[Class A]

I upgraded my stand-alone copy of LR5 to LR6 (the $79 upgrade version) and it auto-installed Adobe Creative Cloud on my PC.

Thanks for the heads-up.

Poor company that has to resort to such lousy methods to push their agenda.

[Class A]

Found a direct download link for LR 6 (no CC cr*p). There are associated download instructions that need to be heeded for the direct download to work.

[lightbox]

Found a direct download link for LR 6 (no CC cr*p). There are associated download instructions that need to be heeded for the direct download to work.

I'll be interested to know if it doesn't install the CC app on your computer. For what it's worth, the name of the executable is the same as the one I bought: Lightroom_6_LS11.exe

I have a sneaky suspicion that they are all the exact same software. It's probably just an activation / licensing difference that determines whether it gets a "CC" badge (and associated cloud privileges) or not.

[bdery]

Though, I have to ask, if your tagging method works for you, then what would the difference be?

Hopefully it would save time.

For people with good keyword discipline, I don't really see this as a killer feature, especially since it really don't work that consistently. You're still going to have to go and tag half your pictures.

If it's not consistent, then it's worse than useless. I want it to be reliable and never think about it again. Otherwise it only increases the amuont of work that I need to do, since I then need to double-check everything.

all face matching algorithms suffer from the limitation that they can only find faces, so if you have a half-turned profile, or a silhouette, they will never help.

Well, Picasa and Facebook have pretty strong (almost magical) face recognition. Even my cell phone does a marvelous job. Why can't Adobe get it right?

---

Last edited by bdery; 04-29-2015 at 10:10 AM.

[Class A]

Why can't Adobe get it wight?

The real question for me is why Adobe hasn't been challenged more by competitors.

Quite clearly, Adobe's software is often half-baked, has usability issues, and most annoyingly, is unreliable in terms of stability.

There is often a very good core to their applications that gives them a headstart over competitors and this, next to some historic quasi monopoly domination of certain markets, is my only explanation as to why Adobe can still afford to deliver subpar quality and give embarrassing public demos of their software, while locking customers into lifetime subscriptions.

That they don't get most things right does not surprise me in the least because they have repeatedly proven to be very good at it.

[bdery]

The real question for me is why Adobe hasn't been challenged more by competitors.

Well, Apple killed aperture recently, that's one less player in this field. Picasa could have become a powerful tool if Google had tried to up the editing game. It's already better at indexing. There are a few others.

Quite clearly, Adobe's software is often half-baked, has usability issues, and most annoyingly, is unreliable in terms of stability.

There is often a very good core to their applications that gives them a headstart over competitors and this, next to some historic quasi monopoly domination of certain markets, is my only explanation as to why Adobe can still afford to deliver subpar quality and give embarrassing public demos of their software, while locking customers into lifetime subscriptions.

Lightroom does get a lot of things right. I like it a lot. But its most powerful and useful feature (to me), which is sorting through pictures and quickly finding what you're looking for, often feels half-backed. Face recognition should have been there years ago, and it should be working perfectly and always. Keywords are just a mess, when they should also be a wonderful tool. Plus I don't like to have so many businesses plugged in when I purchase a product (Behance, Blurb, to name a few).

[mee]

I upgraded my stand-alone copy of LR5 to LR6 (the $79 upgrade version) and it auto-installed Adobe Creative Cloud on my PC. When I try to uninstall it, I get this:



So, be warned. They seem to be nudging (not so gently) toward CC.

Another issue I ran into is the LR6 installer complained that it failed to find my copy of LR5, even though I have it installed at the default location under C:\Program Files\...
I had to manually enter my LR5 serial to prove that I own it.

I have not run into any bugs or problems yet in LR6 itself, but haven't done much. Face detection works once you train it. In a couple instances it mistook an object (such as a vase) for a face.

I'm using a Radeon 7900-series GPU. No problems so far.

That's awful!

But thanks for the information.

