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David Stallard

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David Stallard
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Hey guys, probably been asked a thousand times already - I have been using lightroom for years but only in the most basic of ways, I shoot all my trackside stuff in jpeg and have a couple of presents to basically batch process a couple of thousand at a time before doing a quick crop or cull.

I begrudgingly went over to the subscription PS / LR when I had the R3 but knowing that they are about to screw us over even more shortly with price hikes etc. PLEASE if any of you use DPP exclusively does it do what I require? I tried Luminar (wife uses it) but couldn't get the batch process to work as I wanted.

Appreciate your help
 
There are no price hikes if you are an existing customer. When your monthly plan runs out you will have two options. You can continue to pay monthly but the price will go up. If you go with the annual paid up front plan your price remains the same. I was lucky that my plan renewed last month so I'm not going to do anything until Nov of 2025. Then I'll switch to pay up front for the year. I actually did that when I signed up in 2018 but decided to give the monthly payment option a try for 2024. I mostly went with the annual plan because I did not want to see Adobe on my credit card statement every month :)

As for DPP. When I was a DPP die hard I started off there, created TIFFS and sent them to PS. It was an editing nightmare. After 3 trials I finally decided to switch to Lightroom in 2011. My wife said there was much less cursing coming from the digital darkroom after that. Over time I started to appreciate what Lightroom offered.

I have thought about a post Adobe life and figured I'd go back to DPP and use Affinity to finish. I have Affinity v1 which I paid $25 for but have never used. It won't support my new cameras but I can load TIFFS in it. This was while searching for an alternative.

With Adobe getting non destructive Denoise AI into LrC (being tested in ACR) and the new Adaptive Color preset (beta) it's going to be tough to drop LrC for now. I have not sent a file to PS since v11. Add the 5 personal websites, Lens Blur and all of the other goodies.

I am going to explore the LrC, Lr and 1GB option next fall because the price will be $10. These days I only use PS for screen grabs and making arrows. It may be time to start exploring cloud storage for travel.
 
Thanks for that - will stick where I am for the moment but will keep looking for an alternative - I still begrudge paying a subscription for something that you used to buy once and had on your PC all the time. Yes old and proud ;-)
 
By the way be careful of sites out there creating sensationalistic headlines while not presenting accurate information to get hits. I have read of a few out there although I have not seen them. I know I would if I did search on YouTube.

Ask questions at reliable sites like here.

 
Thanks for that - will stick where I am for the moment but will keep looking for an alternative - I still begrudge paying a subscription for something that you used to buy once and had on your PC all the time. Yes old and proud ;-)
I had a though time deciding in 2018 because of inaccurate information. Trolls and button pushers where trying to convince people that LrC would send your files to the cloud, Adobe would steal them, hold you ransom and double the price. I never believed the ransom part but when I learned it is impossible to send a file to the cloud using LrC I went in.

I don't mind spending $10 a month on my favourite hobby. I don't curl anymore but I went out with my old curling buddies last night and spent $80 CND on beer. We were in Singapore two weeks ago and went Raffles hotel - the Long Bar where the Singapore Sling was invented. In the 50's it was illegal for women to drink in public so the bar tender created fancy fruit drinks and slipped it in. Only $41 CND for one. It was a novelty and we'll never be there again. The experience was fun. Good thing I'm a social drinker :) It's all perspective. I respect people who don't like subscription or Adobe.
 
FWIW I have been using P shop and Lightroom for nearly 2 decades. The improvement over time have sometimes been a little slow, but overall the experience with both programmes has been great. The subscription model has not been updated in many years, I pay a little over £8 a month plus vat, I spend more than that on takeaway coffee. The recent upgrades to both LR and P shop have been fantastic especially the AI noise and Raw masking. I have over the years tried and discarded many programmes, mainly because they were not as intuitive to me as LR. As an aside I find DPP so clunky as to it not being worth the bother. In todays day and age there is no such thing as a free lunch, and as Adobe keep updating us with new features without any additional cost, that alone is worthy the price of a couple of coffees a month.
 
I am pretty much in the same situation; I can understand people's reluctance for subscriptions. But we have used Lightroom since version 1 (And PS since version 3) and for us LR has been the perfect tool for us. Prior to Lightroom and being geeks, my wife and I had built our own FileMaker Pro database populated with small thumbnails to track our photos (and rolls of film at that time). When Adobe premiered Lightroom it was a nerdy dream come true for us 😁, since our database use was very time-consuming, even if we were proud of it.
Like others, I have tried DPP and find it maddeningly slow and difficult to integrate into our workflow. My wife noted that DPP induced more post-processing profanity from me as well...
 
No matter how many types of PS actions I tried to set up or automate/scripts (I can't remember the details) it worked for one gig but then failed for the next gig. Maybe I just wasn't good a it. For just single files I had lots of actions that worked great.

