Adobe Max and life without creative clouds

Life after creative cloud is fine, infact the computers have sighed several sighs of reliefs, start up is faster (no waiting for yet another "mystery" update). I've had enough of those with windows10, especially the ones that repeatably failed. Also I'm definitely wasting less time (some was learning but a lot of pointless play). Has my photography suddenly become poorer, don't think so (Dan Andrews lockdown has had more influence.) Am I more likely to use outrageous filter, ...  ...  ...Yes

So for yet another opportunity to learn that may become a waste of time. Comparing Adobe Max and  to last weeks ZOOMtopedia its a really clear example of how high quality video with snappy graphs is no where near as compelling as more interactive video streams that you know are truely live. You naturally follow the live much more close focus than the slickness of tight video was like have the TV on in the background Still I like the concept of learn and train in lightroom where you can select and example tutorial and work through it in light room.

Adobe Max is still on (the a big catalogue of "live" event) and is free to join but you may to set up an adobe ID.

Yet another update issue

 I have come to use OnOne Photo RAW as my go to RAW file editor of choice and when I use it I generally export a "finished" jpeg version but something has gone astray in the latest update. It often reports that the screen resolution has changed and I need to restart the application. I assume this is related to the fact that one of the two screens on my main desktop had died and I replaced it with an old VGA style monitor. The Microsoft update fiasco made this worse, the software would hang and clearly had rendering issues anytime I exported a finished edit.

Initially the response from their support was very non-specific (ie delete OneOne and reinstall it) but I had already done this 3 times. Yesterday I got a real reply it turns out this is a common bug when using two monitors. I had to physically unplug the old monitor and just use a single screen, Magic everything is fine again, albeit with less overall screen real estate.

Am I becoming too cynical or are companies just in such a rush to push out updates to their software they are forgoing testing, and using us as Alpha testers?

Enough is enough!

 

I have (yet again) wasted painful days watching this repeatedly appearing on three of my 4 active computers (two desktops & two laptop). Once this happens the next update on that machines takes hours. One desktop took 3 days before it was again useable.

Microsoft surely to realize this is a massive #FAIL.

After 3 months I wasn't overwhelmed

 I’ve had an trial of the creative cloud suite for an extended 3 month period. It really does have a comprehensive set of programs. In comparison I have a number of different programs, from several different software companies, that I use standalone but use whichever is appropriate and have to swap files between each application. I was expecting that by now adobe would be well integrated. I was disappointed there is only some interchangeability but it is pretty much the same step, saving &/or exporting then opening working on the file, save again and back on the roundtrip merry go round, like plugins have pretty much always worked. Ok it all works but I don’t need to be in the creative cloud environment to do it like this.

  I was once quiet a fan of lightroom up to revision 5 when it got so slow. So I was keen to see how light room classic had progressed and it had. The facial recognition was nice (but not essential for me) the HDR and Panorama were also fine and the synch to lightroom mobile seemed to work nicely. I was initially impressed. However I still had the strong impression that behind it all was the one person one catalogue, one spot to file your originals was underlying this all (the shared images just being smart previews). So I was a little underwhelmed here compared with tools I already had.

  I had decided to spend a fair bit if time learning Photoshop in detail, and it started well, I was particularly interested in layers and blending. I must admit it does do these tasks well, However things kind of fell apart after that there are so many menu, tabs, icons,  sliders and even different terminology for much the same process that I found trying to consume the actually well put together training material to be brain numbing. I did step down to Photoshop Express and that was useable straight away (I do have an old version of Adobe Photoshop express on my main machine, it came with my Wacom tablet, but I actually haven’t used it in 3 years. The new express is certainly update but again a bit disappointing.

  Illustrator wasn’t as hard to pick up and I made a couple of fun things with it, however when I tried doing a couple of cartoons I was a little shocked at how few graphic tools I commonly use I could actually find.

My final foray into the creative cloud world was video. I’m not very experience with video but interested and have been making a few experimental shorts. So I then dove deep into premiere pro,  The training material is good but stopped short of what I wanted. The wealth for a menus, tabs, sliders and icon and number of track types was a bit confusing. I reckon Davinci Resolve is easier to pickup. (that’s not a compliment by the way)  So after some time back down to Premiere Express (its ok easy and much quicker to get things done), then finally Rush.  

 Now Rush does about 90% of what I was after and sort of quickly and had a nice set of options including schedule upload to YouTube. Its very heavily aimed at social media influencer wanna-bees. So I actually used that for a few weeks to recorded a set of quick tips for watercolourist. This might be the one program I would miss when the trial ends. I’ve since discovered a few stutters in the videos on YouTube that are not the same as renderings on my computer (but I’m not totally off-put, it may have been easy to avoid.)

The ongoing rental (aka subscription) and its price, have always been a stumbling block for me. I can’t find any strong reasons for me taking up an subscription (and no discount was offered). I did however registered for Adobe Max, which is free for those with Adobe ID just before my trial version ran out. Maybe the blue sky of features yet to come might keep the adobe flame burning, but its nearly gone out for me.