Yesterday I installed Lightroom 6 and attended a Major League Soccer match, which the Whitecaps lost to D.C. United. Here’s a combo review, with some Lr6-enhanced footie pix.
The Whitecaps play at B.C. Place, whose
roof-retracting struts
are visible just behind the traffic lights.
The big difference · LR6 manifests on your computer simply as “Adobe Lightroom”; its predecessor was “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5”. That’s about the biggest difference; the editing and saving operations look and feel more or less just the same.
Those struts cast interesting shadows on B.C. Place’s neighbors.
Marketing · The Whitecaps Football Club (WFC) markets itself aggressively as “The best sports atmosphere in Vancouver”. It’s been years since I’ve been to a Canucks or Lions game, but I think they have a point; it’s more cheerful, less beer-drenched, more gender-balanced.
Then there are the Southsiders; organized fans who fill a couple of sections (on the south side of the stadium) and keep a steady roar of drums and organized cheers going. They have banners and wave huge flags; it’s impossible not to smile at them.
Importing · The one big LR6 difference I noticed was photo import, which runs slower, separates copying and DNG conversion into separate user-visible steps, and triumphantly pops up a dialog to let you know it converted your pix to DNG, just like it’s been doing for years.
The game · The nice thing about soccer is that the game is fluid, doesn’t stop all the time the way football does between plays or hockey does for commercials.
The bad thing is, when a team is having trouble moving the ball through midfield, all the endless sideways and backward passes between the defencemen and keeper. I think the game would benefit from some analogue of basketball’s over-and-back and 25-second rules.
Grumpy with Adobe · I’ve liked Lightroom enough to have bought each successive release, over the years, without thinking much about it. I still like it, but at the moment I’m really wondering why I bought this one.
One big feature is said to be face recognition; I’ll report back on if I ever find it useful. The other is using the GPU, allegedly to make Develop operations run faster. I perked up when I read that, remembering how blindingly fast Lightroom 1 used to be. Well, if there’s a difference, it’s sure not dramatic, at least on my combination of a high-end MacBook Pro and 16MP raw files. Maybe I’d feel it if I were using one of the huge Sony sensors.
The team · I guess I didn’t see them at their best. But let’s start with the good stuff: Octavio Rivero is just immense fun to watch.
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Rivero jumps for a corner and gets a header off,
unfortunately straight at the keeper
I’ve watched some soccer on TV, but hadn’t realized how much of a full-contact sport it is. Rivero’s style isn’t about using raw speed and free space; it seemed like every moment he had the ball, he was in full-body-contact mode, leaning into defenders while they tried to claw their way through him to the ball. In my memories of college soccer, that sort of contact was a foul, every time.
Steven Beitashour also offers high entertainment value: Totally committed, unflappable, and with remarkable bursts of pace.
The Whitecaps are at the top of the MLS standings at the moment (although other teams have games in hand) but both the defense and midfield play had spells of looking ragged and klunky. Maybe it’s just that DC, who are also high in the standings, are really good.
Rent or buy? · Adobe really didn’t want to sell me Lightroom; clicking on “buy now” got me an offer to rent it for $10/month. I reflexively declined, because I don’t particularly need a closer relationship with Adobe. It turns out that you can buy LR6, but you have to dig through the Web site pretty hard.
Hm, the $10/month would have got me cloudspace for my pix and also the mobile app; maybe I’m doing it wrong?
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: paul (Apr 26 2015, at 16:57)
speaking as a DC United supporter, I can assure you they aren't that good but they are lucky...
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From: Dan (Apr 26 2015, at 18:39)
Was just on a photo expedition with a Nat Geo photog for two weeks. He, and others, were using Photo Mechanic to do the initial import and triage of pix precisely because LR (5 in his case) is soooo slow. I've never used LR but am testing it given Apple's mess with image apps.
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From: Coldforest (Apr 27 2015, at 20:41)
A fellow 'caps fan (and sitting very close to the section we're in) who also spent the weekend testing out the LR6 update, cool ;)! Unfortunately, both were decidedly less than overwhelming. To have to wait this long for a major LR update that seems to already be so overrated was really, really disappointing. Facial recognition (which I've played with), HDR merge and pano (which I've played with), GPU accel (of which I'm an increasingly large member of the group that gets GPU in PS but not LR :() all fall *way* short in my estimation. The one second order enhancement I've also hoped might arrive: *Book module* update(s)(!), were no where to be seen. Sigh... After holding my breath whenever Kah touched the ball, groaning after Laba's 2nd yellow, and nearly falling over after Rosales' post I finally went home thinking I'd rise early this morning for a cup of espresso and, at least, a ManUtd win at Goodison - *NOT!* Tough weekend to be sure...
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From: Jim Ancona (Apr 28 2015, at 09:26)
On the rent vs. buy decision, my concern has always been what happens when I stop paying Adobe. Today, if I don't buy an upgrade the old version still works. Worst case scenario, I have to run an obsolete OS in a VM for the next twenty years.
If I stop paying the $10 a month, presumably Lightroom stops working. I still have my unedited images and theoretically I could export my edited images. But exporting *just* the edited ones turns out to be harder than you'd think, because those "process changes" that got applied on Lightroom upgrades years ago all look like edits, so "export edited images" turns into "export all" without some complicated fooling around that I'm not sure I have exactly right.
Ideally I'd have been exporting all my edited images incrementally, but I didn't. So now I've got a huge number dating back to Lightroom 1. So if anyone here has a good solution, I'm all ears!
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From: d.w. (Apr 28 2015, at 13:22)
"thinking I'd rise early this morning for a cup of espresso and, at least, a ManUtd win at Goodison"
I was amused to see the hashtag #BlueWedding trending on Twitter.
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From: bruce (Apr 28 2015, at 15:09)
That $10 a month also gets you Photoshop which might be a win if you use Photoshop as well.
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