in layers—including adjustment layers and layer masks—and the resulting ability to make very precise local edits. I'm not aware of any other program that has this capability (though I'd love to be informed otherwise)."

Jamie Pillers (partial comment): "I've used Aperture for several years now, since it first came out. Recently I added the Nik suite of software (which loads as an integral add-on to Aperture). Aperture has always done everything I've needed."

david stock: "Folks might want to check out Photoline. It does virtually everything Photoshop does, for a fraction of the expense. I wouldn't use it for RAW processing, but for those times when you need layers, selections and special tools, it's very capable. Of course, like Photoshop, it has a learning curve...."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "I actively do not want 'all-in-one' software. I don't want DAM integrated with photo editing, in particular—a nasty path that both Bibble (in v. 5) and Lightroom (from the beginning I believe) went down. [...] As a general philosophical thing, all-in-one tools are second (or so) best at each thing they do, maybe actually best at one thing if you're very lucky. Given how photography pushes data storage processing speed issues, I can't afford second best for many aspects of my photo software."

Tom Kwas: "Once again, as I've said almost every time someone on here talks about 'pro' processing and editing software:

"One: Photoshop was never meant to be a photographer's software, strictly pre-press, and it was marketed to me as such back in the '90s when I was running a big studio for a retailer. For those on here that said it's now getting to have too many features for the general photographer, it always did. It was never written using photo specific terminology that all pro photographers understood, like 'grades' for contrast, and 'stops' for brightness. C'mon, sharpening that has to do with radials and distals? What the what is that? And no 'one button' B&W conversion for years, when other software had it....

"Two: Capture One is what everyone I ever knew in a professional studio used, especially in large commercial studios with a lot of varying equipment and medium format sized digital cameras. Photoshop was only in the pre-press and assembly departments!"

Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud, Part I: The Bad

This week's column by Ctein

This is the first part of a two column series on Photoshop CC. In this column I will talk about what Adobe got wrong (oh, so badly wrong!) Pertinently, I'll also correct some broad misconceptions that people have about Photoshop CC. Feel free to rant, fume, and bloviate to your hearts content in comments; that's what this week's column is for.

Next week, I'll talk about why I decided (to my surprise) that this is a really good thing for Photoshop users and Adobe, both. No, don't anticipate me; you will not be able to guess where I'm going with this. I think I've got an interesting take on the whole thing; if we can get our rants out of our system this week, we'll have an illuminating discussion next week. (So call me a cockeyed optimist.)

I'm limiting my scope to Photoshop. I don't use Lightroom, and I rarely, if ever, use any of the other Creative Suite components (in other words, I am typical of 90% of photographers using Photoshop). If you're a Lightroom or major Creative Suite user, you likely have concerns and issues that I'm not competent to discuss. That doesn't mean I think your gripes aren't legitimate, just that I am restricting my scope.

Diving into the lava pit, without further ado...

Adobe did not spring this on us in the worst possible way, but it's way high up on the incompetence scale. Some of their strategy and marketing people need to be fired. I'm not kidding. Most of the whirlwind they are reaping is entirely of their own making and was entirely unnecessary.

To start with, there's the style. You don't surprise customers with a change like this with one month's notice. Yes, Adobe's been talking about this fundamental strategic change for several years, now, but only with vague timetables that put it years in the future. The result was entirely predictable, forcing people to make long-term strategy decisions, with just a month to figure this all out before the hammer falls? How much would you think this might piss people off?

Enough that you see a marked uptick in people using the phrase "Adobe tax." Yes, it's a brain-dead, bumper-sticker-slogan bit of rhetoric (you call your monthly phone or garbage collection bills "phone tax" or "garbage tax"? Really??), but it's a fair indicator that people are really upset. A change.org petition? OMG. Sure, it has no force whatsoever and a pretty small number of signatories compared to Adobe's installed base, but when was the last time you saw anyone attempt to start a social movement over a change in product licensing terms?!

PR-wise, Adobe couldn't have made it much worse if they'd offered to kill a puppy with every purchase of Photoshop CC.

Oh, wait. They did manage to make it much worse. There was the content. The murky, unclear, incomplete, convoluted content. That's where most of the misconceptions come from. In the days following the announcement, a large number of people were unclear about just what this physically entailed, because Adobe had decided to wrap the whole thing up in the high concept of the Creative Cloud. Was the new Photoshop application going to be client-resident or server-resident? Where did your files live? Were updates going to be push-obligatory or optional? Would you even be able to buy CS after CC comes out?

