Apple One-Ups Its Final Cut X Failure; Completely Abandons Aperture

I don't own a Mac. I don't like Apple that much. In fact, I kinda' sorta' hate Apple. Not the Macolytes or iPhone fans or anything; I hate Apple itself.

One thing I don't hate, though, is competition. I love competition because it prevents companies from dragging progress down. When a large company dominates a market, it becomes difficult for smaller companies to succeed. Basically, the largest animal is eating all of the food that the smaller animals might use to grow. And since large companies are usually run by greedy nitwits, progress grinds to a halt.

Let's look at Adobe, another greedy company run by nitwits. They have released the near-universally hated Creative Cloud. With this, it is impossible to actually buy their software. You can only lease it. They are trying to say that it is intended to be beneficial to users, but everyone knows that this is a lie. It is intended to try to stop pirates... which it has failed to do. I can go pirate Adobe Photoshop CC right now.

So, as with so many (all?) attempts to stop piracy, all they have succeeded in doing is making life more difficult for their legitimate users.

You will notice a peculiar omission from their Creative Cloud, though:

Lightroom.

Odd, don't you think? If Creative Cloud is so awesome for users, why isn't Adobe forcing Lightroom users into it? You can get it. In fact, if you go to Adobe's website and try to buy Lightroom, they only give you the option of ordering it in a monthly lease package with a minimum one-year commitment for $120.

But, and this is a huge but, I can still go to Amazon and buy it outright and for the rest of time for $135.

Why give me the option at all? I can no longer buy Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Premiere. Why is Lightroom exempt from this tyranny?

Because of competition, that's why. Unlike so many of the markets in which Adobe plays, the photo processing market has a large number of options, with all of them fantastic in their own ways. Capture One, Bibble, DxO, and the quite usable open source RawTherapee are all alternatives to Adobe's Lightroom. Moreover, Lightroom has seen more and faster development than all of their other programs. Competition has forced Adobe to work.

So it is with a heavy heart that I report that the competition in that market has grown to be too much for an old stand-by. Apple is leaving the professional photo processing market and pulling the plug on Aperture. This is a big problem for me because Adobe will use any excuse they can find to stop working, charge more, and screw its customers. And since Lightroom is my application of choice, I am on tenuous foundations. Adobe could suddenly decide to pull a Creative Cloud on Lightroom, and I would either be forced to tag along or make the troublesome transition to another program. Neither option is very nice.

So the loss of Aperture is bad for Aperture users, but it is also bad for Adobe users. Aperture users have had the rug pulled out entirely from underneath them, but now our rug is looking like it might move at any moment. We need constant, intense, brutal competition to keep these companies in place, and the loss of any player in the game is going to be felt by all involved. I am very sad that Aperture is gone.

Maybe it's time to start donating to RawTherapee.

Adobe Changes Carousel to Revel

Adobe has changed the name of its Carousel service to Revel.

We originally chose the name Adobe Carousel because it was descriptive of core functionality in the product – access to all your photos on any device (i.e., viewing photographs in a circular manner, like a carousel).

Revel means to take great pleasure or delight…and that’s what we hope to do in the future as we continue to add more functionality and fun to the app. In the future, you can expect we will also be able to offer additional photography solutions on the newly named Adobe Revel platform.

While Revel might mean delight and pleasure, this rebrand means that Carousel has been more than a disappointment; it's been a complete failure. They tout the number of downloads at four million. If we assume a similar "click through" rate as is usually seen in online advertisements of between 0.1-0.5%, that's 4,000-20,000 people. That's actually not terrible. That can only mean, to me at least, that the numbers are even worse.

I'm not sure what they expected. Online image hosting is not valuable, anymore. $6 per month is WAY too expensive especially when Flickr is $24 per year and Picasa costs $5 per year for 20GB. Even Cnet, which almost never calls anything bad, disliked it. Adobe is a shockingly arrogant company.

Doubly annoying from the perspective of a designer: the logo makes no sense, now! Shouldn't it be a picture of some person eating cake or something?

Comments on Adobe Lightroom 3

I really like Adobe Lightroom. I like the interface, I like the library management, I also very much like the RAW handling. The program has a fantastic noise reduction system that competes very well with Noise Ninja. And perhaps the most important benefit of Lightroom is that it melds functions that previously required Adobe Bridge and Photoshop. It is definitely my RAW manager of choice.