[mattb123]

I'll be interested to know if it doesn't install the CC app on your computer. For what it's worth, the name of the executable is the same as the one I bought: Lightroom_6_LS11.exe

I have a sneaky suspicion that they are all the exact same software. It's probably just an activation / licensing difference that determines whether it gets a "CC" badge (and associated cloud privileges) or not.

I bet that is exactly what it is. I'm in the software business and that's standard procedure. Try to have as few different versions of someting to maintain by distributing the same software to everyone and just activate features as needed/purchased.
I installed the standalone upgrade and have seen no sign of CC other than warnings that I'll need it for cloud functionality.

[rawr]

I installed the standalone upgrade and have seen no sign of CC other than warnings that I'll need it for cloud functionality.

My test was to pull the network cable. Even with no Internet access, the standalone LR6 works fine.

[cxdoo]

I got it last night. Their web site is a mess. I spent over 15 minutes reaching a page where standalone version can be bought in Firefox with NoScript (won't check out) and then in IE (won't check out until I set the region in the footer(!)). Was brought multiple times to a page where the process of getting a monthly subscription starts. Maybe their marketing thinks that's a good strategy to me it smells of desperation.


However once I got it I had no problem. Yes it didn't recognize old version but I prefer to enter serial myself than have it plow my HDDs for 15 minutes. Upgrade of catalog went smooth, haven't noticed much difference in speed but then I didn't mess with Develop module. Face recognition works really good.


I have some questions regarding tagging/face recognition.
Previously I'd tag my photos manually with the names of people present which was pretty tedious but it allowed to tag people who can't be recognized by software (see photos below).


So what should be done now about it? Face recognition attaches the tag to a region of the photo so if I tag someone where their face can't be seen should I just add the same tag to the photo and skip adding a region?
But then on People tab I won't see these photos listed under that person's name?
OTOH if I mark a region I'd just mess with face recognition training.
How about photos of people in glasses? Is it ok to train recognition on that too?

[reeftool]

The real question for me is why Adobe hasn't been challenged more by competitors.

Quite clearly, Adobe's software is often half-baked, has usability issues, and most annoyingly, is unreliable in terms of stability.

There is often a very good core to their applications that gives them a headstart over competitors and this, next to some historic quasi monopoly domination of certain markets, is my only explanation as to why Adobe can still afford to deliver subpar quality and give embarrassing public demos of their software, while locking customers into lifetime subscriptions.

That they don't get most things right does not surprise me in the least because they have repeatedly proven to be very good at it.

Actually, they get most things right. The issue is that for years, Adobe has catered to the professional and serious amateur photographers who didn't object to laying out the money and spending the time learning how to use the products. Personally, I think adding consumer crap like face recognition to a product like Lightroom is a mistake. Being non destructive, Lightroom doesn't change anything in a photo. Any changes or adjustments are added to the original file. So unless you have a pretty substantial computer, large batches of photos are going to cause slowdowns while editing.

Lately, they seem to be steering Lightroom towards being more of a consumer product and marketing it to consumers. They even have camera profiles for smartphones. Really?

I like Adobe CC. I could never afford Photoshop CS at over $600 and now have have it for $9.99 a month. No big deal. All my photos are backed up and I have my original RAWs and exported JPEGs and TIFFs. If they jack the price up or somebody makes something better, I'll drop them tomorrow. But IMO, there isn't anything better right now, at least for my needs. Adobe, like a lot of other tech companies, rose to the top because they did it better than everybody else. They nowhere near a monopoly. There is a lot of photo editing software out there and even some pretty decent free stuff. Much of that software is a much better choice for simple photo adjustments than Lightroom or CC. You wouldn't buy a tractor to mow a 50 x 50 foot yard with a lot of shrubs and if you did, you would probably come to the conclusion that tractors suck.

[Class A]

Actually, they get most things right.

Doing a public demo in front of hundreds of people attempting to show how PS saves your work even when it crashes, only demonstrating that nothing was saved is not "getting most things right". Now demos can go wrong, but this was by far not the only thing that went wrong during this demo. It was embarrassing. People were looking at each other and the demonstrators were running out of jokes to gloss over the issues.