I once went with the Canon knows its RAW engine best and I liked Canon colours so that was my starting point. After 3 trials I migrated to Lightroom and it figures. Six months later Canon comes out with DLO. True digital deconvolution for specific for each lens. Other software USM for capture sharpening but DLO is dialled in.

I'm hoping some day Adobe comes out with a Sharpening AI module. That is all I need now as it pretty much has everything else I need. I'm looking forward to when LrC gets non destructive Denoise AI which is now being tested in ACR. That will be the cat's meow.
 
The only other software that I can think of that has digital deconvolution is DXO. I have to give it them as that company did put the work in.
 
I use DPP, but only for depth composting focus bracketed images. I’ve played with it for culling, but not sure about that.yet.
 
I have the 1TB Photo Plan. $240/yr is a deal for all you get. LR, LR Mobile, LrC, PS, and PS Beta. And 1TB cloud. Allows me to upload in the field to LR and have the files on my desktop in LrC when I get home. Using the Web apps, I can easily access my files from anywhere and work on something. Even on a computer in the local Library. My only complaint is the two device limit. But it lets me deauthorize one and authorize another on the fly. DxO requires an email to the support and two days to change machines. When I want to show pics to people, I open LR on my phone. LR camera app makes the iPhone cameras a lot better with control over SS/Aperture/ISO.

I have a desktop for main work, and ipad for minor culling while sitting in the Dr's waiting room, and two laptops, one Wintel, and other a Mac. Geeks be me. LOL
 
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I use DPP, but only for depth composting focus bracketed images. I’ve played with it for culling, but not sure about that.yet.
I always use it to pre-cull before importing into LrC. Quick Check - Full Screen mode has excellent scaling algorithms and it shows as a finished Jpeg so sharp and contrasty.

I select all the files and go into Quick Check. I scroll and X the files I don't want to keep. When done I exit Quick Check. Edit - Rating - Select Rejected Images Only. Then File - Move to Trash.
 
I always use it to pre-cull before importing into LrC. Quick Check - Full Screen mode has excellent scaling algorithms and it shows as a finished Jpeg so sharp and contrasty.

I select all the files and go into Quick Check. I scroll and X the files I don't want to keep. When done I exit Quick Check. Edit - Rating - Select Rejected Images Only. Then File - Move to Trash.
My usual workflow is “Select All -> “Move to Trash”, but I’ll give that a whirl, thanks!
 
By the way be careful of sites out there creating sensationalistic headlines while not presenting accurate information to get hits. I have read of a few out there although I have not seen them. I know I would if I did search on YouTube.

Ask questions at reliable sites like here.

I just learned that the Lightroom Queen (Victoria) contacted Adobe to tell them they should add some extra information as there has been a some confusion. Adobe updated that page in the link on post #6.
 
Hey guys, probably been asked a thousand times already - I have been using lightroom for years but only in the most basic of ways, I shoot all my trackside stuff in jpeg and have a couple of presents to basically batch process a couple of thousand at a time before doing a quick crop or cull.

I begrudgingly went over to the subscription PS / LR when I had the R3 but knowing that they are about to screw us over even more shortly with price hikes etc. PLEASE if any of you use DPP exclusively does it do what I require? I tried Luminar (wife uses it) but couldn't get the batch process to work as I wanted.

Appreciate your help
I use DPP for the first round of culling images. Then, I Import into Lightroom CC and perform 98.9473% of my edits there. I use Photoshop upscaling, object removal, and other "tough" edits that don't perform well in LR CC. This is a complicated workflow especially considering my use of Dx0 PureRaw.

I am looking for tools to streamline my workflow. This goes beyond your original question, but I don't like to have to import into the Lightroom Library in order to cull photos. That's why I use DPP, but that is way behind the times.

My summary is that out of camera to editing there is a hole that neither DPP or Lightroom suits for me. I shoot raw and Lightroom CC is my preferred editor for the vast majority of my edits. I've tried a lot of other editors and keep coming back to Lightroom CC. I use Photoshop for specialized edits and scaling. Photoshop is still way better at the AI removal and editing stuff, but Lightroom CC has made big strides recently.
 
Another video to explain what is actually happening.

