short term lightroom?

If you have an iPad Pro you could switch to LR mobile. It is 22€/year in D and the functionality is high.

I've just upgraded to a D500 - get me, keeping up with the 2010's. It isn't supported by my owned version of Lightroom. Lightroom cost me about £100 back in the day - today if I want to rent it - it is ~£100 a year. That seems madness to me? Clearly I don't need all the new bells and whistles and I've found that DNG works fine for what I want to do.

We all work on different budgets. I don't have all the other monthly costs either ie Netflix, Spotify etc. Clearly I pay my taxes, which in the UK cover many of davehicks other spends. I buy my cars rather than rent them, I buy my dive equipment rather than rent it. It means I control my spend and I buy "features" when I want them.

In my opinion Adobe and many others (Microsoft) have moved to the rental model because the new features just wouldn't have interested enough people into buying their product again. AI certainly doesn't interest me. It doesn't really scare me either. I look to produce the best pictures I can, if AI could remove all the backscatter in a picture then it may be useful, I'm not interested in it "repairing" a bad picture though. I'm not making money out of my pictures (they aren't good enough for that ) so a bad picture is just a chance to take it again with better technique.

I have to admit to being interested in Topaz de noise and sharpen but at the moment not enough to buy their product. If they did trial software I'd be happy - I don't like the buy and we will refund model either.

1 hour ago, MTH said:

I've just upgraded to a D500 - get me, keeping up with the 2010's. It isn't supported by my owned version of Lightroom. Lightroom cost me about £100 back in the day - today if I want to rent it - it is ~£100 a year. That seems madness to me? Clearly I don't need all the new bells and whistles and I've found that DNG works fine for what I want to do.

We all work on different budgets. I don't have all the other monthly costs either ie Netflix, Spotify etc. Clearly I pay my taxes, which in the UK cover many of davehicks other spends. I buy my cars rather than rent them, I buy my dive equipment rather than rent it. It means I control my spend and I buy "features" when I want them.

In my opinion Adobe and many others (Microsoft) have moved to the rental model because the new features just wouldn't have interested enough people into buying their product again. AI certainly doesn't interest me. It doesn't really scare me either. I look to produce the best pictures I can, if AI could remove all the backscatter in a picture then it may be useful, I'm not interested in it "repairing" a bad picture though. I'm not making money out of my pictures (they aren't good enough for that ) so a bad picture is just a chance to take it again with better technique.

I have to admit to being interested in Topaz de noise and sharpen but at the moment not enough to buy their product. If they did trial software I'd be happy - I don't like the buy and we will refund model either.

Lightroom just added AI de-noise in the latest update. It's at least as good functionally as what Topaz offers in this initial debut, and likely to get better and add options in the future. The AI features in Lightroom to date have been about making your existing editing flow easier and faster, not about auto-magically fixing your images.

If you don't want to pay for Lightroom/PS then just use Bridge and a free-ware RAW editor. It will still work with your legacy lightroom catalogs.

On 6/7/2023 at 6:16 PM, davehicks said:

Lightroom just added AI de-noise in the latest update. It's at least as good functionally as what Topaz offers in this initial debut, and likely to get better and add options in the future. The AI features in Lightroom to date have been about making your existing editing flow easier and faster, not about auto-magically fixing your images.

If you don't want to pay for Lightroom/PS then just use Bridge and a free-ware RAW editor. It will still work with your legacy lightroom catalogs.

That's interesting @davehicks. Still as I said I'm not interested in renting software, so Adobe are sadly not a future option. The Topaz option to buy and mix with my current workflow would work, and when I get a chance to spend more time looking at things I'll probably give it a go.

I know many on here are Adobe fans but I'm never renting software if I can avoid it, it just isn't a model that works for me personally. For the Pros that always upgraded PS etc, I'm sure it makes sense. I'm still making do, quite happily, with my PS CS6 from 10 years ago and Lightroom 6 from about 6 or 7 years ago. At £120 a year I'm sure that is affordable to many, but I'd prefer not to have paid £1200 over the last 10 years that I've happily used CS6 (that I only paid ~£500 for). Yes there has been inflation etc. However, I'm still using it, and to be honest I'm still very happy with what it does. I try and not mess around too much with my photos above and below water. Cropping, playing with white balance, sharpening, playing with the light to enhance and removing the odd element that I'd not noticed at the frame edge etc. 

As I said earlier, I'm just doing it for fun :-).