There are hundreds of small bugs in LR that either got never fixed or only after years and years. One of them was that LR forgot metadata like photo rotation information when it believed (it wasn't actually the case) that files on the hardrive where changed. One of their main staff admitted the problem and said that the necessary format change always seems to be forgotten in the next release.

They had inconsistent mouse wheel behaviour for years until one day, someone woke up and acknowledged, "oh, yes, that's right, we never noticed".

I could go on and on, including problems involving image rendering that anyone who has ever enjoyed a software engineering education struggles to understand how a supposedly professional development team can work like that.

The issue is that for years, Adobe has catered to the professional and serious amateur photographers...

The image of Adobe being a brand for professionals is a well-cultivated image that I originally believed as well.

However, if software like PS let's you do changes to an image only to tell you when you try to save the image that it cannot do so due to lack of memory -- without any advance warning and without any option to avoid losing hours of work -- than this is not a hallmark of professional software. When LR gets slower and slower over time and requires a restart after a while, this isn't a sign of professional quality either. As the last example of an endless fountain of painful stories, a professional should be able to rely on all images of a folder to be moved to another, without having to double-check whether LR has managed to not move some images. This bug has survived many, many versions of LR and I wouldn't be surprised if they still haven't fixed it.

InDesign once produced exports of such low quality that a photobook I printed using them had visible artefacts. When I rerun the export later, everything was fine. Again, no warning of any kind when InDesign apparently had some problem not producing proper exports.

I don't know whether Adobe ever made professional software (perhaps some time ago on the Mac), but in recent times, the quality just isn't there.

I like Adobe CC. I could never afford Photoshop CS at over $600 and now have have it for $9.99 a month. No big deal.

In five years, you will have spent $600, provided they don't increase the subscription fee. Older versions of PS, which still cover much more than most photographers will ever need, have been available for a lot less than $600. Photoshop CS2, for instance, is legally available as freeware.

I don't mind how other people pay for Adobe software. If the subscription model works for you, that's fine with me. However, I definitely disagree if someone tries to tell me that Adobe software has something to do with "professional" (outside the pricing).

[Omestes]

I like Adobe CC. I could never afford Photoshop CS at over $600 and now have have it for $9.99 a month. .

My problem is they are pushing this. It took me literally an hour to buy the perpetual license upgrade for LR6. I had to "buy" it twice, since the first time it inexplicably wouldn't let me use PayPal (I'm not giving Adobe my credit card information, they proved themselves untrustworthy). On my second attempt at purchasing the stand alone version, the link to buy it was mysteriously missing, only the link to buy the CC version remained.

They really don't want you to buy the stand alone version. This scares me, since it makes me suspicious that they are going to do away with it completely, forcing everyone to use CC. No support means no access to future body and lens profiles, it also means my library is an unmigratable orphan.

CC is an okay idea for people who regularly use both products. I don't, I only need LR. $10/month is a rip off for me, if Lightroom updated once a year, and didn't have an upgrade price it would be equal in price to the stand alone version. But neither of those are true. Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I'm very leery of being tied to a cloud, and find software as subscription to be a somewhat horrifying precedent.

Sorry for the longish rant, I really shouldn't read forums before my first cup of coffee.

Also, how does one treat photos with people but obscure faces? That was a brilliant question that bugs me in Picasa. Do I screw up the algorithm if I tag the back of peoples heads?

[jatrax]

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I'm very leery of being tied to a cloud, and find software as subscription to be a somewhat horrifying precedent.

People who drove horse drawn wagons thought automobiles were a horrifying precedent.

I definitely disagree if someone tries to tell me that Adobe software has something to do with "professional" (outside the pricing).

Guess you don't like Adobe software? It's OK, don't hold back.

[Class A]

Heise Verlag tested Adobe's claims regarding performance improvements and found that LR6 isn't faster than LR5 but in fact slower.

Adobe has been contacted for comment, but has not replied yet.

It seems like in good old Adobe tradition due to bugs some systems will run slow and some will run fast(er) and no one will ever know what to do if you have one of those configurations that provoke bad performance or how to predict if you are going to get bad performance.