Katie,
Not sure of the image quality as I have mine linked to my subscription.
Re the cost, I pay £99 per year in the UK. For this I get Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Portfolio so I consider it a reasonable deal.
I use Lightroom Classic on my Mac and find it much better than the new cloud style Lightroom CC.
I don’t know anyone who uses a film camera these days so I can’t say much there. What I do have here is decades of slides and film (my spouse has shelves stacked high with them) that I’m going to scan Any Day Now. I’ve got no interest in making more.
It would be hard to recommend a digital camera without knowing more about what you were going to do with it and what you were comfortable spending and carrying. That’s really a conversation that’s best had with yourself. What I can point you to is this free video course:
(registration required) that goes over some things to consider. It’s from last year and so a bit out of date (it looks like it doesn’t have much on some of the newer mirrorless systems that @SpivR mentions) but hopefully it will give you some ideas about what to look for in a camera. I used an earlier version of this when I was thinking about getting more serious about photography and found it helpful. I should say that the author of that course has a bias (which he explains) towards interchangeable lens cameras and away from smartphones and “fixed lens” cameras. The course reflects that. That was fine with me but might not be for you.
I use Lightroom Classic mostly because it has a very rich set of tools for organizing, tagging, and finding photos. It also makes it easy to compare photos and, while the editing tools aren’t always the easiest to use, they’re very powerful. But there’s a learning curve. If you go that route start small and just focus on what you need at first. There are other apps that provide some of this but none do it all quite as well as Lightroom Classic. Unfortunately it’s only available on a subscription basis now. They killed off the one time purchase version earlier this year.
There’s limited functionality, but when you log in with your subscription ID all features unlock. It’s a great app that offers elective edits, sliders to adjust color/grain/detail/distortion etc, works with RAW, lets you organize and rate images, and more… while also offering cloud storage.
That said, there are a lot of apps which can duplicate the editing of Lightroom Mobile (without the storage), including my iPhone faves Darkroom and Snapseed (whic also work on iPadOS), and excellent iPad apps like Affinity Photo and Pixelmator Photo.
When I want to do quick and dirty editing and adding frames I tend to open up Camera+ (it’s a camera app, but I use it almost exclusively for post-processing). Otherwise I’ll usually go to Darkroom (bought the IAP unlock).
I’m not in Apple’s photo sync ecosystem at all, but even though I am an Adobe CC subscriber I don’t sync there either.
When you say Lightroom has a very rich set of tools, which product do you mean, Lightroom or Lightroom Classic?
Good point. Lightroom Classic. I can’t do the cloud thing and so don’t have any experience with that version. I’ll add that to the earlier post. Thanks. Years on and these names are still confusing. It doesn’t help that they keep changing them.
Thank you so very much! I’ll definitely check that course out and keep in mind all that you’ve said!
I love almost everything about OS13! I truly do. But I can’t believe what a mess they have made of my photos! Whoever perpetrated and authorized the annihilation that this update has done to Photos?
My photos are grouped into inane collages, with varying sizes. The general photos are not displayed well. They either all run together or they are too far apart. Videos I’d rather take time to enjoy later, just run on their own, as if they were running on some tacky website and messing with my peripheral vision.
They have screenshots mixed in with authentic photos. It seems like most everything is grouped by date. So when I typed a date in… well, they couldn’t give me that. No, the search returns with an arbitrary range of dates.
Then they link the photos to the map. I never asked them to do that or ANY of these “nightmares”! The worst part is going to be trying to figure out how to undo the devastation. I can’t opt out of ANYTHING!
I am certainly going to have to decide on an authentic photos app and stick with it.
And I can’t help but shudder at what the future is going to bring! Yuck.
That’s exactly what I was thinking today! I almost always shot at ASA 100. I recall that if I shot at ASA 400, the photos started getting too grainy. I saved it for sunsets and concerts- two of the things I found the hardest to shoot but which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I do miss getting the prints. I mean, what if Apple goes out of business? (Yeah– right!) But you had something. Ink is outrageous and the printers are not what they were when I first got one. I had a workhorse that printed nice photos too. But my scanner is pretty cool although I’ll never scan the way I want to.
I love being able to repair photos etc. I can erase annoying people! I only had access to a darkroom for one course.
Just saw this article in the App Store about selective editing in Lightroom Mobile:
I’ve been adding a bunch of old M4/3 photos to Photos. None of these have embedded location data but Photos (rightly) infers that if I took a photo around the same time on my phone, I was probably in the same place with my camera, and they’re all clustered in a single Memory. I’ll take that over poking around on a map to set the metadata manually any day.
In my opinion, Apple Photos is okay for managing images you have on your phone and in iCloud, but if you want a stable, all-around digital asset manager you need to just get Lightroom and be done with it!
The are some other options with On1, Capture One and so on…but Lightroom is the most deeply embedded throughout the photography industry.
With desktop, mobile and web clients as well as cloud storage and easy integration with services like Flickr, SmugMug and many others, this ecosystem makes managing your image library a breeze regardless of its size.
It has many other advantages as well. First, it has several other built-in modules for things like maps, making books and more. Next, as the most popular DAM system in the world, there is plentiful training as assistance if you need help…both from Adobe as well as countless third party instructors and authors. And finally, there are a lot of third party accessories to make your use of Lightroom even more enjoyable - presets, profiles, drawing tablets, hardware controllers and more.
This is the deaf to professionals choice for good reason. You will hear others make all kinds of claims about why you should use product X instead…however at the end of the day, the bottom line is the don’t like paying a $10/mo subscription fee.
That adds up to $120/year for Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe Camera RAW, Bridge and a few other goodies in the photographers bundle. But they will complain about the subscription and try to convince you to buy something like Capture One that costs $299 for a new license (or $20/year to subscribe)…and it doesn’t have nearly the features or wide acceptance and support of Lightroom.
Sales pitch over. I don’t work for Adobe and I get nothing from you choice one way or the other. But as a photography enthusiast, I love Lightroom! It is the HUB of my entire digital workflow. It has made my life so much less complicated…and I know it can do that for anyone else who wants to give it a serious try!
Moving digital photo archives around is a hassle. Make this move your last one and enjoy taking more pictures!
@rhuleva, What is your workflow with LR and Apple Photos?
How do you decide whether to store a photo in Apple Photos / iCloud?
Do you just move every image from your iPhone to LR?
I want to avoid having duplicate images in LR and Photos, if possible.
Thanks!