I had a friend who is exceptionally knowledgeable about streaming and server-based technologies and services (because it's her job to be) ask me three days after the announcement if the new Photoshop was going to be client or server based, because the short-form press releases hadn't made that clear even to her. (If it were server-based, she was most curious how they'd solved some bandwidth/latency problems.) I had to ask Adobe's PR agency several questions myself, because I couldn't figure them out even after delving deeply into the Adobe website. In a couple of cases they couldn't give me an answer because Adobe hadn't told them yet.

Here in a nutshell is what's really going on (I'm glossing over some technical details). Photoshop CC is not any different from Photoshop CS. It resides on your computer. The files you work on reside on your computer. It does not require a constant connection to the Internet to work. It does require a periodic connection to keep working...but so do CS versions of Photoshop! You didn't know that? True. I've had CS occasionally reset itself and need to login to revalidate my copy and pull it out of 30-day-trial mode. In some cases it's even needed me to reenter the serial number.

The only difference for the user is that Photoshop CC revalidates itself on a regular basis (30–99 days, depending on the license), while Photoshop CS only does it when some internal bit of logic deems it necessary. That's it.

That discredits the argument that this change is somehow about dealing with piracy (next week I'll tell you what it is about; be patient). It'll be no more difficult to pirate Photoshop CC than CS. Well, okay, they may have rolled out some new anti-piracy tweaks to the activation/validation system in the new version, because they're always working on that, but it's nothing inherent in the CC model; those would have been in CS 6.5.

The reason all this misinformation is out there is because Adobe couldn't figure out that they needed to explain this cleanly and simply, and not inextricably and confusingly wrap up the presentation in some fancy Cloud conceptual package that was irrelevant to most Photoshop users.

Then there's the confusion on pricing. A lot, maybe even a majority, of existing users think their Photoshop costs are going to go up, because they'll be paying out $20 a month. Except, they won't. For existing users, the price is $10 a month. It's only $20 a month for brand-new users (or current users of really old versions). Yes, it's a one-year "introductory" price. But, I've got good reason to think it'll become permanent and, anyway, that's what it is now. Ten dollars. Not $20.

Except...was this clearly and prominently displayed on the Adobe website? No! You found this out only if you drilled down through the purchase options. It's not that Adobe is trying to rip us off; the information does come up clearly once you get a layer or two in and before you'd be making a purchase. It's maladroit presentation.

Dear Adobe, since it seems you do not know how to suck eggs, let me explain this to you. Here is the way you present something like that, especially since your primary audience is a pre-existing installed user base: The very first page that discusses pricing should say "Price for the next year: $9.95 for users of Photoshop CS[x] and later." And the price for new users? That goes in smaller type or maybe even footnoted. Oh, and not so by the way, this information should be very near the top of the presentation because, y'know, it's the very first question people are going to ask, and making them dig for the information is not good salesmanship, it's just plain poking at the bear. Except, it seems you don't know that, so I'm telling you.

All of this, plus these postings:

Photoshop and Creative Cloud: We're Listening

Creative Cloud team: We're listening; stay tuned

You should never lose access to your work, period

...make it clear that someone(s) at Adobe whose job was to think these things through did not do so. Not even a little bit. We're not talking about rocket-science corporate communications issues; these are all such basic and predictable concerns and questions that Adobe should have had all the answers ready and promulgated clearly and prominently the moment they made their announcement.

Adobe truly earned all the vitriol that's been directed at them.

That's it for this week. As I said, next week I'll tell you why I've decided I actually like this idea, despite Adobe's best efforts to make me hate it. For now, have fun with the torches and pitchforks and tar and feathers. Just remember, kids, to have a responsible adult around. I mean, it's all fun and games until someone trips and pokes an eye out out with one of those pitchforks....

Ctein

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Regular columnist Ctein explicates the pros and cons every week on TOP.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

George Feucht (partial comment): "OWNING something (that doesn't require costly upkeep) is much better in the long run than RENTING it."

Eric: "A monthly subscription for $10? Check out the European prices...."

Mark Cotter: "I jumped to CC about six months ago. I figured that I use Photoshop, InDesign, Lightroom and Premiere (occasionally) enough to justify the cost. And I decided that I preferred the idea of always having the current version rather than upgrading every couple of years when I couldn't work effectively with the files others had sent me. OK, not quite the person you were aiming your column at but I do agree with you—and I expect to agree with you next week. Oh, and I work in education so get a hefty discount. Win-win for me!"

