GioDoe

Self portraits in a mirror with the face behind the camera

I have lost count of how many times I have corrupted cards and ssd drives when connecting them directly to my iphone. I have repaired the file system and reformatted, then they are as good as new. That connection is so slow and bad that one can consider a miracle when it works without issues.

The only circumstances in which I do care about ISO are those in which I am using a tripod on a stationary subject. In all other cases limiting ISO means not getting a shot. I can still delete the image later, if I cannot clean it. Noise can often be cleaned, blur not so much.

This said, there is such a variety of photographers around here that it is quite a futile exercise to generalise topics like this.

Photoshop aside, which has been already suggested, you can try (without raising your hope too much) Lightroom's resolution enhancement feature or Topaz Labs Megapixel AI.

I found a guaranteed way of increasing my share of keepers. I only calculate the share after culling out 1.9k of the 2k images I bring back from a birding session. This way I managed to raise my game from 0.5% to 10% of decent shots..

I am not paying Adobe for the community support, I did not make myself clear. I am taking advantage of the fact that Adobe has a huge user base, therefore it is a lot easier to get help for very specific issues.

I could save the monthly fee by using some other software (assuming that there is one that suits my needs, which is not the case), but I would have to waste a much longer time to look for answers/help/howto guides because a smaller user base means that specific issues might not have been encountered/solved by others.

The community is exactly what I referred to. The reality is that such community is often an order of magnitude larger around well established products, regardless of whether they are sold or are free (often they are commercial products, think MS Office for example).

Moreover, nobody said that you should buy something that you do not need. That would be coercion indeed. I would not pay 1 quid, let alone 10, if I did not need Lightroom.

I do not feel forced in the slightest when I pay my 10 euro a month (I actually pay a lot more than that for the full suite) when such money makes me do the work in 10% or less of the time I would need with alternative products.

Why would you lose decades of digital images?

Ever tried to open a file that was made with an application only running on a computer that was last made 30+ years ago, or to read a medium for which the last reader was seen in the wild 20 years ago? Digital files are volatile, they can be lost for many reasons (backup is not a "forever" solution in the digital world).

Adobe is the least of my concerns in this regard. Besides, are you aware that many of the most common file formats, often including the ones used by backup applications, are proprietary or were developed by those big companies that are considered as evil? It is funny, isn't it, that many of the tools that are supposed to bring our digital possessions into the eternity are proprietary? Ever use TIFFs in your image management workflow? PDF in your daily life? Not to mention raw files made by cameras, a format that easily disappears ten years after it was introduced or less?

'Support' is a con.

In my book support is also the fact that one can count on a huge knowledge base, which means that every time I have an issue, I can count on someone else having had it before me, and possibly many others having found a solution for it. In my professional experience this is an invaluable difference between using widespread software compared to more niche alterrnatives.

like Blender and Unity are free to use.

Last I heard, Unity has introduced substantial fees for developers.

There is hardly any technology that will accompany us for the whole life. I would be more worried about losing decades of digital images simply because of a technology shift, than to be enslaved by Adobe in using their tools for the rest of my life.

BTW, when the sort of money I pay monthly for LR will become an issue, I have about half a dozen similarly priced subscriptions to get rid of first, which are far less useful to me.

Same here. Professionally I have been (and still am) an Adobe suite user for 20+ years and an MS Office user for 30+.

I can't remember for how long I had to stick with the same feature set whilst reading of how fantastic and time saving were some newer tools that I could not afford, because at best I could upgrade once every 5-7 years.

Most of the reasons I am sticking with both suites of software are identical, and none of them is being a fan of either these companies.