I don't need it

Speaking of Google Photos Magic Eraser: Adobe released an update to its Lightroom editing software touting a similar feature. Users like me can now harness the power of AI - as is seemingly everything these days - to remove unwanted objects from photographs. That’s nothing for me to get excited about, because I’ve largely stopped editing my pictures. (The most I do now to my photos is straighten the horizon. Dutch angles absolutely grinds my gears.) I am a straight-out-of-the-camera kind of photographer now. Those Fujifilm film simulations are just that amazing and convenient.

In my opinion, the best way to implement AI is to make it invisible. Don’t tell me it’s AI at all. Let AI do all the magic in the background. The user should only see the end result. Take this new Lightroom feature for example: AI removal should be integrated into the existing cropping and cloning tools. The program has always had the capability to crop things out of photos. It’s obviously more powerful and easier thanks to generative AI, but why mention AI at all? Simply say the crop tool is now way better.

I don’t care that Grammarly is using AI to make its writing assistance software better. I only care that the software works, and works well.

Of course, the cynical take would be all these companies are hopping on to AI in order to upsell (hashtag profits). Adobe is adding AI to Photoshop and Lightroom so they can easily justify increasing the monthly subscription fee in the future (mark my words). Microsoft adding Copilot AI to its Office apps is merely an excuse to charge more on the subscription. Extra computing power is not free, am I right? But what if I only want simple Microsoft Word - without the fancy AI stuff? I doubt there’s going to be an AI-less tier for a cheaper price.

What I would not be surprised is Microsoft adding an ad-supported tier of MS 365 for a lower price. Have you used Windows 11 lately? Ads are creeping in already…

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And round and round it goes.

Not too much to ask

Today is one of those days where I don’t have one concrete topic to write about, so here comes a string of thoughts until I’ve achieved the appropriate length for one these blog posts.

My 2017 era iMac is middle of the line in specs with extra memory installed, yet somehow it’s struggling to run Adobe Lightroom smoothly. There’s a noticeable pause between toggling a setting and having it reflected on the image I’m working on. My 2019 era 15-inch Macbook Pro does not have this lag, which is baffling because there can’t possibly be this much advancement in processing power in the span of two years. The blame is squarely on Adobe for putting out a product that can’t run smoothly on a two-year old high-end computer.

Then again, Lightroom was never known for its smoothness and efficiency. Sadly, I can’t move away from Adobe to something like Capture One because my entire catalog since the very beginning of my photographic journey is in Lightroom. Having to migrate and learn a new system is more bothersome than whatever deficiency Lightroom has running on “old” machinery. So I simply deal with it; I could move all my editing work to the newerMacbook Pro, but the 27-inch screen real-estate of the iMac is difficult to give up.

Indeed this is a first world problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless. I get the sentiment of detaching from our issues and taking a different perspective when people remind us that our problems are of the first world variety; it’s a good exercise to remain humble and see that maybe the significance of an issue isn’t what we had initially assigned. However, it’s wrong when people use the “first world problem” refrain as a dismissal of what others are dealing with, as if taking another perspective would magically make the problem go away. That’s not how it works.

Perhaps my particular example of griping about the speed of Adobe apps is hilariously trivial even for first world standards, but let’s see you try editing through hundreds of photos while dealing with the lag. Those seconds of waiting for the interface to respond can add up really quickly. Professional photographs aren’t upgrading their computers every year, so I think the onus is on Adobe to make sure Lightroom doesn’t run slowly on PCs and Macs alike that aren’t of latest iteration in hardware.

I’m not holding my breath.

No filter needed.

Downsizing on screen real-estate

For the longest time, I’ve only edited photographs on large screens, and by large screens, I mean monitors above 24 inches. It just seemed natural, you know? To have the largest canvas possible, so I can see more of the image in detail, like an architect and his drafting table. Besides, with modern cameras capable of outputting super high resolutions (my trusty Sony A7R2 does 42 megapixels), a screen of commensurate size seems almost prerequisite.

