So this is it. Early adopter, inofficial evangelist, part-time photographer is dropping Lightroom. Rather, deleting it from his workstations.
Who the eff cares? Well, I do, as I am abovementioned former inofficial evangelist. And I wonder what the bloody hell I was thinking. Hindsight is both gift and curse.
What Adobe did with Lightroom, if you stay objective:
More features. Some direly needed (like, support for your camera?), others more, like, what the hells? Yeah, I’m looking at you, Social Media Upload and Comments Download.
Selling said features as USPs to justify the hefty price-tag on upgrades. By now I’ve spent more than 400 quid on Lightroom, it’s upgrades, and plug-ins necessary until Adobe deemed stuff like output sharpening important enough for yet another full-price upgrade.
LR3 is slower and more cumbersome to use than LR2. But it has the better RAW render engine (which you can’t retrofit into LR2), so please upgrade, yes?
Said RAW render engine is identical to the one used in the current release of Photoshop Elements, which you can get bundled with your next scanner for free.
Also, depending on the cameras used, the engine is inferior to competitors’ or even open source solutions. In some cases (Leica M series comes to mind), it should be featured in Webster’s, under “What the flying fuck”.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the Lightroom concept, I’m pretty happy with most of its results, it’s stable like a rock, and I’m used to the way it works (see above evangelist thing). But bloody hells, Flash galleries? Bug-fixing your RAW rendering engine equals a full-price upgrade? Support for fresh RAW formats one year from now = buy our upgrade? Even though the whole difference is in camera identification in the RAW header?
Lightroom was my favourite as it streamlined workflow issues. But: It’s becoming more and more muddled and complicated to use, while it doesn’t ensure plug-ins won’t crash the whole application just because they are coded poorly. I still find things I wrote off as “well, it’s a new application, you can’t expect that just yet” in 2006 that actually had been there from the beginning – but weren’t obvious or easily accessible. The worst thing for a workflow app is to hide things that might seriously influence or even change the way you look at your current, well, workflow.
Sometimes, having an easy install routine sucks ass. To wit, WordPress blinds you with “it’s soooo easy!” while making it fucking complicated to simply move your fucking blog to where it’s supposed to go online.
Yes, you have to change only two lines of code. Theoretically. But then, you might be working with subdomains which makes the whole thing go haywire.
Dudes, seriously. If you market with ease-of-use and lack-of-shitpants et al please make your bloody configs easier to understand if you want to go one step beyond™. I’m talking one step here, not the bloody Camino de Santiago.
You want to be easy-going? Then be simple and don’t go the Apple way. Thanks, guv.
You’re on Facebook? Okay, then you know you’ve uploaded shitloads of personal data. You’ve hooked up with all them friends from grade school you haven’t spoken to in ten years. You’ve liked lots, mostly weird 80s television serials, and you’ve uploaded a plethora of pictures, namely of your tyke.
So why the flying bugger would you not check the official facebook stream or, for that matter, the news, for phishing-viral-worm-privacy-stuff?
Dude, these scams usually have been documented and debunked months before they hit you. So why oh why do you still hit the LIKE!!! button?
And spread that shit to your contacts, namely yours truly?
You have every reason to be careful about what you click on in Facebook. You’ve uploaded all that intimate crap to begin with, so for fuck’s sake take better care of your shit.
Does this change anything? Probably not. But at least I don’t look like a total crank anymore. Lonely and unloved, boozing too much while getting riled up on things 99.999% of the local populace doesn’t care a flying fuck about. While my customers do. Yours too, probably, otherwise you wouldn’t read this.