I take thousands of photos a year with my phone and less than 1% of them get edited.
I take thousands of photos with my Nikon in RAW / NEF format. I have over 50 large photos printed in my house and editing absolutely helps when you print 20x30" or higher.
Turns out, it's fine! The photos aren't perfect, but no amount of editing could make them perfect anyway. They look like the thing they're a picture of. That does the job. And with the time i save by not doing any editing, i have time to take more photos! Or read a book! Or sleep!
I don't disagree with your "enjoy the moment" thesis, but I also envy your memory recall capability. For me, photos can resurrect memories I don't have access to normally.
I do not take photos for the memories, I take photos for art and I do go back and look at them.
My camera is for art, and in my mind this an entirely different thing than recording stuff with my phone. These are as different as using writing utensils to briefly write notes vs. using them to make a complex drawing.
I don't really see the point of taking vacation photos that don't have me (or whomever I'm traveling with) in them; you can find higher quality photos of virtually anything I'd take a picture of on the internet for free; the only thing I can realistically add to the photo is me!
One of the first digital Ixus (IV maybe? from 2000?) made images of just one megapixels, but they were amazing. I miss that thing.
The last issue with my workflow now is figure out a better way to cull my iCloud photos, as they are a mess, and it's a bit annoying doing it on my phone.
- Jpeg is fine, nice in-camera processing
- Oh but I really want to edit this one to fix things only raw can do, raw is better anyway
- (Starts shooting in raw) - man annoying to have to process all my photos jpeg is good a lot of the time
- (shoots jpeg + raw)
- ugh, so many files and it eats my card, I don't need both files all the time, also I'm editing more anyway
- (Starts shooting only in raw)
That's where I am now, though the final steps may definitely be -Eh, jpeg is good enough, I don't edit anymore anyway.
* Lightroom’s noise reduction is WAY better than what my camera (a D500) can do. I shoot sports, usually indoors, with highish iso, so NR’s gonna have to happen at some point.
* If I’m going to lug around a dedicated camera, I’m gonna have it do its best. I have my iPhone for everything else.
* I can apply today’s lightroom NR to raws I shot years ago. Similarly, I expect to be able to apply future lightroom’s NR to today’s raws.
* Lightroom Classic is a superb program - it has many warts and clunks and oddities but it achieved product market fit and it stayed there, doing what its users want. Adobe keep making small improvements, and yet they don’t fuck it up!! This is vanishingly rare in big tech!!! (Promos gonna promo!) I grudgingly pay for this.
(My theory as to how they have managed to resist the institutional imperative to destroy Lightroom classic is that they created a fork, named just “Lightroom”, on which the promo can wreak its destruction, it’s kind of a second golgafrinchan ark, leaving Lightroom classic alone. I pay for Lightroom classic as a way of saying: keep leaving it alone!)
Price-wise, it's kinda expensive, but the buy-it-for-life alternatives aren't exactly cheap, either. You should hold off updating for multiple years to save money compared to the LR subscription.
Now, I haven't used the alternatives for more than just a short test-drive, but the recent improvements in LRc would have made me upgrade anyway. I'm thinking specifically about the noise reduction you mentioned, but there's also all the object detection in masking which saves a ton of time, and the ai object removal which is pretty great when I need it – saves time compared to fiddling with the old healing brush.
I think the alternatives have also gained similar features recently, which would have likely required a new (expensive!) purchase. But, I guess if you figure we've reached some kind of plateau and don't expect to have a new camera in the next 3-4 years, going for Capture One or similar may be a better bang for your buck.
But the editing process is very subjective. even in era of film there was a lot of processing, colors with chemicals, fixing defects. Just manual photoshop.
I understand the simplicity and joy of purists, but to each his own i guess.
Yes, enthusiasts here are spending hours editing RAW files and most think cell phone pics are over-HDRed messes. But phone software is so advanced now that it takes real talent and skill to replicate the perceived quality of what users get with their cell phone's software automatically. Most people are at a disadvantage with a DLSR/mirror less, not an advantage. That leads to ever-declining sales.
Why can't someone make a traditional camera with modern software instead of something that looks like it is out of 1994? The software on a Sony DLSR, for example, looks like the on-screen menu of a VHS player, but is somehow slower and dumber to use. The number of overlapping, incompatible picture adjustments on a Fuji is just as ridiculous.
> But phone software is so advanced now that it takes real talent and skill to replicate the perceived quality of what users get with their cell phone's software automatically
I don't know man, what you get out of a DSLR/mirrorless is just on another planet compared to a phone camera... The raw quality, detail, and richness of a photo captured with a big sensor and big lens is something special.
Phone photos can look superficially good. And for some photo styles this is enough. But when I look at a phone photo, I'm often left lacking a "draw you in" factor, because so much of the detail and lighting is more or less faked through software. There is no ambience, no mood.
At the end of the day, light is a physical property and the more of it you get into your lens, the more of that light can fill your sensor. Phones are still doing a lot of guesswork, post-processing that create photos that aren't underexposed, but are quite unnatural.
Plus gen-z is running around with all the point and shoot cameras we threw away 15 years ago
I’m not a professional photographer, I just wanted to write about where I’m at with a hobby I’ve had for ~15 years.
I love using a camera, I don’t love editing at a computer. So now I’m choosing digital cameras that have decent editing options in-camera. It’s comparable to choosing the roll in your film camera.
If there are any questions, I may get around to answering them. (No promises.)