New version of Lightroom: LRCC and LR 6

[Mike Buckley]

It's good to know you're up and running, Dan.

[DanK]

It's good to know you're up and running, Dan.

Thanks. it was VERY frustrating. I used to have a laptop with a reasonably good screen on which I kept my core photo software as a backup. I think I might return to that.

[DennisS]

There was a lot of chatter on the Internet about LR CC GPU feature. I had to turn it off as it got real sluggish.

If anyone is interested here is a very good explanation by a Camera Raw Engineer - Eric Chan (first post):

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1828580

[Digital]

I purchased LR6 about a week ago. I have had no problems with it. I understand this version was released without a BETA version being released first.


Bruce

[davidedric]

Pleased you are up and running. Personally, there is nothing in it I really need, so I will be hanging on till 6.1 ish.

There was plenty of testing done, but public beta. Opinion is divided as to whether a public beta is really useful, or generates more noise than useful information.

I am surprised how many things have slipped through the net. Launching with a non-functioning Help seems a pretty big oversights! I do wonder how much rewriting went on under the hood. Other than seeking to use the gpu, which I understand to be a major recoding job, it's hard to see why this new release took so long to arrive.

Dave

[Geoff F]

I am looking around for alternative software after a new camera isn't recognised. CR2 Raw but a different version and I can't get updates to help. Yes, I'm converting to DNG at the moment which is a work around.

So I have been trying various free trials and so far I have rejected all of them.

I want something which will do focus stacking as well as layers and masks etc so I was wondering about purchasing a relatively cheap general editor plus Zerene for stacking. I don't use half of what I currently have in CS5, but the other half is essential for me! And it does stack as well as Zerene.

I can't see Lightroom in any form being of any use to me either; which probably means having to go up to full Adobe CC which I was trying to avoid; but if nothing else is offering what I need . . .

To be honest, I can't see Lightroom being of any interest to me in the CC package. If I could just get CS6 in a sensible package or something similar.

[DanK]

I am looking around for alternative software after a new camera isn't recognised. CR2 Raw but a different version and I can't get updates to help. Yes, I'm converting to DNG at the moment which is a work around.

I think there is no way around it, unless you want to keep converting to DNG. Seems pretty clear that Adobe has no interest in helping people stay off the CC subscription model.

I want something which will do focus stacking as well as layers and masks etc so I was wondering about purchasing a relatively cheap general editor plus Zerene for stacking. I don't use half of what I currently have in CS5, but the other half is essential for me! And it does stack as well as Zerene.

IMHO, photoshop does not stack as well as Zerene. Zerene offers two very different algorithms that function quiet differently, and its excellent retouching tool makes it easy to combine composites from both. Last I checked, it is also faster.

If you get CC, you will of course have Lightroom if you want it, but you can access the same raw processing engine via Photoshop ACR. However, I personally find Lightroom to be hugely convenient. It has good database functions. It has reasonably good editing tools now, and I find that for many of my images, it's enough, which means I only have to save the original raw file and the xml sidecar file. It makes it trivially easy to move images to photoshop or any other editor you prefer. There are any number of great plugins for it. For example, I can export directly into Zerene from the export menu, I can call Lightroom Enfuse directly from the plugin menu, I can export directly to my smugmug account, etc. It also has a very nice print module. I ended up, not intentionally, using LR as my home base and branching out to other things as needed, e.g., if I need masks or stacking. But to each his or her own.

[Geoff F]

I'm trying to avoid hijacking this thread, Dan, so just a couple of words extra.

When I try to compare Zerene with CS5 my results are both equal in Zerene P Max mode but CS5 is slightly better than D Max mode.

The only other software which I have found to be suitable for my needs so far is Serif Photoplus which I did use all the time a few years ago. But when you add together the cost of getting that plus the better quality version of Zerene we are up to two years on CC so I suspect that is the way I will eventually have to go. Raw into ACR for first editing is my normal way of operation and Bridge for locating files plus other operations.

Incidentally, when testing software I found Gimp to be quite well stacked with features although slightly weird to use compared with the 'Photoshop Methods' which most others seem to use in various forms; and I have become accustomed to working that way.