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Adobe Photography Subscription Survey Regarding New Subscription Pricing

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thommy

Active Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2011
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248
Location
Sweden
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
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Classic
Hi everyone, just curious, has anyone received a survey from Adobe?
I didn't get the survey myself.
But I read about the survey on Luminous Landscape Forum and discovered that Adobe is asking for a change of the Lightroom + Photoshop $9.99 plan.
Two plans seems to be in consideration.
1. They will pull Photoshop from the "Lightroom + Photoshop $9.99 plan" and give us 1TB backup for $9.99.
2. Photoshop included without 1TB backup will cost double $19.99.

Any thoughts why Adobe is even considering these changes?
 
I'm one of those who wants to learn Photoshop better sometime but don't know where to begin.'

Learning how to use layers and layer masks would set you in great stead for any kind of retouching.
 
Do you have more examples? I'm one of those who wants to learn Photoshop better sometime but don't know where to begin. Content Aware Fill i found out some while ago and indeed it's not that hard. I'm very curious about another examples of these 'low hanging fruit'
A few I use, though what kind of photography you do is probably a big driver:

  • There are some other content aware stuff, like scale and move features (e.g. cut the middle out of a shot and sew the two halves together); I do not use them but worth mentioning along with the more useful fill.
  • If you ever copy negatives, e.g. digitizing old shots, Photoshop does the inversion process of the negative far better than lightroom, then you can take the result back to lightroom for color, crops, etc.
  • I often build collages, e.g. after a basketball game, the press release will be a set of 3 dunks or some such. If you open those shots as layers in lightroom, it's pretty easy to learn to edit each layer individually to resize and position (basic functions include selecting a rectangle, using clear to trim a layer (you could do this in LR before the edit-in but it's easier to get the right proportions in PS), and a free transform of a layer that basically allows you to resize (just grab and move corners like in Word or any other program) and slide around to position in the collage).
  • You can build an animated GIF fairly easily. Take the various shots you want as the individual frames, and Open as Layers from Lightroom. It automatically builds an image with all the layers pre-built. "Layers" scares people away, but thought of as each frame in a GIF, and just using it for that, is fairly easy. You can then export (I like "legacy") in whatever size you want.
  • Select stuff with cloning. PS's ability to select based on color and adjacent similar color is very handy when combined with a simple cut and paste. Doing some art on a landscape, and want an eagle flying by? Take your eagle shot and the landscape, open both in lightroom. Use the select to get just the eagle, then copy, switch to the landscape, and paste. You may need to resize (the free transform above is perfect for that). Done.

All of these have horribly complicated and powerful features you can dive in and learn if so inclined - layer mixing, how to do that paste and have it follow contours in the target, all sorts of tools like color decontamination in selections. When I start reading about them (especially since I use it so seldomly) my eyes glaze over and my first reaction is just say "no". And many tutorials are not helpful in that they dwell on the complexity, rather than showing you how to just do a simple version. But if you persist to find just how to get the basics going, these are not only very easy, but a lot of it parallels the same kind of cut/paste, resize, and reposition that is done in every windows or mac program that handles any kind of objects. Mostly.

I think it's the layers that are the most scary. While I have tried using them with all the various features of smart objects and mixing and such, 95% of the time what I use them for is sticking a smaller image on top of a larger one, whether it's a cloned item, or a whole separate image rectangle. What you might do with scissors and glue if you were back in the 80's and building a poster. But you cannot do ANY of that in Lightroom, as you cannot do anything with two images at once (well, other than panoramas and HDR, which is a different sort of thing).

Most recent example: We are redecorating and wanted some wall art. I took a shot of the room with a blank wall, and copy-and-pasted other images onto it, resized to the size we wanted some gallery-wrapped canvases (which nicely have no frame I had to deal with!), and we could test combinations until we found what we liked. Moreover, by scaling, we could test different sizes.
 
Learning how to use layers and layer masks would set you in great stead for any kind of retouching.
They are, they absolutely are, and you can do wonderful things with them, especially in conjunction with blending modes.

But so many people have had some encounter, either just vicariously from another person's failure and confusion, or attempting to learn "Layers" and getting buried in the details they don't need. I think "Photoshop Layers" has become a real scary term for a lot of people.

I have not searched around much to know if it already exists, but I think we need something like Hawking's A Brief History of Time. When he first wrote it it was filled with equations. His editor warned that for every equation his audience would be cut in half, so he artfully pruned it down to just one (and the one is E=MC2 that everyone knows). My wife, who hates math with a passion, and has no real interest in physics read it and loved it.

We need someone like that with Photoshop -- "Layers" has become the equations of physics -- I think a lot of users get scared away when they hear the term, because so many tutorials and blogs go too deep, too fast, and fail to show how really powerful things can be done really simply.

For example, I'd be tempted to avoid layer masks entirely if doing collages, even though it can make it easier; it also makes it more complicated in concept. Start by teaching someone to just crop the rectangles they need in lightroom. The graduate level course is take them into photoshop and crop them by using a rectangular select and either copy/paste or invert/clear. Post doc is masks.

Anyway... guess we are a bit off topic. Sorry...
 
Maybe. It's been too long to remember precisely, but if I recall the numbers strongly favored subscription if you are one who upgraded ever version, and I think it was close if you upgraded PS every other and LR every version (which is about what I used to do). With the caveat I do not recall hard numbers, I am pretty sure the answer is not "always perpetual" but rather "it depends".

