alt Hacker NewsI admire what this person is doing, but some reasons I prefer raw + lightroom over eg camera jpeg are:
* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.
* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.
* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.
* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.
(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)
Replies
Adobe's AI noise reduction is absolutely first class. The AI adaptive color feature has also saved me on a ton of old photos taken on older DSLRs and smartphones.
I'm also a LR classic user. I think it's pretty terrible by certain aspects, but I haven't found anything better. No idea why the UI lags on a pretty high-end machine, even with test catalogs. And I'm talking about scrolling, or showing and hiding panels. Plus, the worst offender is making me use Windows (on this point, only Darktable is better – no, I won't buy a mac, it's way too expensive for my needs).
Price-wise, it's kinda expensive, but the buy-it-for-life alternatives aren't exactly cheap, either. You should hold off updating for multiple years to save money compared to the LR subscription.
Now, I haven't used the alternatives for more than just a short test-drive, but the recent improvements in LRc would have made me upgrade anyway. I'm thinking specifically about the noise reduction you mentioned, but there's also all the object detection in masking which saves a ton of time, and the ai object removal which is pretty great when I need it – saves time compared to fiddling with the old healing brush.
I think the alternatives have also gained similar features recently, which would have likely required a new (expensive!) purchase. But, I guess if you figure we've reached some kind of plateau and don't expect to have a new camera in the next 3-4 years, going for Capture One or similar may be a better bang for your buck.