Naturally, I never quite understood how some photographers are able to do editing work solely on their laptops. Isn’t it all a bit cramped? You’d have to hide all the ancillary controls just to get the image to appear large enough, and at the proper 1:1 view, it’s way too zoomed in because the screen simply don’t have enough resolution to show more. I’ve owned many laptops of varying sizes, and as much as possible I avoided editing pictures on them, and instead waited until I get home in front of the 30-inch monitor, or what was the 27-inch iMac.

Indeed, the iMac is no more, due to life circumstances. I now have a 15-inch Macbook Pro as my sole computing device, which means I have no other choice but to run Lightroom and Photoshop on it. Perhaps its the bias of having dropped over $2,000 on the laptop, but I have to say it’s been quite okay doing photo work on essentially half the screen real-estate I used to have. The biggest reason for this is most the latest laptops have intensely high resolution displays, so the issue of not being able to see enough of a photography is mitigated. With the Macbook Pro, I still have to hide all the controls in Lightroom, but once having done so, there’s sufficient space.

Another benefit of sizing down on the screen, one that I hadn’t realize, is the increase in speed. With far fewer pixels to draw compared to the 5K display of the iMac, the graphic system is less taxed on the Macbook Pro. Therefore, making adjustments to a photo returns a more immediate response; there’s no longer that slight pause before the picture reflects the change I just made. It’s a pleasant and welcomed surprise, because more so than screen real-estate, speed is the ultimate productivity assistance.

All things being equal, though, I think I’d still prefer having a large screen. That said, it’s reassuring that doing photo work on a laptop is not the penalty box I’d thought it would be; it’s rather great.

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The legendary Shinkansen bullet train.

New Lightroom is finally decent to use

In recent years I've been using the Adobe CC suite for free because San Francisco State - my employer - offers a volume license to faculty and staff. Being a hobbyist photographer I naturally only use two programs out of the many: Lightroom and Photoshop.

I got an email this past weekend from the university IT department informing me the Adobe license have expired, and those of us using CC need to register again to get the updated suite. Me being the lazy type, I decided to forgo the hassle of doing that and instead subscribed to Adobe CC personally. The Lightroom + Photoshop combo is only $10 a month, and I know for sure it'll be updated much faster than the university account on future major releases. 

Besides, can't say for sure I'll be working at the same place anyways. 

So out goes Lightroom CC 2015, and in comes the renamed Lightroom Classic CC. Adobe have promised earlier this year it'll focus on performance in future CC updates, and to my utter surprise, the new Lightroom has indeed sped up considerably! It appears Adobe is sufficiently leveraging GPU power, in edition to expanding the utilization of multiple CPU cores to the entire app, and not just in the 'Develop' module. 

It's still nowhere as fast as it can be - native Apple pro apps like Final Cut are still a cut above of any Adobe CC app, but finally the Lightroom user experience isn't one of feeling like my computer is inadequate to handle it (the latest 5K iMac, mind you). I've been editing the batch of photos I took from the Taiwan trip a week ago, and not needing to wait anymore for the app to catch up to my actions is simply sublime. 

Excellent work, Adobe: more of the same, please. 

Why is Adobe Lightroom so slow?

Adobe Lightroom is one of worse applications in terms of proper usage of computational resources. I’ve recently upgraded to the latest 5K iMac, quite the snazzy with ‘Kaby Lake’ Intel Core i5 processors and AMD Radeon 500 series graphics, which one would think should chew through Lightroom tasks with surgical ease. 

Completely not the case.

Lightroom ran the same on my new 2017 iMac as it did on the 2014 Mac Mini it replaced(!), which is to say, inadequately slow. It’s unacceptable for a company like Adobe to be putting out products like this (Premier Pro users on the Mac platform should understand my pain), wholly unable to utilize the computational reserves to the maximum. How on earth can there still be agonizing lag when applying sharpening to my Sony A7R2 RAW files when the iMac’s got 40 gigabytes of memory and the fastest consumer flash storage yet available?

And it isn’t like I can simply switch to another editing platform. Apple has long abandoned it’s once glorious Aperture app, and my blood isn’t rich enough for Capture one. At least Adobe has recently (finally) acknowledge the utter slowness of Lightroom and is supposedly working hard to remedy the situation in future releases. 

Perhaps late this year, Adobe? Pretty please?