Thursday 30 April 2015

Adobe Lightroom 6

I've been on a bit of a photography spending spree the last couple of weeks with a new lens, a couple of filters and a monster monitor for editing, culminating today if coughing up the £50.09 for Adobe Lightroom 6.

Download took a while on my connection but we got there and then had to surmount the hurdle that my physical media didn't need a serial number entered on install, so had to rummage in the loft for the original disks.

Run for the first time, I suspect the line between Lightroom 6 and cc is a thin one given this version's installer is 200mb smaller than Lightroom 5's most recent update.

What new toy to try, well the big one for me is Photomerge, this is basic functionality that has worked for a while now just not in lightroom. By good fortune I happen to have some pictures I took of a field to try out my new lens, no artistic awards but I know that photomerge will eat the 13 shots for breakfast. I guess the number is the give away here.

Seconds later I have "unable to merge photos. press cancel". Ok, so my first tried I just grabbed all 13 frames, so 13 jpgs and 13 raws so let's try the raws, no same error. Ok let's try the jpegs, no same problem.

Ok, I've stitched these pictures in another product with no problems and I can put them together by eye.

So take 2 jpgs, merge, cancel, 3 jpgs, merge, cancel. I'm sure you get the picture. The second to last of the 13 pictures fails, I don't know what it doesn't like but my merged picture seems to have a little something missing :


so, for the third time in a week I have tried to contact Adobe support. The community forums seem to fall into a "redirect loop" problem almost at random (yes changing my name worked as suggested on other sites but do I really need to change my name everytime I try to use the site) - still awaiting an escalated contact on that one (perhaps time to visit the spam folder). 2nd attempt was for something I spend so long waiting at the "we are still assisting other customers" I forgot, went to dinner and then got an indignant "well we tried to talk to you message".

Today, well I tried again having discovered that pressing F1 for help in Lightroom 6, as per the menu option, goes to a page that appears to be down (actually Chrome is reporting a failed DNS lookup & I've tried a couple of online DNS lookup services and the name does not resolve) so while typing this I've been sitting at the Adobe chat screen waiting for some contact, that's the site which in my chrome tab says "Adobe Customer Care".

It seems I can going to be testing that "updates" feature a lot.