This is amazing when you consider that PS was 100’s of £££ back-along. I remember diving in to LR when Adobe halved the price from £200 to £100
I’ve been using LR V6, the last of LR on a disc, an outright purchase. It still does a superb job but things have moved on considereably.
I’ve never been interested in PS. It’s LR for me and one of the principle reasons to open PS from LR has now been eliminated - Object Removal. Layers and ‘Object Removal’ make the very reasonable monthly sub a no brainer. And every mod/improvement comes straight out of Adobe and upgrades ones s/w.
One reason I’d been holding off a LR sub, even at around £10 p.m. was no local storage, a meagre cloud allowance and loadsa money for more.
But now LR gives 20Gb - which is not huge - but allows for local storage on your own drives. Gbs are cheap, these day.
Amazon usually have the annual subscription to the photographers bundle (LRc, PS + 20GB) for about £64 on black Friday, and the purchases stack. Mine runs to Dec 2026. There’s rumours that prices are increasing, the package being deleted etc, and if that happens then I’ll go to On1 because in terms of output there’s little to choose between them now.
I never save anything online, I always use local storage. I think the 20GB is for the confusingly-named “Lightroom”, the iOS version. versus “Lightroom Classic” which runs on Macs and PCs.
I only use the latter not the former and my LR catalog and image files stay safely on a local drive (with a backup).
As regards Adobe’s pricing, as I think I have mentioned in another thread when subscription renewal time comes around I just cancel it, and when I get to the “are you sure?” screen Adobe’s website always offers me a 30-40% discount (I use the full Creative Cloud suite).
I’m curious about what people want to do in Photoshop or its derivatives. These days I use my twelve year old PS principally for correcting parallax in buildings etc. and recording of my wife’s paintings for exhibition catalogues/website. Also for correcting contrast and saturation on phone photos I’ve taken for source material for her paintings, and cropping/ sharpening of detail for the latter. And of course for the phone photos on the Randos’thread.
As a professional photographer I use PS more extensively than most here I suspect.
Basic colour and tonal correction gets done in Lightroom because I shoot in RAW format and LR is easier for that work than using Camera RAW in PS I find.
Where PS comes in handy is for retouching (I mainly photograph people, but product and architectural images need it done too), for creating cutouts (removing backgrounds behind products), and for the AI features such as taking out unwanted items from photos (fire exit signs, reflections in shiny surfaces, glare in specs, that kind of thing).
Also sharpening, and conversions to black and white get done in PS.
I also use it occasionally to make panoramic images by stitching multiple photos together.
And finally I use it to add text to an image for web graphics or print materials, and for preparing photos for printing either on a desktop inkjet or via a commercial photo lab or printing company (brochures and flyers).
I guess as a former artist who made a lot of use of photographic imagery, I like yourself, used Photoshop mainly to compensate for the shortcomings of the camera’s so-called fidelity.
However perhaps because long before, I’d been analogue photographer since the early Seventies and had then separately got into computer graphics in the late Eighties, and then worked my summers in early US Mac bureaux, So although using Photoshop quite early on, I came to Photoshop quite late as a creative tool. In other words from a fine art perspective, there was a divergence between digital art and Photoshop’s role in image making.
Chris, your reply is what I would have expected from you as a professional commercial photographer, - so thanks. However, and no offense intended, but I was more curious about how and why amateurs wanted to modify or enhance their digital photography.
I don’t use photoshop, but I do use Microsoft Digital Image extensively (which is an early very nice competitor to PS and sadly not kept up by MS). I belong to a photo club so most of the work I do is for our monthly competitions. If I wasn’t doing that I suspect most of my photos would revert to just “snaps” taken mainly by my phone.
Because our competitions are just looking at jpg images and we are not enlarging or printing it’s possible for the final image to be quite small. The following is an example - the theme was “vacances” and I had taken a snap with a point and shoot camera at Mimizan and I liked the image of the three children descending the steps (reminded me of the Startrite ads on the underground from childhood). Obviously I cropped severely - I often do. Thereafter, most of the work I had to do was cloning to get rid of the background. I also brightened the children and I always sharpen my photos in post-processing, even when using my Canon.