Mark Roberts: "What's infuriating—and infuriating is the word for it—about this 'Creative Cloud' is that one will no longer be able to just buy Photoshop and be done with it. (Yes, I'm aware that technically one 'licenses,' rather than purchases, Photoshop.) The amount of the payment is less annoying that the fact that it is recurrent; it'll keep coming back on a regular basis. 'Nickel and Dimed,' 'Death of a Thousand Cuts,' whatever you want to call it. I already have too many of them in my life. I suspect many others do, too."

David (partial comment): "I don't rent anything except floor sanders, jackhammers and some extra lighting equipment when I need it."

The End of the Photoshop Era

I've used Photoshop for 20 years, more or less. I've upgraded every two or three versions. Each time I do, it's like going into my house after someone sneaked in and rearranged everything, sometimes subtly, sometimes not...taking a few familiar things away and leaving a few new things. It's mostly familiar, it's just that lots of things aren't quite where I left them, and I don't quite know where to go look. It always takes me a while to groove my practices with a new version. Sometimes it's a bit of an adventure. (Not the sort of adventure I enjoy—for the most part, I hate gratuitous change. But that's a rant for another day.)

I hesitate to admit this, and I would never do this now that I have a public "presence," but I must shamefacedly admit that I used a pirated copy of Photoshop for a while, too, when I was too poor to pay for it. (Hey, I'm a single parent. My current copy of CS6 was fully paid for, high retail, with cash money.) So I completely understand why Adobe is setting things up so that people will have to pay for the use of its software. It has the right. I'm walking proof of why it might be necessary, and I can't complain.

As I understand it—and I really haven't done nearly as much reading about this as I should have (software issues bore me)—Adobe will be making constant, ongoing updates to the CC program, something they're touting as one of the advantages of the new arrangement. (Is that correct?)

My issue is not so much that I'd have to pay a monthly fee, but that constant updates would mean I'd never get comfortable. That stranger sneaking into my house and rearranging everything would be doing less of it, but more often. I find it hard enough to do what I want to do in Photoshop, which I have never really come close to mastering. Add in constant, ongoing changes of the sort that have appeared in the past in new versions, and I'd never feel like I'm standing on firm ground.

Anyway, I doubt very much I'll be a "subscriber" under the new regime. I'm not a "power user." My Photoshop era may be coming to an end...or will as soon as CS6 gets too long in the tooth to remain fully practical.

Several readers have suggested that I do a survey of other software options. That's like asking me to write about higher mathematics. I have strengths and I have weaknesses, but, really, you don't want me writing about software, believe me. I don't learn software easily or well. (It was one of the reasons I got into photography in the first place, and I'm really not kidding—so I wouldn't have to get anywhere near computers! That's the truth. ) I can't write intelligently about the software I use, much less every other option too.

However, Dpreview to the rescue—they've just published a list of ten alternatives to Photoshop. Granted, two of the ten have "Photoshop" in the name, and are from Adobe, but aren't Photoshop.

Personally, I'm leaning toward DxO. Anyone have any comments about that?

And many photographers just use Lightroom now, and that won't change. So to a lot of people, I suppose, this whole Photoshop CC tempest is taking place in someone else's teapot anyway....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Greg Roberts: "You said, 'I'm walking proof of why it might be necessary....' I think the complete opposite is true: you are walking proof that if people are able to use, learn, and appreciate, quality software then they will pay for it when they can. I did the same, when I could not afford Photoshop I used a pirated copy, and once I could afford it I bought it, and have continued to pay for it every two years. Whether it is monthly rental or annual purchase, if you can't currently afford it then you are not going to buy it. Adobe's efforts to stop piracy will not increase their income, as the majority of today's pirates aren't going to instantly subscribe tomorrow. A lot of people are going to migrate to other products and find those other products are pretty good for most of the work they want to do. Look back at your own piracy—did you actually cost Adobe money when you pirated the software? Failure to gain is not loss. If the pirate can't afford it the pirate will not buy it."

Tim Bradshaw: "I don't have a recommendation. But if you want to escape the endless stream of annoying changes you really have one choice: don't use software."

