Time to retire Lightroom 5?

[Harkins]

I have been using Lightroom 5 for many years now (since buying the disk on Amazon), but after looking over some shoulders at the COAP image editing demos in the FRIAT enclosure last weekend, I'm thinking that the capabilities of the current subscription Lightroom Classic have moved on considerably. Would I have no regrets if I was to bite the bullet and take up a years subscription? Also, if I did but cancelled the subscription after a year, would I still be able to use it, but just not receive any further updates?

[Black Mike]

I used to have LR6 then mover to the subscription service. As I understand it, if you cancel the subscription you can no longer use it so before doing so you'd have to export everything to jpg or tiff to retain an edited photo. Also the new catalogue it would create would not be backwards compatible to LR5. Depends if your main need is the cataloguing database or the editing.
If you wanted to stick to an Adobe product perhaps PS Elements might suit for editing? There are several other products out there which others will be able to advise on.
Mike

[Harkins]

Thanks Mike. My biggest fear was that I would have to pay out £120 a year for the rest of my life to always have use/access to it. A pity as I am pretty certain that it is dramatically advanced over LR5, but I'm struggling to justify that endless expense to myself, let alone my wife!

[atech]

With the subscription, you get lightroom and photoshop which I prefer. Haven’t used lightroom for years. I have used every version of photoshop since version 4, but I will admit that it is a steep learning curve if you haven’t used it before.

Like all software updates do you really need and will you use all the extra “functionality” the update provides? I suspect not.

If you shoot RAW, the the conversion engine in photoshop and lightroom are the same though the GUI might be different.

As I understand it, for the subscription, the software has to connect to the Adobe servers every 90 days, so in theory if you stopped paying you would be able to continue for 90 days.

Horses for courses I suppose

HTH

Atech

[p6025]

Some version after the move to the Subscription model, Lightroom became "Lightroom Classic" desktop (currently v13.4). It comes as part of the Adobe photography creative cloud sub, along with Photoshop and Bridge.

See: https://helpx.adobe.com/uk/manage-accou ... hip%20ends

"You can continue to access all your photos on your local hard drive through Lightroom for the desktop. You can continue to import and organize photos and output your edited photos through Export, Publish, Print, Web, or Slideshow. Access to the Develop & Map modules and Lightroom for mobile is not available after your membership ends."

Assuming that is still current... you can use the image management features primarily, not the image Develop, Map or Cloud features once you cancel the sub.


P.

[Black Mike]

Forgot to say the latest LR Classic can be quite demanding on processor and graphics card performance in particular when using the AI Denoise feature. If your laptop/PC is older it may seem much slower.
There may be a trial version, worth looking and trying it out if you can.

[Harkins]

Thanks again for the responses. It is tempting if it is still the case that you can still at least access your library and what you have done up to the point of ending your membership. Just means you don't lose everything if life gets in the way and you take a hiatus. However, I can still see me just forking out year after year, as I do with Flickr. That is a bit cheaper though.

And that's a good point about the PC spec Mike. My current Windows 10 laptop creaks a bit now (an aging i5 and 12GB RAM), so I could well end up having to spend big on better computing.

Maybe it's actually lucky I'm so behind the times with my measly 20.2mp Canon 7D2 DLSR and LR5 software. My photos look like they were taken using a potato and I can only dream of mirrorless, but I can still afford to eat!

[Sparts99]

At least if you export your projects as catalogues and store them on SSD + back up SSD you'll have all the edits and RAW files, if you need to do anything in the future just find someone who's got it or just get one month's subscription. I'd say its an idea to get one month and have a play, start a new project and import a catalogue from LR5 to see what happens and check your PC is up to the job. It will make a new catalgoue but doesn't destroy the old one, I regularly call up old work from LR5 in classic to rework or re-export pics for clients. As said above the AI NR is processor hungry but I've salvaged some unbelievably noisy low light pics using it.

[XWP29]

Perhaps look at some of the other options and developers, Tried LR, recognisable brand but boy is it expensive. I use a.n.other and it works really well for me at least.

[MADWOP]

For you Canon users:-
For years I used Photoshop CS3 extendedto process my JPEGs, with pretty good results too.
When it came to transitioning to RAW (CS3 didn't appear to support RAW) I was at a loss.
I didn't really want to move to annual subscriptions nor cloud based storage - so what to do?
I am a regular subscriber to Canon's monthly magazine and read about Canon's own RAW processing programme DPP4.
I tried it and haven't looked back.
I realise it won't be everybody's cup of tea, it's certainly not all singing and dancing but it is very good.
Yes there are drawbacks, for instance:- it's not so easy to isolate the subject only as in later versions of LR.
However it's free to download for Canon users (all you need is the serial number from your camera), there's loads of tutorials
on YouTube (by Canon and others).
When I had a slight problem (my fault) Canon talked me through it and fixed it.
Give it a go, as I said it's not perfect but it works for me and I'm sure I probably haven't scratched the surface of what it can do.
I very rarely use CS3 now, really just going through my JPEG archives and applying some denoise to try and rescue some poorer quality photographs.

[GeorgeA]

There are quite videos on YouTube commenting on Adobe and their change to charges etc so only a suggestion might be worth a look.

[Yorky]

My DPP4 after years of use has stopped processing (converting to jpeg) with no error message? Deleted and reloaded the software to no effect so stumped on the cause. So a few thousand RAW images going unconverted.

[MADWOP]

Yorky: Sorry to hear that, have you tried contacting Canon directly?
When I had a problem with what was then the latest version they sent me the NEW LATEST version (don't ask I didn't understand either).
They talked me through how to get rid of the problem with the older version (which meant going into the register of my computer) and loading
the new version. All o.k. plus they sent me some tutorials.
Good luck.

[Yorky]

Madwop, it only just happened yesterday! Strangly after working OK for a few hundred conversions so odd why it suddenly stopped. Thanks for the suggestion as I have been scratching my head about it. Appreciate the advice, thanks.

[MADWOP]

Yorky:
No problem, fingers crossed for you.
FYI:-
When I had uninstalled the previous version of DPP4 and installed the new version it wouldn't work at all.
I had to uninstall that version, go into the registry (following explicit instructions from Canon/DPP4) delete a couple of lines (sorry can't remember exactly what but obviously to do with DPP4).
Then reinstall the latest version and bingo all o.k.
This was about 3 years ago and so far no problems.
Good luck.

[Yorky]

Hi Madwop
Well after a few hours and uninstall delete register and reinstall it still didn't work. They suggested a few other things but no joy but what has worked is a new profile!!! So it me that's the problem...some would say it had to be. So as a different profile I can download the images again and convert them but they are just not in my profile.....this us going to get messy as they will be stored elsewhere on my laptop....error. Thanks for your help much appreciated otherwise my Oshkosh few thousand images were unconverted. Gulp.

[MADWOP]

Hi Yorky:
Glad it's sorted, not sure I was much help but at least you got there in the end.
Happy days.

[Taxboy]

There are usually the Amazon deals once or twice a year to get a reduced annual subscription. I have to say I don't regret switching especially with the denoise and AI remove tools