I bought Affinity Photo about three or four year ago (ish) as it had features for stacking and processing astrophotography image sets. These features were relatively new and it was promised by the developers that these features would be greatly extended in the near future. What they didn’t say is that there would be a new version of Affinity Photo where this development would take place. Less than six months after my purchase the new version appeared and had to be purchased again. There was not even any reduced price for purchasers of the previous version, or even those who had, like me, recently purchased the old version. That was it for me, I went elsewhere.
I didn’t think it’s so obvious otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.
Although I’ve been using Photoshop for over thirty years, this hasn’t been for recreational purposes more usually for formal recording / documentation, or as part of a creative process with a different type of end product.
Surely that’s the artistic vision. I once listened to a BBC documentary about art villages where painters churn out thousands of copies of well known paintings perfectly legally. They explained how a lot of it was a bit like painting with numbers and the painter might have 20 or more copies of the same picture on the go at the same time. Once he had the colour he wanted on his palette he would use it on each picture before moving on. I later asked a professional artist friend why those painters were happy to copy to such a high standard when they could be producing original works. He explained that art wasn’t about perfection it was about vision and those painters although great copyists had no vision.
Apparently a lot of people who own real works of art will pay tens of thousands of pounds for a good copy of their artwork. They then hang the copy on their wall and keep the original out of sight and harm’s way in a vault.
I’d be surprised if “perfectly legally” applies in this case, unless the copies were commissioned by the original artist… Owning a painting (or photograph) does not give you the right to copy it.
There have been plenty of court cases about this. Even basing a painting on a photograph taken by somebody else can qualify as copyright infringement.
There was a case some years ago where a digital artist made a computer illlustration based on a photo of a Native American Chief, and his artwork won the Grand Prize in the annual Corel Draw graphics contest.
The photographer’s agents sued the artist and Corel, and won $400,000 CDN in damages.
Corel have a a bit of a history with copyright infringement - the actress Hedy Lamarr (note 1) sued them when they used a drawing of her (which again had won top prize in their annual competition) on the packaging of version 8 of their software - again probably based on a photograph.
The case was settled out of court and Corel received a licence from her to use her likeness, but she got a tidy sum for it I believe.
AI generation of images is only making this problem worse, of course. I am quite glad to be retiring fairly soon.
(note 1) Mel Brooks named the chief villain in “Blazing Saddles” Hedley Lamarr, with a running gag about other characters calling him “Hedy”.
But as Mel Brooks’ character Governor William J Le Petomane tells Hedley: “This is 1874, you’ll be able to sue her.”
Apparently as long as you don’t pretend that it’s an original there’s no offence. I can only quote what I heard on that documentary and what I’ve read elsewhere. Artworks by well known copyists painted in the C17th and C18th have their own significant value these days.
Maybe with paintings copied from paintings it’s different I don’t know - or perhaps just because long-dead Old Masters can’t sue! And copyright didn’t really become a thing until the modern era.
But as my examples above show, it’s not automatically legal to plagiarise another work.
Copyright has a sell by date of 75 years after the death of the author/creator of the work IIRC - it used to be less but Disney wanted to hang on to the Mickey Mouse copyright for as long as possible and could afford to lobby.
Did you know that images of the Eiffel tower in the day are public domain, but images of it lit up at night are still subject to copyright?
David, your post raised a lot of issues that I’d have liked to expand further, but hopefully the following will suffice
That’s why I found it interesting. But in different context to Sue, her final image could be the start of a complex creative process, that was more than simply retinal. For instance returning to the original image and reworking every bit of it (not necessarily in the way Sue did). There’s potentially a lifetime of possibilities, certainly I like the idea of an artist basing all his/her work on a single source image.
This situation has a number of aspects. sometimes it’s a condition of insurance, particularly with older more fragile works that need a controlled environment. But at the other extreme and far more worrying are those billionaires who keep important world class art works on board their super yachts - to my mind that’s even more reprehensible than those who buy art as investment and never look at it.
Lastly, re copying and creativity. Your artist friend seems unaware that for most of Western art history not only was ‘copying’ the norm, but it was the basis of tuition in classical fine art academies from the Renaissance to the mid C20th. Historically and globally, Western modernist notions of creativity have been the exception rather than the norm.
