I am really thinking about upgrading from lightroom 5 to lightroom 6. The cost is $79. Has anyone else upgraded to version 6? Is it worth the money? I am referring to the standalone version, not the creative cloud as I have no need for any of the creative cloud services.
I upgraded but did so because of the CC services. Having access to certain collections on my iDevices and online so I can pick/reject, rate, and develop from anywhere is convenient for me. Plus, now I have a legal copy of Photoshop... Other than that, the upgrades are not mind blowing. If you do HDR or panoramas its nice to do so without a trip to Photoshop. The performance is supposed to be better with some of the processing offloaded to the GPU but my MacBook Pro has a fairly low end card so I don't see much of a performance gain. My advice may be to go for it for the $79, especially if you despise the subscription model like so many. The next version may not offer anything other than the subscription model.
I bought it but haven't had time to play with it yet. I agree with Dave, if you want to avoid the subscription stuff for as long as possible, this might be your last chance to upgrade. That's why I bought Photoshop CS6 last year.
It really is funny how taboo the word subscription is, especially given how for $120 a year you get both Lightroom and Photoshop and all of the online and cloud stuff. Weird.
The idea of paying a reasonable amount to rent the software isn't bad. However, I've seen the originator of the subscription service, Autodesk, go from a innovative company that turned out good products every other year to a company that now turns out products on an annual basis that are at best on a beta test level because they have no incentive to do better since they have everyone locked into a subscription. That guaranteed cashflow also allowed them to purchase their competitors, further reducing any incentive they had left. Hopefully Adobe doesn't fall into the same trap. I prefer the previous model of purchasing a perpetual license for a single version of the software because it forces the software company to continue to come up with substantial improvements with each release even when competitors aren't present.
Pro photographers that get over $50,000 or more in the photography business are using Lightroom. Yeah I would buy and use Lightroom 6 too. I hope the RAW rendering is faster in 6 version... Lightroom is not just for hobby. It is a full professional photography app that is used by photography proffecionals around the world. Im going to buy a macphun editor too (its nice tools for hdr i need)
