“Fixing” What Ain’t Broke

I am often confounded by the software industry tweaking something out of usefulness, and the upgrades that Adobe is making to its Lightroom software may be just that. I’m willing to see where it goes, of course. But since mine apparently upgrades itself, this morning, when I wanted to get something done and move on, I had to deal with some unfortunate issues with the latest and greatest version of Adobe Lightroom CC (2015).

If you’re using Lightroom CC and you’ve deliberately or accidentally upgraded to the latest version, here is a link to instructions to go back to the last version of the software (CC 6, I believe). Lightroom is a great piece of photo-editing software, but it appears that rather than keeping this a high-end, usable program for photographers, Adobe is trying to cater to the mobile photographer set. To that end, they’ve dumbed it down, ostensibly so the learning curve is less steep. Unfortunately, in doing that, they’re eliminating useful things I, and many other users, have come to depend on. That said, I imagine we’ll eventually get used to that. The problem now is that several things in the upgrade just don’t work, although they’re supposed to. They’re things that are not being eliminated, just changed, I think.

So, if you use this great software and want to continue to use it until the engineers get the kinks worked out, downgrade. It’s so cool that you actually can, and it’s even more amazing how simple it is! I used the instructions in this article—Install a previous version of any Creative Cloud application—to do just that. It’s very easy, and I’m back up and running with what works.

One of my issues was importing. I imported all my pictures, but somehow Lightroom didn’t show all the pictures I thought I had imported. I could see that some I had shot were missing, and Lightroom said I had 20 more to import, but when I went to find the 20 missing ones, I couldn’t import them because Lightroom said they were already imported. In CC 6 (I think was the latest before this upgrade), I could tell it to ignore suspected duplicates or I could uncheck that box. Nowhere in the new import window could I find such an option. I also checked out all the Preferences panel (may be called something else on a Windows machine).

I then found I was now unable to copy from one picture to another, settings that worked for the type of picture I was working on. You know, if you make adjustments to the exposure, temperature, highlight, shadow, white, and black sliders, for instance, you can then copy those setting and apply them to the next similar photo by clicking on the “paste” button. That wasn’t working today.

Anyway, if you’re using Lightroom CC, and have any of these issues (or others), the answer for you may be to downgrade. It worked for me.

Here are a few of the pictures I was trying to work on. I took a walk in Downtown Grand Junction yesterday with my camera. Colors are great, but in Grand Junction, we’re getting almost to the end of color season. Leaves are falling off trees, and there’s less to shoot. I got a few that I liked and here they are.

BOO!