About 8 months ago, my external 8TB hard drive started making the dreaded click of death when it was plugged in and doing data transfer indicating that imminent failure was probable. Guess they don’t make hard drives like they used to, wait, rewind that, they still make them like they used to: they still fail enough that RAID and a backup strategy is a good idea.

Fortunately for me, Costco had a rebate on their Seagate 6TB external which the sale price per GB bought it down to what I paid for the 8TB, but I hadn’t remotely filled it yet. The drive came bundled with 2 months of Adobe subscription though. Well, I said to myself, sure, why not? I loaded it up but didn’t give it my credit card to charge beyond the 2 months; I had no intent of renewing as I’m not a believer in renting software. I’m still not by the way, but, Adobe does have some nice products.

Rewind a bit, my last encounter with Adobe was CS3 in which I clocked a good 40-50 hours of professional training to learn to use Photoshop and did some pretty amazing things with it, but couldn’t stomach coughing up the couple hundred bucks at the time to renew to CS4 and instead choose to go with SOOC JPEGs and Canon’s own DPP3 and then DPP4 after that with very good results.

That said, I had another encounter between Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom CC: The Canon PowerShot G1X II.

The Powershot G1X II was notorious for overexposing and thus blowing out highlights in addition to having poor dynamic range in which to attempt to recover those blown highlights. That was my first time really wringing RAW files for everything I could. At that time I was using the free Canon DPP3 and then Canon DPP4 after, which DPP4 improved highlight recovery significantly. But I still wasn’t happy with the results or having to wring every other shot for that matter; it took all the fun out of shooting. I ended up selling the PowerShot G1X II due to its limitations including sensor performance and metering consistency.

The EOS M series I had after it was spot on with metering by comparison, and the RAW files had more latitude, but, I rarely needed to process them due to the accurate metering; SOOC JPEGs were just fine again.

Fast forward to present; I’ve gone back to those G1X II files over time with better post technique with improved results but still nothing consistently reproducible without substantial effort. That is till Lightroom CC.

Photoshop's auto levels was impressive back then, but it’s ability to fix the G1X II files was very impressive being able to do a better job than I could by hand and with consistent reproductive quality. I found in easily 90% of the images when auto corrections and levels are used with the vivid profile, the results are good enough I might’ve kept the G1X II if I’d had Lightroom CC at the time and may have even paid the monthly subscription for it.

I figured with the success I had with the G1X II RAWs, I’d try the EOS M3, M5, 5D III and my existing Powershot G1X III RAWs as well.

I quickly found the newer the camera, the less helpful Lightroom CC was. In my opinion this is attributable to improved metering by Canon and possibly reduced optimization from Adobe as I noted Adobe's hay day seemed to peek around 2014, at least in my observations of the perceptions of others toward Adobe. Whereas Lightroom CC's auto corrections for the G1X II was about 90% "success rate" in substantially improving results, by the EOS M3 it was down to 50% (with in some cases it would make the shot worse, not better), and by the EOS M5 it was good for fixing images needing fixing, but otherwise provided much smaller gains to general images if you will through automated levels and correction (and also in many cases made the shots worse, thus limiting it to fix images in need of fixing only duty if that makes sense).

I did by coincidence have excellent success with providing modest but definite improvement to my recent PowerShot G1X III files for print on my also new Canon Pixma G4210 Megatank printer; the results were large enough to justify the subscription, but I print in spurts making the subscription more suitable for rent as needed, not ongoing use.

I do like the streamlined interface of the new Lightroom CC and excellent hardware acceleration support. It made quick work of batch conversions on my old 2014 15” MacBook Pro and it was easy to pick up and work with immediately with little workflow tweaks.

Overall I’m left impressed with the new Lightroom CC, but quickly hit the 20GB limit, which I have no use for cloud storage so I just ran it over, made my tweaks, converted the RAWs with tweaks to JPEG and deleted from the CC library and repeated.

Will I be renewing? Depends. I just picked up the EOS M50 (and returned for the R in the time I’ve been working on this), which is DIGIC8 equipped which supports both D+ ALO and on the fly DLO corrections meaning it’ll need corrections the least probably. I don’t plan to ditch the PowerShot G1X III as there's time's I'll want to go out sans-lens setup, but how often do I plan to print from it? We’ll see, it’s definitely an efficient batch post processor but, Adobe's color isn’t exactly my favorite vs Canon profiles so it’s not quite a slam dunk to say yes or no yet. However things have come a long ways and it's impressive to say the least. Too bad there isn't a traditional ownership model anymore.