Mark Roberts: "Mike, as you probably know I've been teaching Photoshop in college now for... a long time. It's not surprising that old farts like you and I are fed up with getting our rooms rearranged, as you describe it. But the last time I told a class full of students that the release of a new version was imminent I received, rather than expressions of excitement or enthusiasm, an audible groan from the room. This from 19-year-olds on their first version of Photoshop."

FrankyB: "Adobe's plan reminds me of a humorous skit I saw on television. A poor widow is in the funeral home and the director is selling her a suit for her dead husband and is charging her by the week.

"I have used Photoshop for many years and paid full price for it and each upgrade through CS6. However, I will not be forced to purchase all future upgrades. I will continue with CS6, until I feel the need to move to something else. I will then purchase a program with a permanent license from a different company."

Charles Lanteigne: "I found DPReview's list farcically inadequate. Apart from Photoshop Elements and GIMP, which are novice versions of Photoshop, the rest are not even close to being alternatives to Photoshop. The only way they could be construed as such is if all along you've used so little of Photoshop that it's actually not what you needed. The list actually includes either alternatives to Camera Raw (to perform global ajustments, some dodging/burning and such) or alternatives to "Paint" (used to draw stuff). Image manipulation applications that can perform complex local adjustments, masking and compositing (which is what Photoshop is all about)? Sorry, there are no alternatives."

John K: "I stopped using Adobe products a couple of years ago. No PS, no Flash, no Acrobat. I'm doing just fine. I use Aperture 3 with the Nik suite of plugins for most editing and Pixelmator for anything Aperture can't do. There are lots of non-Adobe options."

Michael Matthews: "Since Lightroom's develop module is essentially the current version of ACR, plus some different approaches to achieving similar ends, it should continue to serve as an up-to-date entryway to your existing flavor of Photoshop. Nothing in your copy of CS6...or CS 5.5...or CS3 is going to stop working just because there's a new function in the subscription software. Do the ACR work in Lightroom and, then, if the image needs more (or if you prefer the Photoshop layers and tools approach) bump it over to Photoshop and continue. Updating Lightroom at $79 for a new release is a lot less expensive than updating Photoshop has been."

Robbie Corrigan (partial comment): "Been using the subscription version of PS6 for a good nine months now. Can't see what the hassle is in keeping it bang up to date with camera/lens profiles."

Greg (partial comment): "Please, let's not discuss PS Elements—in 2013, 8 bits per channel is crippleware."

Phil: "When it comes to computers, I'm what people refer to as a power user. I've used hundreds of programs of all kind, and I don't fret much when I need to use one I don't know—they're pretty much all the same to me. As far as I know, and I've seen a lot, the only area where PS (and Adobe products in general) truly outshines others is in color space management. If you need to go to print (and I do mean magazines and the like), then there is little latitude in tool choices. I don't say that Adobe do it better than others, they just do it in the way the industry understands and handles color spaces. If you are like the vast majority of users and don't need to go to print, then just about any tool set will get the job done quite well, usually with a softer learning curve and much less hassle and aggravation over time."

Don Bryant (partial comment): "I'm surprised no one has mentioned Capture One software. An excellent alternative probably the top contendor to replace Adobe PS and LR."

Yannick Martel (partial comment): "I strongly suggest RawTherapee, which I find very efficient once I get used to it."

Max Sang (partial comment): "I've used Bibble (now renamed AfterShot) for a few years now and it's really nice."

David Dyer-Bennet (partial comment): "My bulk processing goes through Corel Aftershot Pro (formerly Bibble Pro). They've ruined it (dropped the Noise Ninja integration, so newer versions are useless to me). Adobe's attitude has made me not willing to use Lightroom except as an absolute last resort."

Bernie (partial comment): "I have decided to give Pixelmator a try."

Manuel (partial comment): "I can't praise DxO Optics Pro 8 highly enough."

Godfrey: "I have Photoshop CS5. And hardly use it. No need to upgrade. I debate whether to even keep it installed. Lightroom does well for me."

John (partial comment): "I have used Picture Window Pro for several years now. I like it and still use it for most of my detailed editing."

Jim Kofron (partial comment): "I left Photoshop years ago, tempted by a new program that was advertised here at TOP: Lightzone. For me, Lightzone was an ideal system once you figured out the gestalt (it was much different than Photoshop), and as long as you didn't have to push pixels around (no healing brush). The sad news is that Lightcrafts closed up shop a few years ago—but the good news is that Fabio recently agreed to open-source the code. http://lightzoneproject.org/ is where the action is, and there's Windows and Linux betas out now. Hopefully the Mac beta will be coming shortly."

adamct (partial comment): "I have to lob in another recommendation for Photoline."

