That’s from an email I received from DxO today. Quite why they’re trying to sell me anything is a bit of a mystery considering I own the latest versions of PL, FP, and VP.
I looked at those bolded phrases and I thought I could certainly get behind the last two. 100%. The one-time purchase? Kinda. Maybe I’ll get behind that 75%. Moving from Lightroom? Here I’m falling well below the 50% mark.
I would, for some time now, have said LR’s Library module is far more powerful than PL’s, but I concede that for most people, PL’s is quite functional.
But recently, I have been trying to up my game with my wildlife photos (hey, I live in New Zealand where we only have two native mammals and they’re both bats, so let’s say bird photos). The techniques I have been learning have been taught on LR with a caveat “you can probably apply these same techniques to whatever software you’re using.” This is almost true.
Because a core part of the techniques involves masking. A bright yellow finch on a simple stick against a clean, green background? That’s pretty easily achievable in PL. Less so if there are multiple colours (often including black and white) against a varied background.
Control Points and Lines are great. I’ve used them a lot. I have also fairly often struggled with them and had to fall back to manual painting. But in PL, manual painting is just that. You’re in control with little-to-no help. Even Auto-brush relies on some fairly clear delineation. And, although I’ve not done brush masks for a while in PL, my memory was they are not terribly responsive once a significant amount of brush strokes are done.
Contrasting this to LR, I click “select subject” and a good proportion of the time it’s at least 80% accurate. So sure, it reasonably often needs editing, but even brushing in LR is more responsive and functional. Adding brushwork to a generated mask is simple, especially with easy access to “un-painting” that only affects your previous brush strokes. But you can also use object select very often to do the work for you.
So yes, sometimes there are quite a few steps to get the mask required, but they are easy steps to perform. Contrast this to a mass of Control Points, always needing negative points to stop spillover, and it just does not compare.
I see Control Point masks in the same role as gradients. They are area masks, not object masks, which is what these wildlife techniques use.
I do also miss some of the PL sliders. LR’s Clarity and Texture are decent, but not quite up to what PL’s (or rather FP’s) fine contrast sliders can do. Then again… if I want to apply clarity to the whites or highlights… there are masks for that.
There’s a fairly deep irony in this post. Not so long ago, others here were claiming AI masks (such as those in LR) were needed in PL and I claimed they were largely useless, based on my limited testing of “very easy” examples (such as a white helicopter against a clear blue sky) which weren’t “one shot” correct. I was wrong.
What changed is that I’ve seen the use cases for AI masks as a really good starting point that is somewhat often the whole task. Use cases that I desire to use.
Boiling it down, I think LR is leaps ahead on masking “things”. I do, however, have a real hard time passing up the initial RAW conversion offered by DxO Modules. Plus, of course, noise reduction.
As an experiment, I recently tried to recreate one of my LR edits purely in PL. I failed miserably because of the masks required. I then tried to recreate one of my older PL edits in LR without using PL at all. That also failed badly on account of the basic image quality, which was pedestrian at best.
I’ve considered whether I should simply ditch PL and get PR instead. At the moment, already owning the PL license, plus FP and VP (which, honestly, I probably wouldn’t miss 98% of the time) says the value proposition in switching to PR is a little hard to justify unless I am completely jumping out of PL. Also… right this minute… I don’t have a LR-native capability for one small PL feature a lot of people probably don’t use, but that I use for every photo I publish… per-photo watermarks. LR’s capability is archaic. If I could figure out how to make it easier in LR (I want to fine tune every watermark for base colour, placement, and transparency) then it might be the final push to PR.
Unless… PL9 ups the game. I’m not aware of planned features this year (though I have a sense of one which may be coming), but if they do not include better masking options, I may, for the first time since I discovered PL3, sit this one out. I’d still get upgrade pricing from PL8 to PL10, so that’s two versions to win me over.
All because hard-edged masks are a pain in PL.
So when DxO ask “Are you tired of paying every month for software that doesn’t deliver?” I’d like to reframe the question. “Are you tired of paying a large yearly lump sum for infrequent updates?” And honestly, LR has been delivering new functionality often. Some of it is catch-up, but, well, PL has catch-up to do as well.
