The Adobe-Free Workflow

Or how I learned to ditch something I thought I needed and like the result

I’ve been an Adobe customer for at least a decade, probably significantly longer if you count the fact that I used to use products with the word ‘elements’ in the name. I’ve always been more than happy with them all, they served me well and over time became a core part of my photo workflow, especially when I traded up as it were to their photography plan and got Lightroom and Photoshop, which used together allowed me effectively to manage and create the things I wanted to create. When they moved to the subscription model I wasn’t one to join in with the furore because I can understand why companies do it: there is a finite number of potential customers for your product and what tended to happen is that people bought it, never bought the upgrade and your year on year revenue drops. Once my mac got to the point where it couldn’t run the later versions, okay the inability to leverage the upgrades became a bit annoying but it wasn’t a deal breaker. Yes, I think they’re an aggressive pricer, but hey they are not alone in that. They announced this year’s price hike, which for people like me who paid for my annual subscription was a bit eye watering and meant I’d have to switch to paying annually to get the same pricing I was used to, but I could live with that.

Then, for reasons totally unconnected with Adobe, I had to reformat my iMac There was an historic install of Symantec which hadn’t completely uninstalled, was fighting my new anti virus, and none of the methods recommenced to remove it worked, the last ditch advice was to wipe the hard drive, and then tell Time Machine to restore only user areas, none of the configuration or application stuff. Over the years I’d silted up a lot of old apps so that wasn’t I thought too bad an idea, and software developers can always easily make available old versions (you can see where this is going already can’t you?)

Yep, Adobe do not, off the peg, provide or support older versions of their software, well oddly they seemed to do me a Photoshop old enough but not Lightroom. I contacted their support desk, explained the situation, then asked for the latest version of Lightroom which run on 10.15, and to their credit they sent me back a download link, which I downloaded and installed. The first time I tried to open it there were errors, but then the second time I opened it there weren’t, so I thought I was okay. I asked it to open my Lightroom catalogue…… and it said that the catalogue was for a later version of Lightroom and it couldn’t open it. Sorry, I asked for the latest version which ran on 10.15 which means that it should have been the version I was running before I formatted. So how am I now being told this was for a later one? Well, I was just about to get onto Adobe again when I thought, look, the prices are going up and my subscription ends this month, and there are clearly issues, and Affinity is great.

I shall ditch Adobe.

Well in my terms that’s a bit jump, one I thought I wouldn’t make, like well everrrrr! But I did and I’ve worked out a new workflow to replace the one I was used to. Here it is

NEGATIVE SCANNING - VUESCAN

I’ve always scanned negatives in VueScan, and that runs fine on the new MacMini in my wife’s office, where the scanners are, so I’m just going to carry on with that. I scan onto a removable SSD. I was using Negative Lab Pro before, which is very good but they don’t do a non plugin version, so I’m going to have to let VueScan do it. I’ve got Silverfast as well, but I sort of get on better personally with VueScan, but I really ought to do some serious comparison and check I’m not missing out. So the scans of the negatives go onto the SSD and get bought over to the iMac.

CONTACT PRINTING - MAC MAKEPDF APP

The negative file contains a contact print for each roll of film, which Lightroom used to be able to do quite nicely once I’d added the images. I can’t exactly replicate this, but there is a slightly hidden, well really quite well hidden actually, routine in MacOS to produce a pdf contact sheet from a number of images. Currently I can’t get it on one page, but I think if I create a Hazel routine (see below) to produce a copy of the files at exactly the right size I might be able to get there. But at any rate, I can do my thumbnail sized copies for the neg file.

(note, I can’t remember which web page I found the tip about this, but if anybody wants to know how I did it just contact me and I’ll tell you!)

FILE IMPORT AND RENAMING - ROUTINE IN HAZEL

Negative scans get appropriately batch named in VueScan, but files from SD cards used to get named and copied across to a file system in Lightroom. There wasn’t an off the peg alternative here so I’ve got a system which works as follows..

I use a piece of software to automate tasks on the Mac called Hazel, it runs in the background and does things like empty the recycle bin of different types of files at different times, and archive stuff, and so forth. So I’ve set up a rule which renames any file I put into a particular folder to ‘sometext’ and the date and time. I can then use the MacOS rename facility to change ‘somtext’ to text of my choosing, and then copy the files to where I want them. It’s more or less doing what Lightroom did but in several different stages, it takes a bit longer but for me that’s not a problem and gets me where I want to go.

PHOTO EDITING - AFFINITY PHOTO

I was a launch customer, pretty much for the Affinity Suite, I think it’s really very good. There are a lot of hours (days? moths?) of time on Youtube and petabytes of internet file storage devoted to people discussing the merits of various RAW processing packages, and editing software. Go down the rabbit hole if you must, but for me Affinity does all I want.

So I now have a workflow which gets me where I want to be, and which costs me a lot less than Adobe did. My view for many years is that Adobe make good, really good, products, but then let them down with the way the business operates. I think that actually they’re not interested in small scale and private users, I think they see their core business as selling hundreds or thousands of subscriptions into big commercial design companies, and to be honest, that might well be a good strategy for Adobe who after all exist to make money, but I think it will lose them an ongoing small scale user base