Mike Weatherstone (partial comment): "I do as little post processing as possible, preferring to get it right' in camera' if I can. The reason is just that I get no pleasure at all in doing it. Frankly it bores me rigid."

Mike Plews "Maybe it's time to go back to doing all my image processing with Dektol."

John Camp: "I've been involved with a long torturous discussion of this on Luminous Landscape, and anyone who wants to read or participate in a long torturous discussion should go there—there's a lot of information. Here's what I believe (others may disagree):

"Adobe may have had several reasons for going to the subscription-only form. The main one is, it'll make them a lot of money. If you upgraded with every single new version of the stand-alone product, CC will still cost you more (other than the first loss-leader year.) If you did what many people did—upgraded every other version, it'll cost you more than twice as much. (This is compared to upgrade costs, not to first-time buyers.) I have a very serious, but infrequent use for Photoshop, which really leaves me in a quandary. Do I want to pay more than twice as much for what is already a very high-priced product, to use it six times a year? I think many other people are in the same boat. Other reasons that some people claim Adobe may require CC: to cut down on piracy, to smooth revenue flow, to reduce engineering complications in maintaining two versions, and because Photoshop was reaching the point in its development when new important features were becoming harder to provide, so people might more frequently opt out of new versions (and thus reduce Adobe revenue.)

"Adobe has suggested that there will be no CS7—that CS6 will be the last stand-alone Photoshop. They have promised to keep it updated for some time, but not forever. That means that within a relatively few years...probably three or four—you would no longer get and updated camera base for CS6, and if you use Mac computers, then the very next OS upgrade might no longer support CS6. So CS6, without support, will probably go obsolete relatively quickly, unless you mothball an 'archival' computer with an OS that sports CS6. The problem will be somewhat less with Windows machines.

"The objections to Adobe's decision generally follow these lines:

1. Too expensive, especially for independent artists, part-time pros, or independent pros. One well-regarded commenter on LuLa suggests that Adobe his basically going for corporate sales, and is willing to sacrifice non-corporate sales.
2. Locks up your work, as well as Adobe's. If you drop out of the subscription system, you will be allowed to continue using Photoshop (as I understand it) for 90 days, and then the program will stop working. (So here I make up a story.) Suppose you are a serious photographer, with several thousand images in Photoshop files. You lose your job, and can no longer afford to pay the monthly fees. You then must move all your files off Photoshop, into some other DAM program, or they will be locked up—after 90 days you will have no access to the files, including your personal work on the files. The program simply won't work anymore. It is possible to move the images, but if you have, say, several tens of thousands of them, you'd have to do an enormous amount of work to get them out before the program is locked. The objection here is that Adobe is not only locking their program—they're locking up your work.
3. Some people have claimed that if the move to CC is successful with Photoshop and the other Creative Suite programs, that Lightroom will be next. Adobe has more-or-less denied this, saying that Lightroom will remain stand-alone for the foreseeable future. If Lightroom also went CC, that would again require those who do not wish to subscribe, to do an enormous amount of additional work to save their own past work on the LR program. The question here is, what does 'foreseeable' mean? Definitions are thin on the ground.
4. Since you must be online to keep the program working, you could have problems if you go off-grid for more than three months  (traveling to a third-world location, for example.) And because of the frequent updates projected by Adobe, people who live in rural areas with not much bandwidth avaIlable, upgrades could take a lot of time.

"Jeff Schewe, who has written well-regarded Lightroom/Photoshop books, has mounted a generally intelligent if somewhat cantankerous defense of Adobe on several threads at LuLa. I don't feel like defending them, so go there if you wish to see Jeff's defense.

"Bottom line, as I see it: Adobe is going to hurt a lot of people who supported them in the past, but for Adobe, the change makes sense in terms of revenue. There may be other consequences that would be less favorable, but those are all speculative."

UPDATE: I've been more impressed than ever by the variety and thoughtfulness of the comments to this post. The idea of the "Featured Comments" is to provide a briefer sampling of a variety of good or interesting (or amusing) comments for readers who might not have time to delve into the larger stack of unedited ones, so I've been reluctant to expand this section too far, but there are quite a number of valuable comments in the main Comments Section. Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts.

UPDATE #2: A friend at Adobe wrote to clarify that updates to Photoshop CC will be optional and adoptable on the user's timetable. They'll come through the Adobe Applications Manager. —Ed.

