We Need An Adobe Lightroom True Competitor Locked

JNR wrote:

Bill Ferris wrote:

Adobe's the industry leader. Their market share is huge.

When I was youngster Ma Bell was the industry leader in the phone communications industry and their market share was huge. Gosh, I wonder why such a fine company lost that advantage...

That's not a particularly good analogy. Ma Bell had a monopoly until the federal government required them to break apart in order to facilitate competition within the market. Monopolies tend to suppress technological advancement.

Adobe has never had that advantage. They built their market share and continue to maintain it precisely because their products meet the needs of more customers than their competitors, and because Adobe regularly releases new features, and improves existing ones.

This argument in support of Adobe is typically the first offered, and is understood as the weakest by those of us who keep on trialing software that end up meeting our needs better. Yes, LR is still the best at some things, but is clearly falling behind in other major areas.

Based on the new features Adobe has released over the last few years, Lightroom is clearly advancing and leading the field in major areas. And let's not forget that Lightroom comes bundled with Photoshop in the Photographer plan. That is an incredibly powerful combo.

There are plenty of folks who prefer Capture One or another image editing app to Lightroom. That's only normal. In a competitive market, no single product is the best option for all consumers. But the notion that LR Classic can't produce a quality NEF is just a tired old troll.

And that's the rub. For those who are primarily Nikon users, LR processes NEFs spectacularly.

That was a typo on my part. I intended to write, RAF, to call attention to the tired old troll that Adobe ACR and Lightroom can't produce quality images working with RAFs. The number of quality images made by photographers who process and edit their RAFs in Lightroom is the clearest evidence of this.

For years, my Canon CR2 files very much responded to LR color processing very nicely. Yet, my Pentax PEF profiles from Adobe were not right most of the time. While LR has mitigated both waterfall and worm effects from the early RAFs, the profiles have never quite nailed the backward engineered profiles for Fuji.

If you've seen my earlier post in this thread, the Adobe versions of the Fuji film simulations aren't too far off. It's also fairly straightforward to tweak the Fuji film simulations in Lightroom to deliver a very close match with Fuji in-camera JPEGs.

So, yes, Nikon and Canon have been better served by the higher level of attention Adobe provided, but clearly for Pentax and Fuji Adobe hasn't put in the same level of effort. That's based on my extensive use of Canon, Pentax and Fuji bodies over several generations, and the back-and-forth use of LR and Capture One over several years - until Fuji and Capture One became my primary choices in recent years.

It's awesome that you've found a product and workflow you like. Clearly, you favor Capture One over Lightroom. As I stated earlier, that is to be expected in a competitive market. Customers who have choice will choose different products. That's a positive. That diversity of opinion when someone asks, "Which product do you recommend?" is a positive.

I'm just tired of getting trolled by people who claim Lightroom is inherently broken. When someone starts a thread to say a quality image can't be made in that app, I call that garbage out for what it is.