Angry Sascha is angry.

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.

It’s just sad. So much potential. Oh, well.

You like what you see on the cam’s display? Sure you do. Great colours! The contrast – w00t! You enjoy working with your camera, getting the shot right™ while framing it, hate the idea of post-processing. And anyways – them colours! Woah!

And then you switch to RAW because somebody told you that’s professional, JPEG isn’t. And then you wonder why this funky RAW software thingy you need to actually see what you’ve shot delivers such lame-ass pictures. No oomph. And what the hells, I made this picture in black and white! It’s in colour now! This software sucks!

No it doesn’t. You have to take RAW literally: it’s a collection of the raw information captured by your camera’s sensor. Without all that funky stuff happening inside your cam like Virtual Films or Art Filters. Or the less funky stuff that happens internally so you can actually look at a picture on the camera’s screen. Sometimes, RAW even ignores your choice of aspect ratio as the sensor captures everything anyways. The horror, the horror, etc.

It’s like the difference between getting photos developed and shooting negatives you develop yourself. Later on, in the dark-room with a bottle of Whisky nearby and the tingly sensation of chemicals on your skin. In this case, chemicals are replaced by (sometimes) expensive software while the booze remains the same, if hopefully of Irish provenance.

You like to control your pictures on-site? You don’t want to meddle with Burn, Dodge, different virtual “chemicals” and whatnot just to hold a decent picture in your alcohol-stained hands? Then shoot JPEG, save a lot of time, and stop complaining. The software can’t read your mind, and as long as camera manufacturers stick to proprietary RAW formats and settings, i.e. until the sun burns out, it also can’t know what “Vivid” or “Art Filter No.43” means.

Fine, you changed “Contrast” in your camera’s settings. And how exactly should third-party applications such as Lightroom or uvraw know what +2 Contrast in your camera relates to? The file might be readable, but the JPEG engine inside the cam that interprets +2 Contrast is a heavily guarded, copyrighted, and patented secret.

Get real. And take your pick. JPEG is perfectly fine if you like your camera’s results and won’t go all wonky colours later on. It’s neither more nor less “professional” than shooting in RAW. But please, baby Jesus please stop bitching about the status quo of RAW developing and stop expecting the impossible from manufacturers who don’t have full access to your camera makers’ intellectual property. Or, better choice, do something about that IP thingy by voting for the right™ parties next time round. Okay? Thanks.

Thanks a bunch, Adobe. You had heard the cries of pain, mostly from Windows users, thus Reader 8.x: Much faster! And later, Reader 9.x: Even faster!

But where did those speed improvements come from? Apparently mostly from trial-and-error rendering of Postscript-flavoured (OpenType) fonts. Ironic, sort of, considering you guys pushed Postscript to begin with. But TTF-flavoured fonts still display just fine.

But hey, it’s not a biggie, is it? Just use web fonts or the € 600 Acrobat Pro package to generate PDF documents. Thus, all obscure hinting information necessary for proper font rendering will be included. Never mind documents generated with other PDF writers showed up perfectly in Reader 6 and 7, and still do so with alternatives such as Foxit or Apple’s Preview. Who cares about alternatives anyway?

You’re smarter than this … You are perfectly aware of the fact that 99 % of end-users read PDF documents with your software. Hence people producing loads of for-screen PDFs require both your software and 600 bloody Euros to make sure customers won’t throw up over their keyboards when opening invoices or letters. At least them invoices and letters that include serif Postscript fonts.

I am deeply humbled by this display of sheer ingenuity. PDF is a rather open format? Well, let’s make sure only documents generated with our stuff displays fine with our stuff. Microsoft should avert their eyes, blinded by your glorious rip-off dedication to deliver integrated solutions.