Bear.: "For my business, I much prefer software licensed monthly. No capital costs tied up. Outgoings match revenue. No tax issues. But for my personal affairs, I greatly dislike the monthly model. I don't use the software day to day. It is is a discretionary purchase. And I generally don't need the latest update. I will keep a copy for years. Hence, from my personal perspective, Adobe is pushing Photoshop to professionals, and away from amateurs. This will shrink its market. And I image either Adobe or someone else will fill the gap."

Ctein (partial comment): "Keeping a chronological perspective on it, it's a bit early for anyone to be worrying. If one is good with Photoshop CS6, nothing is going to change until the operating systems go through enough generations that it will no longer run. That's difficult to predict—a bit less so on the Mac side. And especially since I know your habits. In your case, assuming you go with your plan to get a new machine when your AppleCare warranty expires on this one, you're going to be good for at least four more years and quite possibly seven. Which is, like, forever in computer terms. Just saying, it's not an immediately pressing problem. Remember, Creative Cloud isn't going to negate anyone's existing CS6 license or operation."

Brian Ellis (partial comment): "I've spent hundreds of hours over the years reading, watching videos, attending workshops, buying books, etc. to get to my present knowledge of Photoshop. I'm not about to use some other program unless there's absolutely no choice."

Crabby Umbo (partial comment): "Photoshop is so ubiquitous, that I've lost management jobs during interviews by saying 'I've used Photoshop in the past, but use alternative software today, as do most photographers.' The HR stiff only knows that the department head told them the candidate must be proficient in Photoshop, even though it isn't their job to use it...."

James Moule (partial comment): "Adobe is creating an opening for Google (which has recently acquired Nik) to develop a full-featured replacement for Photoshop."

MM (partial comment): "One commenter recommended xara.com (Windows only). I had never heard of it, but from their website it looks very capable and the more expensive version ($300) claims to have full PSD support."

Alan Barnard: "I'm a graphics professional and photographer who uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and Lightroom on a regular basis. For someone like myself who uses the full suite of Adobe tools, CC is a welcome alternative. That said, I'm pretty sure I'd be disappointed if I was strictly a Photoshop user."

John McDevitt: "I can't believe DPreview neglected to mention Picture Window Pro (PWP). I've been using PWP for years."

Lightroom 5 Public Beta Released

Adobe has released the public beta version of Lightroom 5, available for download. The new features in Lightroom 5 are said to be: Advanced Healing Brush; "Upright" (one-click straightening of tilted images); Radial Gradient; Offline editing with Smart Previews; and Improved photo book creation.

There's a brief review by Sharon Machlis at Computerworld.

The beta version will expire on June 30th, but it's free to use until then.

Mike
(Thanks to John Camp)

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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

Lou: "Those new features are obviously pointless gadgets, but we will keep paying the Adobe tax to get the bug fixes and the newer camera support...."

Adam Richardson replies to Lou: "I'd love to hear what you think a non-pointless gadget is. Adobe regularly does free updates that support new cameras (4.4 being the last one just last week that included extensive RAW engine work to handle Fuji X-trans files). Plus, the relatively small price of this upgrade largely obviates the need for buying/upgrading the vastly more expensive Photoshop, unless you really need layers, or the pano stitching and HDR work as Svein-Frode mentions [in the Comments section —Ed.]. As they build in more functionality it becomes a single solution, so it's actually a money saver....

"In my mind a proper healing brush is super useful and something I've missed since switching from Aperture. It saves a round trip via Photoshop to take advantage of its context aware fill, but that comes with its own issues of image versioning.

"PNG file support, finally—very nice. PDF support would be great too so that it can be used as a more holistic asset library.

"One-click proper full screen view, finally, is very welcome.

"While it's not necessary for me, the ability to keep a relatively tiny size database on a laptop is super useful for working photographers.

"The horizon alignment is a nice to have if it works well—yes, you can do it yourself (and I have to, an embarrassingly large amount of the time), but this is a nice time-saver, and after all isn't that a lot of what working with digital is about, to make tasks that used to be arduous more convenient?

"The Upright function is an extension of the functionality that's been there for lens/perspective corrections, and looks like it brings some enhancements that avoids the weirdness you can sometimes get with the functions in LR4. It means you don't have to invest in expensive tilt correcting lenses, and avoids a round trip to Photoshop for its (til now) more sophisticated abilities."