Lightroom mobile

[tenohfive]

Have just seen that Lightroom mobile has made it's way to Android. With the catch that you'll only get 30 days out of it unless you've got a CC membership that includes LR from what I can see.

Adobe really are pushing the monthly model. And for those that like their costs up front, it's really quite frustrating - as having spent 5 minutes tinkering with it LR mobile really is a cut above the other mobile photo editing apps out there (for Android at least - Snapseed, Pixlr Express etc.) Having control over contrast, exposure, highlights, shadow, clarity, saturation in a way that presents very similarly to full fat LR is lovely.

Just from a 5 minute play with it I'd happily pay an up front cost of £5-10 - and that's just on the strength of the basic editing, I've not even looked into the cataloguing/synchronisation options. But Adobe won't do that, as - having created an appealing product - my money says they'll keep it CC exclusive to draw more people into that business model. I get the business side of thing, but for the same reasons that I won't lease a car I want my outgoings up front.

Anyone else had a play with this?

[Simpo Two]

I have no idea why anyone would want to edit a photograph on a telephone, still less pay money to do so.

[ian in lancs]

its really meant for iPads rather than phones; in either case its a solution looking for a problem!

[steveatesh]

Well they definitely want customers to sign up to CC. I very recently bought the perpetual license for LR5 and it took me a while to find the button as it kept defaulting to the CC subscription. I REALLY hope they don't make LR6 CC only.

[tenohfive]

Simpo Two said:

I have no idea why anyone would want to edit a photograph on a telephone, still less pay money to do so.

Convenience. If I've got photo's from my phone that need small tweaks to look acceptable for social media (yes, I'm one of the 1 billion people that has a Facebook account) then it's much easier to do in device than upload to cloud storage, import to LR, export out then upload to FB etc.

[rottie102]

tenohfive said:

Convenience. If I've got photo's from my phone that need small tweaks to look acceptable for social media (yes, I'm one of the 1 billion people that has a Facebook account) then it's much easier to do in device than upload to cloud storage, import to LR, export out then upload to FB etc.

Can your phone's built in photo editor not do it? I'm on Sony Xperia Z3 and do all of that in EDIT mode.

[Simpo Two]

Indeed, I'd have thought that LR was rather overkill just to put snaps on FB.

[K12beano]

I haven't tried it yet, but I would assume that the main advantage would be the familiarity of what the options do.

I can't imagine using it in any significant way (especially having graduated to a 5K screen and D800 files )

[steveatesh]

K12beano said:

I haven't tried it yet, but I would assume that the main advantage would be the familiarity of what the options do.

I can't imagine using it in any significant way (especially having graduated to a 5K screen and D800 files )

Am I right in thinking the 5k screen refers to the retina iMac?

If so I'm wondering what your experience is like with LR on it?

[tenohfive]

rottie102 said:

Can your phone's built in photo editor not do it? I'm on Sony Xperia Z3 and do all of that in EDIT mode.

I'd never used the in built editor before you mentioned it - and it's not bad at all, well worth some further use - but I've used several of the bigger third party apps and none work quite so effectively. As K12beano points out, a large part of that is probably familiarity - coupled with a few more options, and with the easy to use interface that you expect.

And I'm fussy. I rarely see shots straight out of smartphone camera - even with the decent camera on the Z1 - that I'm happy with.

Perhaps it's just me, but I was really impressed with LR mobile.

[K12beano]

steveatesh said:

Am I right in thinking the 5k screen refers to the retina iMac?

If so I'm wondering what your experience is like with LR on it?

O/T, but it's so easy with lots of "real estate". I've actually set up a secondary (and obviously lower resolution) old screen alongside for mail and iTunes etc. Was fully intending to try and organise programmes like LR across the two, but you really don't need to.

Best experience is editing at about 1:3 with "before" and "after" in Develop mode.

LR itself feels so at home on a Mac too. But I specced mine to 32Gb Ram and sometimes you still have to wait half a second for the largest of files to render!

Anyway: LR on a mobile....
Am going to be brave and try out the CC, plus the iPad/iPhone apps and see what it does for me. Tweaking the odd iPhone snap might be a better experience than Apple's own (although their simple tweaks are quite good).

[Craikeybaby]

Unless Adobe had added more metadata options to Lightroom Mobile I don't really see the point for me. In the past I have used Photosmith a lot to pre-filter images and add basic meta data whilst on flights etc, and then sync the data back to my Lightroom catalogue, but I wouldn't want to do any image correcting on a low powered device with a small screen such as a tablet.