For many years – from v3.1 to v6.14 – I was a 100% Lightroom man. I had begun my digital photography life with Paintshop Pro (I think it was) before graduating to Photoshop and then fairly soon afterwards to Lightroom. My digression into Photoshop was an expensive mistake because I found it unintuitive and difficult to use. Lightroom was a whole lot better. Then Adobe moved Lightroom into a subscription only package with Photoshop, and by 2017 it became impossible to update the software without signing up to a subscription. I stuck with the final outright purchase version (LR6.14) despite its slowly developing shortcomings. For a longer version of this process, see this post.
It seemed that Lightroom could do everything that I needed a software package to do. But slowly I became aware that other companies were producing alternatives to it, particularly in the realms of sharpening and noise reduction. Once Adobe’s subscription model became set in stone, there was an additional impetus for software developers to produce real, genuine, “Lightroom alternatives” that could be purchased once and updated once every year or two (at a price, of course) if the user wished. Capture One was long-established, but it was joined by DXO PhotoLab, On1, Luminar, and others, and Topaz was developing some excellent NR and sharpening tools.
My move from full-frame Canon to micro four-thirds format Olympus proved a bit of a turning point. Because of its small sensor size m4/3 has limitations, particularly at higher ISO’s; digital noise can become obtrusive. At long focal lengths, correct focusing has always been a difficult skill to master. The bird photographer is always likely to be pushing the boundaries of their equipment and I’m no exception. But I noticed some strange “clumping” of detail in wide-angle landscape images taken at the Olympus’ “base” ISO of 200. I thought it must have been the lens or the sensor, or user error of some sort. After a while I decided to take the plunge with Topaz Denoise AI, specialist denoising software which sharpens images as well. After processing an image in Lightroom you send it to Topaz which successfully cleans it up.
My go-to camera for almost three years – the Olympus EM1 mk2 – was fully supported by Lightroom v6.14, but I knew that once I upgraded it I would no longer be able to use that software. In preparation for that day I invested in DXO Photolab, software which claimed to be a fully featured Lightroom alternative. It seemed at the time to be the most “grown-up” of the new-kids-on-the-block – it didn’t, for example, make it any easier to replace skies, which is anathema to me. There was always going to be a learning curve with new software but I fairly quickly found it was lacking several features I was used to having. You couldn’t combine different files to create panoramic images, or blend a number of files at different exposures to overcome high levels of contrast. And bizarrely, once you have processed a file and closed down Photolab, your processing history is lost. You can’t go back to it.
Eventually I set the software up to only pre-process selected files, and then exported them back to Lightroom for further processing. In fact I’m using it in the same way as DXO’s PureRaw software, which had I known then what I know now, would have been a better choice in the first place. Potentially this works really well – the sharpening and noise-reduction is excellent, and you get a lovely clean file to work with. In extreme cases, it is possible to add even more sharpening in Lightroom because DXO’s NR is so good. The clumping of detail which I mentioned in the third paragraph just doesn’t happen. Its main drawback seems to be that it also adds contrast, which you don’t necessary want in bird photography, and the colour balance can be altered on export. Perhaps there are workarounds for this, though.
In the years after Lightroom became subscription-only Adobe continued to develop it. I heard of its new masking tools which enable the user to select specific sections of an image and work specifically on those. My purchase of an Olympus OM1 (the company’s new flagship model) in summer 2022 made life more difficult for me again. I was either going to have to jump ship from Lightroom entirely, or return to it completely by enrolling in the subscription programme. I decided to swallow my pride and do the latter. To be honest, I’m glad that I did.
While the cost of a standard subscription is £9.98 a month, if you pay in advance and buy from Amazon on Prime Day or Black Friday, that figure is reduced to £6 p.m. I’d say that is a pretty good deal and you still have Photoshop sitting on your hard drive if you want it. It is now easy to roughly select an “object” in Lightroom and software will outline it accurately. It also very easy to select the sky. In fact I worry that processing a file is now almost too easy! Fortunately or otherwise LR’s “content-aware healing” doesn’t work very well in my experience so far, so there’s still difficulties to overcome. Thank goodness for that!
Nothing ever seems to be straightforward, though. As mentioned above I’m using Photolab to pre-process certain files before returning them to Lightroom. I’ve come across a fairly serious problem in that more recently in many cases the export back to LR doesn’t take place successfully. It either fails completely or returns a corrupted file that has a regular pattern of coloured lines running across it. PureRaw doesn’t work either. I’ve taken this up with DXO technical support but they have not yet come up with a solution. In fact they seem to have forgotten about it altogether. Meanwhile someone on the DXO user forum has suggested that it is actually a Windows problem and suggested an easy fix. I’ve followed his instructions and my fingers are well and truly crossed.
To read more Tales from Wild Wales as they are published, please click the Follow button
Tales from Wild Wales 