Again, aging memory, but I seem to recall the $10/mo coming out pretty late in the CC launch, as though it was a reaction to negative press and user complaints. At the time people were saying "it's really cheap compared to buying -- there's a catch". Maybe there will be a catch, but it's been a while without any "gotcha".

There is a catch, it is to do with short term punishment and reward. In a subscription environment, the need to produce good quality code is greatly diminished. It doesn't matter whether a LR is good or bad, the buyer goes on paying, at least in the short term. Long term there isn't much difference as if the product becomes unreliable for any length of time people will stop subscribing and will move elsewhere. In the 'try before you buy' perpetual environment, users try and if it doesn't work, they don't buy.

Wrt PS, I fall into the camp that sees photography as being about the camera and not primarily about a graphics design package that allows essentially unlimited manipulation of a database of ones and zeros. But that is a personal thing, many others get huge pleasure out of the digital manipulation of an image. For me, PS is massive over-kill compared to the very many 'lesser?' layers editors that are out there. Adobe even have one themselves, called Photoshop Elements. Yes PSE has some limitations (though it does have de-haze) and for some users those limitations are very severe, fair enough they need full PS. I like to think of LR as a 'whole photo' editor and only very rarely stray into local adjustments. The bottom line is that, in my experience, LR isn't very good at local adjustments, but when it comes to the end to end workflow of raw processing, it is right up there in the top echelons, the user community support is excellent too, and that is worth a lot. For how much longer LR stays 'king of the hill' remains to be seen, the alternatives are catching up fast; in terms of partly automated image processing, LR is now well behind the leaders, IMHO.
 
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There is a catch, it is to do with short term punishment and reward. In a subscription environment, the need to produce good quality code is greatly diminished. It doesn't matter whether a LR is good or bad, the buyer goes on paying, at least in the short term. Long term there isn't much difference as if the product becomes unreliable for any length of time people will stop subscribing and will move elsewhere. In the 'try before you buy' perpetual environment, users try and if it doesn't work, they don't buy.

I have to respectfully but very firmly disagree with this statement. If there are frequent releases, high quality code based on a good architecture is more important than ever.

The problem with frequent releases, especially if they are on a regular cadence, e.g. monthly, is that there is pressure on the team to have "something new" every release. That works against doing significant new features that simply require more development time. We are seeing that in practice with people saying that Adobe hasn't released anything significant since releasing DeHaze. My guess here, again pure speculation, is that this feature wasn't finished in time for the 6.0/2015 release, so it got pushed out.

Again, all speculation without any real basis in facts. For all we know, Adobe is "saving up" for a real big-bang CC 2017/7.0 release. Just don't quote me here.:confused:

Phil
 
Personally I never use Photoshop although what I've read about content-aware fill does sound tempting.......

But I'm getting pretty skilled at Lightroom now and I just hope that Adobe will keep the standalone version. Financially, an update roughly every 2 years for £50 (£60?) is a pretty reasonable way of getting the most up-to-date features. Compared to - what? - £10 per month for a product that I will never use 95% of?

I wouldn't mind paying a monthly subscription for Lightroom as long as it was reasonably priced - £3 a month, maybe?

And as a matter of interest, what has Adobe added to LR since v6 was released?

I've heard about de-haze, and I recently noticed that there are now black and white sliders in the drop-down menu under the radial/grad filters and adjustment brushes. I know I would find the latter useful, probably more than useful. It's frustrating that I can't use them NOW!
 
And as a matter of interest, what has Adobe added to LR since v6 was released?

Dehaze, local Whites/Blacks, keyword count, improved panorama merge with Boundary Warp, Guided Upright, Smart Preview editing mode for performance, Reference View, filter for photos with snapshots, and a whole bunch of stuff around Lightroom mobile.
 
.....improved panorama merge with Boundary Warp

I tend to forget about this one, and it's just about magic. I occasionally now shoot handheld panoramas at crowded sports events, and just let it stitch them together. Somehow it just eliminates amputated body parts that are so common in panos like this.

Now if it does not work -- it cannot work; unlike purpose built tools like PTGUI, you cannot go "fix" things. But PTGUI will take hours of work on some crowd panos just putting people back together that it split into pieces, but Lightroom's very is awfully good with zero effort.

I tend to forget it was a "feature" we all got from CC, but it's quite an impressive one. Here's a FIVE shot panorama shot with a 400 + 2x TC (i.e. at 800mm), so each piece is only 4-5 players at a time, on a monopod, no alignment or leveling. I can't see the seams, maybe you can.

Miracle%20v%20Jupiter%2004-08-17%20-%20DD5_6030_84159-Pano-X2.jpg


I tend to forget about it, but it's really quite a technical feat to stitch those together with people shifting around (OK, in this case not so much shifting, as they are standing for the anthem, but even in random crowd shots it is pretty good).
 
Yeah, perpetual would be cheaper if one ignores Ps, which I realize many do. And especially if you hold on to cameras or don't shoot raw, and don't upgrade your system. So you can still run say Lr 4 for years.

But as to the price, only the subscribers have locked Adobe in. I got two years, so no price rise for me. But the price of a perpetual license can rise to $300 tomorrow. Yes, you could ignore that...unless you needed the upgrade's features, ability to run on your new computer, or convert your new RAWs.

It's just an economic choice you have to make based on your own finances.

But to Adobe I'd say: don't be a cable company, bundling all kinds of odds and ends. Why? What will we see next, Lr plus floor wax for $9.99 per month, if you act now?

I'd like them to offer more storage, but they are really behind the curve right now and I don't see that happening; Google and Amazon are doing it almost free. Hard to compete with that. And do it separate from the plan.
 
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