 
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What do you use for the other 1.0527% ?
Microsoft Paint®

It's totally underrated, especially the AI Generative Erase tool

Untitled.png
 
So I’ve been using Photoshop since PS2. That’s a long long long time. I bought it for $499.00 in 1995 I think. Then every 18 months I paid $199.00 to upgrade it to the next version. I was ecstatic when they went to a subscription plan. I had been keeping my old Mac for years just to run PS on it because it would have cost me another 699.00 to get it to run my PC. Now I could just port it over. And the 9.99 monthly fee was pretty darn close to the $199.00 every 18 months with much more frequent updates and bug fixes.
The fact that they are finally raising prices isn’t a surprise to me. They have held the line for 10 years! 10 years where everything has gone up. They aren’t still paying their engineers what they did 10 years ago and all of the technology they use is upgraded. I can understand their rationale
And there are always those that will hate- you’ve got that lovely bit of yellow journalism called f-stoppers who only report the most sensationalist parts of things ignoring anything that might dampen their (un)righteous anger. (And then the next day they post an article that is fawning all over Lightroom. Try not to have a knee **** reaction and read balanced articles. Adobe is far from perfect but you do definitely get amazing bites of software for your subscription price.
 
However the prices will not go up for current customers or anyone who signs up for the plan before Jan 15. We will have to pay the $120 a year up front to keep that price. For any who want to continue to pay monthly it will go up to $15 a month.

Any new customers after Jan 15 will only have access the 1TB Photo Plan which $240 a year. That plan will still be available for $20 a month as well which will be the same for current customers.

Adobe will be adding LrC to the Lr 1TB plan that has no PS. It will go up from $10 to $12 but I'm not sure if current customers will be grandfathered into it at $10 a month. I am going to look at everything in November, 2025 or (or sooner) as I have not sent a file to PS since LrC11. My annual cycle renews then and obviously my first choice would be to pay $120 up front for the year. I'll look into the no PS plan as it may be time to explore cloud storage. I'm not in any hurry to change anything.

New customers will be able to get LrC and Lr only plan for $12 a month. Unless you are into design, etc most customers won't really need PS. These days LrC pretty much does everything you need as basic photo editor.

As far as the big picture this has not been a significant increase.

You read about all the disinformation out there about how Adobe is losing masses of people. I like this guy and listen to what he says in the first 30 seconds. He does pretty balanced reviews and speaks very highly about DXO DeepPrime in other videos.

Warning. He says #hit once in it.


From 8 months ago. I was hoping we'd get Sharpen AI in LrC14. I'm not giving up hope.

 
As for DPP I have had one question that I could never find the answer to. If you learn about sharpening there are the 3 phases. Capture, Local and Export. I'm only interested in Capture and Export.

Long ago DPP only had Sharpness with of a scale from 0 to 8. That was it. I took that as Capture sharpening. Since it offered nothing else I sent files to PS to finish things off which included resizing and Export sharpening.

Then Canon added Digital Lens Optimizer (DLO) which is for deconvolution. True digital deconvolution. Deconvolution also compensates for the AA filter and other developers use USM for that purpose. So does that now make DLO solely for Capture Sharpening?

Canon also added USM as a sharpening option with the existing Sharpness. Is that now supposed to be for Export sharpening? DPP still does not offer any sharpening options for their Export process. Only resizing.

Still puzzled after all of these years and I have tried to find something that explains all of that as a whole, not each individual function. Canon did have at one time an excellent document about DLO which like many others they have pulled it. I can find stuff about DLO at Canon but this was a multi page document with colour illustrations which dove into the science of it.
 

So it does compensate for the AA filter as I suspected. I'm sure I read this before but it as been about 5 years since I looked that it.

How does the Digital Lens Optimizer work?​

There are lots of factors that cause image resolution to deteriorate—lens aberrations, diffraction, the low-pass filter effect, and so on, which Canon holds data on.

From this link.

 
The main issue with DLO (for me) is that I do not shoot JPG. I'm currently using DXO to clean my photos, then I post edit in LrC where I do Sharpening using Topaz. Using DPP to DLO adds another process and that's not something that I want to add to my workflow.
 
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DXO has their Lens Corrections called Sharpness and they put the work into it. I'll give them that. Outside of Canon I think they are the closest to true Digital Deconvolution. I used to wonder why they offered that Sharpness module and also USM. Then I learned USM is for any lenses that are not included in their Sharpening Database.

Perhaps Canon is the same but there is no documentation that I can find. As I stated DPP's Convert and Save dialogue only includes Sharpening, not resizing. Almost all others offer both in one way or another. The algorithms work hand in hand. That was why I always sent TIFF's to PS for final export. Then again there are those who use DPP exclusively.
 
I did as well but the last version I own is PL3 so it has been a while since I used it.
 
I did as well but the last version I own is PL3 so it has been a while since I used it.
I have not updated mine to DXO 4, I edit in a laptop and these software tend to be more heavy in each version so I found that version 3 gives me a better performance and decent results. So I do not see the need to upgrade.
 
I have not updated mine to DXO 4, I edit in a laptop and these software tend to be more heavy in each version so I found that version 3 gives me a better performance and decent results. So I do not see the need to upgrade.
PL3 or PureRaw 3?
 

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