Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notyourday | Hacker News Reader

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> One interesting thing to note about open-source vs commercial software when it comes to RAW conversion is that commercial offerings like Adobe CS, CaptureOne and Affinity Photo sometimes have a relationship with camera manufacturers to get access to their proprietary demosaicing algorithm for their camera's sensors.

This is absolutely true even for Nikons and Canons of the world.

I'm always baffled about the obsession with open source for photo editing workflows on a desktop. From "I just want to get stuff done" OSS is just junk. It is a better junk than it was before, but it is still junk. And why would not it be? It is all about optimizing for the experience and there's not a single piece of open source software that is optimized for user's experience. Why on earth do we think this -- a fairly complex type of software -- would be any different if we cannot get themes in GNOME work consistently?

After battling with Linux on the desktop periodically for a couple of decades I came to the same conclusion. All the boring problems like consistency and stability are never solved. Only new problems written. I gave up and went to Mac. It’s not perfect but it’s less imperfect.

However I will say that Lightroom is horrible and I hate it. Only because of the memory gobbling and the persistent cost until I’m dead.

As I’m not a professional I settled on Apple Photos and Pixelmator Pro for when I bend Photos too far. This is good enough and doesn’t come with the persistent cost issues associated with subscriptions and paying for lots of RAM. Also works entirely offline or online if you need it to.

Open source photography software is, by and large, garbage. I'm working on a RAW parser for shits and giggles. The existing stuff is breathtakingly hacky.

My motivation for moving on from Lightroom is simply that Adobe no longer sells Lightroom. I'm not going to rent software that doesn't need constant updates to be useful. Sure, Adobe pushes out constant updates but their primary utility is in support for new bodies and I don't go through camera bodies that frequently. Unfortunately Adobe used a 32-bit installer for their 64-bit version of Lightroom so if I ever do a clean macOS install I'm boned.

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