Photoshop CC

[HaseebM]

Just went ahead and without fuss got my subscription for annually at $9.99 per month. Wish I hadn't bought LR5 earlier though it was for my son. Now I am in the learning mode. Any simple suggestions like stacking, text, frame, borders and the like would be highly appreciated. Thanks.

[Kodiak]

Any simple suggestions like stacking, text, frame, borders and the like would be highly appreciated.

I would suggest you the PS CC online resources: tutorials and more…

[HaseebM]

Indeed I have been checking them out, learning a few. For the stack, do you just open all images and then select all and stack? I saw your excellent car image in another post.

[Kodiak]

For the stack, do you just open all images and then select all and stack?

These are pretty straight foreword, yes… fill in the dialogue box and click OK!

[JR1]

Sorry I consider subscriptions a con.

I would rather pay for a program and update than pay monthly.

I have Paintshop Pro I still use to this day dating back 15 years. Monthly that would have cost about £1,500 by now at £8 per month.

[pnodrog]

The subscription model suits many but certainly not me. However my son who does far less photography than I do does have a subscription mainly to remain aware of the latest versions and tools. A major question is do these people have a foolproof exit policy if for some reason or other they no longer have access to CC.

[Manfred M]

The only thing you will lose is access to edit files; i.e. psd files. The RAW and output files will still be quite usable.

As I have a licence to PS6, I would hope to be able to backgrade; but on the other hand, at this point, I don't see why I would drop my subscription.

With respect to subscription model; effectively tax preparation software and anti-virus software runs like this; albeit with annual rather than monthly fees.

[pnodrog]

Yes an exit policy is not difficult unless you have neglected the need to archive and backup appropriately and regularly. It is certainly not confined to photography and CC. Having recently closed a business I have just finished the task of extracting the payroll, accounts and stock system from cloud based systems and ensuring I still had sufficient access to the data to meet statutory requirements.

Actually if it had just been $10 per month it would have been simpler to keep paying for another 7 years.

[davidedric]

I suspect I will peg out before Adobe does

[HaseebM]

These are pretty straight foreword, yes… fill in the dialogue box and click OK!

I figured that one out, need to do some terrestrial stacking to check results, thanks.

[rpcrowe]

YouTube has some wonderful (and free) Photoshop tutorials... Here are some choices...

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Photoshop

[HaseebM]

Yup, been watching them and trying out a few things side by side, thanks Richard.

[Thlayle]

Haseeb,

I am six months into the same subscription and it works well for me. I have Aperture 3 so the learning curve with Lightroom was not bad.

I would back-up the catalog frequently. I have never had a problem with a corrupt catalog database but it is definitely worth having the back up. On that note, I will add that I have found through experience that equipment failure is more of a risk than database corruption -- so make sure to do regular back ups of all your files. As Manfred helpfully noted, your original RAW and other output files remain useful even if you stop your subscription (as long as those files don't get corrupted or lost, such as through a hard drive failure!).

To me the potential downside of a subscription, isn't the total cost over time as much as it is the potential to lose the work I have put into the editing of the images. If I drop my subscription at some point, I will not be able to access the work I have done in Lightroom or Photoshop. So my second suggestion is to generate lots of outputs of your favorites/best work. That way even if you decide to drop out of the subscription you still have plenty of outputs that do not have to be reworked.

Some say the cataloging abilities of programs like Lightroom are overrated. Maybe so, but Lightroom uses what are sometimes called 'referenced' libraries, meaning the files are not stored in one large database file but stay in the locations you stored them in. That is helpful since you can access those files/folders through other file management methods rather easily. However, that is where having your own method of organizing your work will still remain important. It can be amazingly hard to locate files sometimes if they are not well organized. What I am saying I guess is do not depend just on Lightroom to organize & safeguard your original files.

Side bar digression on the complaint of the cost of subscriptions: yes they do cost more in total. As for cost, I spend far more on coffee every month than I do on my subscriptions which are by the way always up to date with the latest product versions of both Lightroom and Photoshop. That does not even include the money I spend on coffee I buy across the counter when I am out and about. So to me this is definitely affordable. Is it worth it? I ask myself that question much more when I look at my monthly cable tv subscription...

[HaseebM]

Thank you Randy for taking the time to explain. I do take back-ups in LR5 but need to do the same with PS, so thanks for pointing that out. I plan on getting a back up hard drive as I had one which got corrupted a few months back.

[DanK]

I have never had a problem with a corrupt catalog database but it is definitely worth having the back up.

I have. Worse, I didn't notice the problem for ages, so I no longer had an uncorrupted backup. The corruption affects a fairly small number of images, so I can continue to use the database, but I have to be alert to the sync images dialog asking me whether to delete "missing" images that are in fact present on the hard drive.

The moral of this story is to have LR write changes to sidecar XML files. Fortunately, I had read that advice shortly after starting to use LR, so I have XML files. If you do, you can recover edits, but not the visible history in the left panel, by simply importing the affected images into a new database.

[chauncey]

I'm surprised that the excessive learning curve hasn't been mentioned...can you say "years".

Additionally...do not assume that PS will cough out the same results each and every time, especially
when using photomerge tools and it's associated little choices.
Stacking works quite well...sometimes. But, oftentimes it takes a lot of major work, shifting things
here and there to make it work out.