The news while I was offline…
- Adobe raised Creative Cloud pricing for many. Fortunately not for the Photography Plan. That’s because they’re now starting to see real competition trying to lock into the Lightroom/Photoshop target, where a price increase might lose them customers to competitors. No, Adobe’s price increase was a mostly greedy move targeted mostly at those that don’t have a lot of alternative choices, in particular, the full suite users. Adobe’s own wording gave that away: "To reflect the increased value that we have already delivered to our members…” If that were true, then they need to explain why much of that same added value was given to other members whose price wasn’t raised ;~). The approximately 10% price increase comes immediately after the company posted a record-setting quarter with 13% growth. I’m sure the shareholders are temporarily thrilled. A better solution for Adobe would have been to simply add a price for all the things they added (mostly regenerative AI, Express, Firefly, and the Denoise function): stay on your old plan and do without the new goodies, pay more for a plan with them. That, of course, would risk showing that the new items aren’t as popular or as necessary as they want you to believe. I’m betting that next year the Photography Plan will go up in price. Adobe is like the the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. It wants to be fed.
- macOS updated. Apple has a fairly rigorous policy of only providing updates (e.g. security fixes) for the most recent three versions of macOS. As of September 28, those versions are Monterrey, Ventura, and Sonora. For those of using ealier macOS variants, you need to know that Big Sur, Catalina, and the others that came before are no longer being updated for things that are known active threats. Should you be one of those holding onto an older macOS version, you should be running additional protection (e.g. Netbarrier) and avoiding that machine for the most common threat vectors (email and Internet browsing). The problem, of course, is that Big Sur and Monterrey, in particular, made some big changes that a lot of software relies upon. Thus, if you’re using software that can’t be updated to the new APIs, you’d lose it if you moved to one of the newer macOS versions.
- New products were introduced at IBC, the European media show. Atomos showed the 8K Shoguns. Blackmagic Design introduced an L-mount 6K version of its Cinema Camera, two updates to the m4/3 Studio cameras, and most interesting, an iOS video camera app that provides extensive abilities on its own but also integrates really well with DaVinci Resolve. Canon introduced their CN-R cinema lenses for the RF mount. Sony showed the new 8.6K Burano video camera with the FE mount.
- DxO introduced PhotoLab 7, which includes a raft of features and improvements in how the product manages color (and black and white). On the one hand, the changes don’t seem as dramatic as adding a new feature like AI-aided noise reduction, but on the other hand these changes now allow new ways to work with and standardize color in your images. You can even calibrate directly within the product if the image has a standardized color checker chart in it.
