Today was I think a good day for photographers so far as Adobe products are concerned. I don’t know if the upgrade to Lightroom 5.5 really changes a great deal, but like most such upgrades, it does feel just a little snappier, which is no bad thing. And I’ve yet to try the updated Bridge and to do anything substantial with Photoshop CC 2014, though I don’t think any of the enhancements that Julieanne Kost enthuses about will have any great impact on my work – or that of any other real photographer. If I want motion blur etc I’ll take photographs of things that are moving.
Perhaps the improved content-aware fill tool will help improve retouching my scans but most of the other things – like most Photoshop features – are ways to destroy the photographic nature and content of your images rather than tools to enhance. At least 90% of Photoshop should be irrelevant to photographers, but we use it because it does the 10% better than anything else, though it sometimes needs a little help from plugins.
It’s taken a bit of fiddling around to get my favourite plugins working with 64bit Photoshop CC and with Photoshop CC 2014. There are strict instructions to use the plugin providers install software rather than trying to install by hand, but this didn’t work for me for some. Fortunately finding the correct ‘64.8bf’ files and copying them to the plugins directory does work. But having four versions of Photoshop on my system is probably confusing. Perhaps I can cut it down to two now.
But the good news (or at least slightly good news) is that the $9.99 per month photographers package is now a standard one rather than a special offer (with VAT that’s £8.78 in the UK – or you can save 50p a year with a pre-paid annual sub.) It isn’t quite the same, with less cloud storage and no ‘Behance’ portfolio for new subscribers (I haven’t used either) but seems to me to be reasonable value, costing not very much more than the regular upgrades to Lightroom used to. And if, as most photographers seem to nowadays you buy new cameras fairly often, you do need to keep Lightroom up to date. I’d want to in any case, as so far each new full version upgrade – the ones I had to pay for – has added welcome improvements.
It would be even better value if I had an iPad and iPhone now that Lightroom works on these too, something I can see many photographers making use of, though you are only able to work on ‘smart previews’ rather than the actual files.
I’d rather that Adobe had not gone the CC route, but I can see why they have elected to do so. So many photographers I know use somewhat less than legal versions of their software. And I can see why they do as well, given the cost of the old standalone versions – it was really just too expensive for many photographers. Until the announcement yesterday I was a little worried that Adobe had not got the message and might ramp up the price again, but it looks as if they now realise the different market.