After much deliberation and soul searching I have finally switched to Adobe’s Creative Cloud for Photographers image management and processing solution (otherwise known as Lightroom and Photoshop).
Adobe Creative Cloud – (c) Adobe
I know I’m very late coming to the Photoshop party. For years now I have messed around with other applications (including Elements, the cut-down version of Lightroom and Photoshop) so what finally made me jump into the Adobe Creative Cloud pond? A number of reasons:
- As discussed in a previous post Apple are no longer supporting Aperture (its RAW processing application that is equivalent to Lightroom) beyond their current OS X release (Yosemite) and have not upgraded it for a number of years now. Whilst it still did the job as far as RAW processing was concerned it was lacking some of the nifty new features of more modern packages like Lightroom, DxO OpticsPro and Phase One Capture Pro. Apple have said that Aperture and iPhoto (its low end image manipulation application) will be replaced by Photos however it’s not clear if Photos will be closer to Aperture or iPhoto in terms of the functions it offers. Given that I was going to have to learn something new in the near future therefore I reasoned this might as well be what is pretty much the industry standard.
- Since Adobe moved Lightroom and Photoshop into the cloud it has made what was a very expensive proposition (£500+ for Photoshop alone) more accessible. You can get both Lightroom and Photoshop (for OS X/Windows and iOS) for only £102 for a year if you pay up front. The concern of course is that Adobe will lure people into using their products then begin to hike up the price. I figured that £102 (actually only £87 because of a 15% discount offered by Olympus for people purchasing an OM-D E-M1 before 31st January 2015) is actually quite a good deal. Of course that’s per year but I probably easily spend that upgrading the various applications I use and exploring new ones.
- The sheer amount of education that’s out there for learning to use Lightroom and Photoshop is pretty staggering, and much of it is free! Whilst Photoshop is by no means an easy piece of software to learn (beyond the basics at any rate) there’s no denying there’s lots of help out there if you’re serious about getting to grips with it.
So I’ve signed up to 12 months on the Creative Cloud Photography package and made it my objective this year to really get to grips with it. I figured it would be good to share my learning’s on here, showing what resources etc I had found so that others, in a similar position to me, could benefit from what I found as well. Watch out for some posts in the future on how I get on.
Peter Cripps | Photography 
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