Well, I took the plunge and bought COP8 and crossed my fingers, and anything else I could, and gave it its first wee hurl. To say it was as black as the proverbial in Calcutta was an understatement and even darker than Lightroom but it was also a little familiar too, as it reminded me of Aperture (add and remove tools in the same way). The first thing was to move the tools adjustments over to the right side as in Lightroom then, I tried the photo previews at the bottom too but, moved to the left for now. Then, I imported some images that I'd taken and saved in Lightroom to the experiment with, from my SD card.
This is where the first bit of confusion arrived and the first doubts too arrived... Had I made a big mistake in splashing the money with trying the trial first? The image edited was dark and a bit unsharp and the highlights were blown too. What editing done was a disappointment and a cause for my doubts but, slowly, I began to figure it out. Save edits wasn't like Lightroom's but via a 'button' in the menu bar. But where was my means to edit with an external editor: by accident I found the way and the sense of relief was noticeable when I saw Iridient Developer, Silver Efecs etc all awaiting use.
So, images deleted and a clean catalogue awaits the first fresh images shot in anger today for the new regime to start: Lightroom will still be there and in need of some housekeeping (don't get me started on why, plus Aperture is at this time a dumping ground for all that is being removed from Lightroom) then, Aperture will need sorting before it too gets cleaned up before transferring to the new Photo app: all images.
So why would I spend the money on another image editing software instead of sticking with a know and tried work flow? Well,, for one thing, COP8 is very similar to Lightroom as it has the ability to import and catalogue my images. But I hear you so why, well, Adobe has been on Royal pain in the posterior with their constant screwing up. If its not Flash, it's Lightroom and the last two updates to Lightroom finally nailed LR's coffin for me. I was left with orphaned images and missing photographs which, with a lot of work, I got back or at least the ones I was aware off that I had. The last thing I need is to create work for myself and LR has done that for me: create unnecessary work.
Part of the troubled was done to my own failings in the way I allowed it to upgrade each catalogue with each LR upgrade. LR3,4,6 were reasonably trouble free with each one creating a new upgraded catalogue with a corresponding number 3,4,5 but when LR6 came along, this didn't happen and that is where I fell down on the job. Then other user cock ups... Forgetting to plug in the external HDD before firing up LR resulted in extra catalogues being made before realising the mistake (I know, take me out and shoot me) but when the last updates screwed up (not the users error this time) that was the final straw for me. So here's hoping this move will be a good one... All I need now is a plugin for COP8 to allow me to export to Flickr as I could with LR without needing to export to Lightroom to export to Flickr: ahem.
So, have you jumped ship and gone to Capture and do you know of a plugin for Capture to export to Flickr? :-]
