I would guess that the new users who are complaining are new because, like me, they had a sudden problem with Photolab and joined the forum seeking help. Any new problem with a product is going to drive new people to join related forums.
“Inflammatory” lies in the eye of the beholder. I haven’t said anything a reasonable person would consider inflammatory.
I have had Photolab for two months, and it ran fine until I received the update. It gave me Windows Security warnings which appear to have ceased. It also crashed repeatedly, especially when using denoising. A number of times, the entire monitor screen has gone completely black, and I had to bang on the keys until I could get a screen that allowed me to sign out of Windows.
I notice that there was a long thread last year from beta users, having what look like similar problems.
I tried a number of suggestions to fix Photolab, but as of the time I posted here, nothing had worked, and I was fed up. I assumed DxO had employees monitoring this forum, as is customary with corporate forums, and I also thought there had to be other people who had posted about similar issues and received responses, so this is where I came.
Yesterday on the DxO site, after coming here, I found a suggestion about changing the settings on my swap file, so I did that last night, and since then, I have not had any problems. I don’t know if this is a permanent fix or not.
As for Lightroom, I chose Photolab over it because it seemed to me that Photolab was generally superior, and the difference in noise reduction tools was extreme, so Photolab would allow me to shoot at higher ISO’s. I was considering adding Lightroom because it appears to do a much better job with skin problems, and I regularly photograph someone who has been having breakouts. When Photolab started driving me crazy, it gave me added motivation to add Lightroom, since I didn’t know when the Photolab bugs would be fixed.
Now I am planning to use one program for skin and the other for everything else.