That being said, there are a few things that annoy the ever-loving crap out of me.

One: there are functions that are only available in "library" or "develop" mode, and no way to access them without switching back and forth.

Two: while the program runs smoothly on a multi-core CPU, it runs like absolute garbage on a single-core system. I'm not talking a slow system, either. 2GB of RAM, 128MB ATI Radeon, and a 3.2Ghz AMD CPU. Yet it takes a whole minute to export an image, and simply moving through the library maxes the CPU at 100%. The program isn't terribly memory efficient, but it's an outright bloated mess in regards to the processor.

Three: And about that memory usage, considering all of the stripped functionality of Photoshop, you'd expect Lightroom to be easier on memory. It's not. You can easily run into the 300MB+ range in active memory just sitting there, and I've hit nearly half a gig with small files. Apparently, the developers at Adobe are clinically incapable of writing memory efficient applications.

Five: The price is a bit high, as with seemingly all Adobe products. Photoshop is $700, even the stripped-down Photoshop Elements is $100. At $300, it's in line with DxO Elite, but double DxO Standard. It's also $100 more than Apple's Aperture and Bibble Pro. The only program that out-prices Adobe is Phase One's Capture One, which is intended for tethered studio photography.

Four: And finally, removing chromatic aberrations. You know the kind. The purple or red fringing around highlight areas. Well, Lightroom is retarded when it comes to these. As in, it doesn't do ANYTHING to them. You may as well not even have the feature. Lightroom is SO terrible at it, that if the rest of the program wasn't so good, I would have ditched it.

UPDATE: I forgot to post a good comparison of the major converters from Twin Pixel.

I also wanted to mention that, on that same single-core system I've used Bibble and Capture One. Capture One is better at handling a 150MB, 65Mp RAW file from a Phase One 65+ medium format back than Lightroom is at handling a 15MB RAW from a Panasonic GF1. When working on a particular area of the image, it's very fast.

Capture One maxes my CPU, but it never dominates it. Where Lightroom's interface will freeze when it's doing stuff, Capture One maintains UI integrity. Buttons still operate, I can manipulate the program, I can switch from image to image, etc. Bibble is a similar story. Everything still functions.

And as a final note, it's perhaps not the fact that I'm running a single-core system, but Lightroom itself. I just found this thread at Adobe's message board, with over 1,000 replies, of people complaining that Lightroom 3 is slow.

New Raw Processing.

I'm new to the world of RAW photo processing. I've been doing it for a couple of years (All the cool kids DO it), but have only been using the RAW program that comes with Photoshop. I've experimented with all of the major programs and am just leveled by the amount of CPU cycles eaten up by these fucking horses of programs.

Adobe Lightroom, I'm being literal, sends my CPU to 100% with ANY ACTION. Any! It's absurd. I can only assume that someone operating on an old single-core cpu, although still running at 3.2Ghz, just isn't considered a legitimate market to Adobe.

DXO, Bibble, Capture One, the whole lot of them are similar. At least Bibble is a BIT faster. What the fuck! What ever happened to optimization? What ever happened to finding little tricks to reduce the CPU load? Why do I need a bloody server farm to process photos?

Capture One is a freaking nightmare. It creates cache folder EVERYWHERE, and never seems to store thumbnails. It always reloads photos when moving through a gallery. It's slow as a snail. How the hell is this worth $300? I'll tell you something, it's not. Not even close. It's not even worth pirating. Seriously, pirate something else.

Adobe Lightroom seems to be becoming my go-to program. Although, it's a lot slower than just running my raw files through Photoshop. Greater control; a butt-load slower. Lightroom tries to get you to use it as a full library and photo manager program... don't. It's slow as shit. Google's Picasa is free and it does a better job.

I can say from all of this is that if you're paying, get DXO. If you're pirating... well, still get DXO, but also consider Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom has an ENORMOUS problem in that it won't compensate for lens distortion. I have no idea what ganja Adobe is smoking to think that they can pass off a $400 program for RAW photos without any lens correction, but they're doing it. I would never buy Adobe. I'm kinda' sort of using it because I pirated it. Otherwise, DXO gets all of my love.

A shout-out to Noise Ninja, though. You should so get that.