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Comment by caycep | Hacker News Reader

The one worry, and this is more of an ancillary one, is that now without the Aperture competition, Adobe will let lightroom development slack off. Lightroom is (was) one of the adobe apps that don't totally suck, and I always credited this w/ them getting taken off guard by Aperture (competitions is a great thing, etc etc). That being said, I suppose the writing is on the wall and whatever changes in direction were in store for lightroom is probably already in motion.

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I'm not even so worried about Adobe letting Lightroom languish as I am about them using their newfound monopoly position to at last move Lightroom into the mandatory Creative Cloud subscription model that ate the Creative Suite last year. As an enthusiast photographer and avid Lightroom user, there's no way I'm paying a recurring subscription for the same app when I'm not using it to make an income.

That said, there's a potential twist here. Apple's upcoming Photos app can go one of two directions: Apple could, as everyone seems to be assuming, go the consumer-focused route and stay out of Lightroom's market. On the other hand, Photos could pack all of Aperture's pro features and more behind an "advanced mode" UI. Suddenly, Lightroom isn't just competing with an Apple product, they're competing with free.

Apple never does simple/advanced mode UIs

Not the best example, but the OSX calculator app seems to have this.

Also, compare clicking on various Menu Bar items (or other UI features) with option-clicking on the same item. Apple has advanced little mini UIs all over the place.

Similarly, look at many current System Preferences panels in Mac OS X. The basic stuff most users need is up front, and the rest is hidden behind an "Advanced..." button.

I conclude that having an advanced mode, or various enhanced features accessed in different ways from the standard UI, is not inimical to Apple's approach or UI philosophy.

Aqua (GUI) and Terminal (CLI)

The copy of Lightroom you have right now isn't going to suddenly stop working, even if the next version becomes part of CC. If somehow it does fail to do the job for you in the future, you can switch to DarkTable, RawTherapee, CaptureOne, or any number of other programs.

True, but it won't handle or process RAW files from your new camera. Yes, you can use the free Adobe tool to convert RAW to DNG, but that adds another step, and reduces some of the current simplicity of Lightroom.

You can't expect software written before your camera was even released to support it. It will never stop working for existing cameras. What more can you expect?

It will stop working if you ever get a new camera. RAW formats are all different and Lightroom needs constant updates to support new camera models. It's a huge mess, the camera companies don't make the specs public and the formats change subtly with camera releases. Adobe obviously gets access to the formats, but open source tools are left to guess and it shows.

I just had this burn me when I got a new camera (Panasonic GH4) and I couldn't import a thing. Even worse is that I was on a road trip and didn't have a way to install the software that came with the camera (also terrible, but I took photos at Yellowstone and badly wanted to see them). As of the last week an update came out and now I'm good to go, but if you want to remain on an old version of Lightroom it can indeed be tricky.

None of the other programs you mentioned are anywhere close to Lightroom. For example, while RawTherapee can technically open images from my new camera, it displays them incorrectly. They're not even the right size and I don't want to talk about color.

good lord, why don't the camera companies publish specs?

It's rage inducing, but I think they are of the opinion that it's part of their secret sauce. I get the idea that they're all similar enough so that open source apps can get most of the way there, but Adobe has the full specs and is able to get them perfectly.

You might want to play around with Darktable (http://www.darktable.org). I have no affiliation other than using it a bit. I use an Olympus EM-5 and it handles the raw files just fine.

I have an E-M5 too (great camera!), but it has been out quite a while which helps out. It's still not perfect though, the color is off a bit for the E-M5's RAW images (.ORF). The GH4 images are unusable in Darktable, they look they have been through an Instagram filter. This is straight off the camera in both Darktable and Lightroom:

http://i.imgur.com/6v0mbUb.jpg

>I'm not even so worried about Adobe letting Lightroom languish as I am about them using their newfound monopoly position to at last move Lightroom into the mandatory Creative Cloud subscription model that ate the Creative Suite last year.

I think they've already done that, a few months ago.

You can still buy stand-alone Lightroom, though they also offer it as part of the $10/month Photography subscription where you get both Photoshop and Lightroom.

I see. I had the impression the standalone version was off-ed by now.

I myself have forked for the PS + Lightroom subscription -- and I hate subscriptions --, and the reason was, that, if I am not mistaken, you can't use the Lightroom app for iPad without the subscription.

Lightroom isn't the only game in town. Both CaptureOne from PhaseOne and DxO's Optics Pro handle raw files better than ACR. Bibble also still exists in the guise of Corel After Shot. There are a few decent OSS options too. it looks like Apple are incorporating the Aperture toolset into the new photo app, so it's not necessarily the end of the world.

With Apple supplying the RAW codecs with the OS, Hasselblad's Phocus [1] is a viable (and gratis) alternative on the Mac. For Windows types, it's only good for Hassy's own cameras, but if OS X understands hte RAW format, Phocus can work with it.

[1] http://www.hasselbladusa.com/products/phocus-.aspx

I don't think Adobe will slack off too much, they know it's a massively popular product but that most photographers are geeks and won't put up with them taking their foot off the gas, they'll look elsewhere (although elsewhere is mostly nothing at the moment).

This seems like all the more reason for Adobe to double down on Lightroom if you ask me. They stand to gain a lot of displaced users from this. I'm certainly going to have to make a choice now.

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