Market Position, Adobe and Adobe Lightroom
Asser, your analysis of market position ignores several key points. Adobe has enjoyed decades as the world’s leading supplier of image manipulation and other digital creative tools. Their flagship product Photoshop has been the uninterrupted category standard at least thirty years. So when Adobe says, we’re going to offer a DAM for photographers, the entire media sits up and pays attention and offers flattering press.
Adobe has also been one of the biggest advertisers among software makers for many years at a time (I don’t have the exact numbers but I certainly remember seeing lots of their ads in Apple related publications and elsewhere). In short, Adobe has a huge head start in any image related software category which they choose to enter.
Adobe’s Lightroom in its first two iterations was fairly awful (I know first hand as I toyed with it while enjoying Apple’s Aperture). Adobe just kept throwing resources, money and advertising at until pushing it uphill.
Lightroom is reasonable capable all in one software now. It would be extremely hard to deplace. Moreover, Adobe’s current DAM offer - $9/month - includes Photoshop, the gold standard in bitmap editors with full plugin compatibility with everything. Unlike DxO there’s no great upfront fee so students, artists, small businesses don’t even have to weight the purchase. They just sign up and can get to work and can cancel later if they don’t like it.
Adobe very cleverly has the consumer DAM market sewn up, by:
- outinvesting everyone else
- outlasting everyone else
- underpricing most potential competitors
Potential Remaining Market
There are two categories of people who are open to an alternative RAW converter or DAM.
- anyone but Adobe people (usually related to the subscription issue) - I fall into this category
- pros who live or die by
- the quality of their images
- the speed at which they can prepare them
- affluent photographers (capable gear is not cheap, as we all know) who share the same pro taste for quality, and have even less time available to work on their images. Most certainly this category don’t want to have to spend a year learning a tool (Photoshop, Capture One would be examples) to be able to use it correctly.
So the available audience for DxO as long as it chooses to price the full solution at €289 and not around €100 has very little to do with Adobe Lightroom’s wider market. In fact many of DxO’s paying customers have Lightroom available for free: if you wish to have access to up to date Photoshop, you’re already paying Adobe (I’m not and never will).
We’ve established that at the current price point, DxO can only target pros and affluent photographers who are also very demanding about their images. No students or penurious artists welcome.
Respecting Existing Workflow
This audience already have a workflow, already have workflow tools and won’t settle for compromise solutions. What has attracted these people to DxO is knowing that their RAW files and their lenses will get the best processing and the best noise reduction. We are also impressed by how capable and automatic DxO Viewpoint is in correcting perspective (it’s not infallible - put in the wrong images and uh-oh, but with the right images, which are most wide angle images, it’s brilliant and oh so fast). There’s apparently also a crowd who like to play with film emulations (not my cup of tea). DxO Film Pack is competitive but not best of breed in this category. What appeals me about Film Pack (besides the Fine Contrast tools for sharpening, I don’t understand why they are not in Photo Lab) is that the film emulations are done directly on the RAW style in a single RAW converter. Saves creating a whole bunch of huge tiffs just to put film grain on them.
For me though Film Pack is not worth paying another €70 and has been causing me some stress on which DxO package to purchase. Film Pack as a separate product in this case at least is a barrier to purchase, not an incentive. Adding a half-baked DAM product may just create more confusion among potential purchasers. Imagine buyers saying things like:
I would have bought DxO Photo Lab but I didn’t want to pay for yet another DAM product.
or:
I seriously considered DxO Photo Lab for the image quality but the integrated DAM is so mediocre 1. I decided to stick with… 2. I decided to buy X RAW processor.
This literally happens in the case of Capture One.
So out of your shopping list, the DAM is not a gimme or necessarily an asset at all. DAM is a lot of time and work and whatever DxO comes up with will not necessarily please everyone or even anyone. As you point out, On1 is under the $100 mark, allowing it to compete directly with Adobe’s Photographer offer. DxO would be giving up a lot of revenue and an established premium market position by competing on price. Lowering the price is really a one way street as well. You can’t go back.
Important Areas for DxO Photo Lab to advance
I do agree about:
- improving masking tools
- potentially Fuji availability (looks like Fuji is dropping X Trans next year, as X Trans was great up until 16MP vs Bayer, is about a draw at 25 MP and is worse beyond that on APS-C as there’s enough pixels to defeat moirée issues). GFX is already Bayer so there’s no barrier except psychological and time to picking up GFX if GFX looks like it’s going to make it in the market place (I’m not sure it will, as I decided to double down on Canon instead of moving up to GFX, despite my fondness for Fuji X and if I hadn’t doubled down on Canon I would have bought a D850 and/or a Nikon Z6 instead after doing the arithmetic on image quality, lens quality, lens availability and cost).
Where DxO has additional room to roll are with:
- improving interface speed: real time sliders is a must. Part of improving speed should GPU acceleration at least for live preview as GPU these days are so powerful. I say interface speed, as I mostly could care less about output speed - live event photographers would feel differently. There needs to be a faster output option if they are to be included under the tent
- improving interoperability with other tools (already good as Photo Lab mostly doesn’t try to be a DAM or manage my images or get in my way)
- continuing to improve noise reduction and image quality
- keeping up with lenses
If DxO is the fastest RAW converter, with the best automated tools, keeps up with all a photographer’s lenses, offers the best noise reduction of any solution (including stand-alone plugins), it almost sells itself.
DxO is almost here right now at that stage. Improving image editing responsiveness (should be mostly real-time), steadily improving masking and local editing and keeping up with lenses would get them over the finish line.
USP: DxO Unique Selling Proposition
Of course when DxO arrive in terms of quality, tools and speed, there is the question of marketing. Marketing should be focusing on the USP.
DxO Photo Lab creates the highest quality RAW conversions and best looking images.
The secondary benefits:
DxO Photo Lab is very attractively designed, is intuitive to learn and helps you create great images in one quarter of the time of any competing product.
As DxO is almost here (just real time and improvements to the local editing tools stand in the way of being the clear cut choice as the very best RAW converter in the world at any price), the marketing can start now. DxO does need to decide who and what they are, to whom they are marketing though and where they plan to spend their limited resources. A wrong step with software development (huge DAM effort, stagnating local edit tools, neglecting to keep up with the latest lenses) could quickly (within a year or two) make Photo Lab uncompetitive in any market.
Key Competitor: Capture One
You mentioned Capture One - Capture One are a clear competitor occupying the same mindspace (best RAW converter at any price, also European, also premium priced). Capture One offer tethering which is well reviewed (I haven’t tried it so I don’t have an opinion) which DxO does not have. This is a bit of an issue. A partnership with whomever competes on tethering may be in order.
Capture One’s DAM and workflow I do not look at as an asset. I hate Capture One’s cataloguing features. Phase One also shuttered DAM tool Media Pro after seven years of very poor management of Media Pro. Phase One Media Pro performs worse in 2018 than it did as iView Media Pro 3 in 2006.
This was supposed to be a night off. May the heavens smile kindly on DxO and DxO Photo Lab!