Adios Adobe!

From Wikipedia:

Adobe (US: /əˈdoʊbi/, UK: /əˈdoʊb/;^[1] Spanish: [aˈðoβe]) is a building material made from earth and other organic materials. Adobe means mudbrick in Spanish, but in some English speaking regions of Spanish heritage it refers to any kind of earth construction, as most adobe buildings are similar in appearance to cob and rammed earth buildings. Adobe is among the earliest building materials, and is used throughout the world.

That’s where it’s at for me and Adobe. From now on Adobe is just a mud brick for me, not any enslaving subscription software (I wonder about the ‘other organic materials’ mentioned in the definition above 😉 ).

Took me some time to arrive at this point, though. I cancelled, re-susbcribed and re-cancelled several times. Those guys must think I’m nuts. But it had to be.

Now I’m happy, as Droopy used to say. I have all my photos, nicely catalogued by date in Apple’s Photos. The relevant ones are in albums sorted by day scanned, camera model and film used.

Photos here serves as my main file system, taking care of storing the photos, hopefully safely, backing them up using Time Machine and also as my editor of choice.

I also manually back up the Photos library at least weekly on another external disk, just to be safe, and will store it at another location. Good old backups!

And after long trials with Lightroom, Luminar ACDSee and others I have found that in fact, all I need is already here!

My usual editing tools are all there and it allows me to share easily to Facebook, WordPress and to my family.

The tools are all there I said? Well with one notable exception.

Photos has all the sliders and setting I use. There’s just one thing missing and that’s an adjustment brush and linear or circular gradient. The local adjustment tools in clear.

But I found a solution, and not only some cumbersome stopgap thing. I googled about this problem and found a mention of the software PICKTORIAL from, you guessed it, www.picktorial.com.

This awesome tool combines a RAW converter (don’t need that, my negatives are too raw for it), a digital asset management (DAM) system and of course a magnificent non-destructive editor that features the adjustments still missing in Apple’s Photos. So that makes me very happy. And of couse the software is not expensive at all! Well I was lucky as they had a sale going on until tonight – just 39,99$! But Picktorial often offer such rebates, so you can as well download the Trial version and have a go at it. Mac only though! The full price of 69,99$ does not break the bank either.

Picktorial works as a standalone program and in fact you can use it solo for cataloguing and editing your files. Now I already have my Photos takes care of by Apples finest and luckily, Picktorial works very well as an extension to Photos. Just invoke it inside photos and it pops up and you can do the local adjustments you need, save everything back and continue in Photos.

And the powerful retouch tools in action:

Well, where does that leave me now?

I paid Abobe the small amount of 11,69€ each month to be allowed to touch their holy software. That makes 140€ each and every year. For that money I can get a nice 2Tb External hard drive to back up my stuff and replace it every year for safety. Or I can buy another camera…… Oh no, not again! Or some film…. makes more sense to me.

Photos is free (included in the Apple luxury tax 😉 ) and Picktorial cost a one time fee of 39,99$.

But now I have all the software I need to pimp up my photos and post on this blog.

Thanks for reading, and I assure you, I get no kickback from Picktorial for mentioning them!