Black Friday 2022- Has Started

[quote=“MrFixit, post:6, topic:29716”]
Despite Adobe’s subscription model - which many appear to hate on principle - I have stayed with LrC / PS as I they continue to offer significant enhancements (e.g., masking - no doubt because of competition) so I see real value from my monthly payments.[/quote]

DxO have semi-officially adopted a subscription model anyway. Updates are about once per year, most typically in the autumn, and come with an upgrade price if you’re upgrading from the most previous version … which would be one year old.

If you opt to skip, then you will be stuck with the full price “upgrade” because you will now be two versions (or more) behind.

To avoid falling in the trap of upgrades and subscriptions, you have to keep the same product for about three years, and I imagine probably only about 15-20% of all users are in that pattern.

Not necessarily.
You can skip once.
Which means you can upgrade every two years.
I have upgraded from PL4 to PL6. Nevertheless even after two years I had to wait for B.F. because those improvements didn’t justify 99$.
And it’s not the money, it’s the principal of what do you get for your payment…
Today I bought the Topaz photo AI for 159$ (plus DeNoise Sharpen and Gigapixel) I was more satisfied with this purchase than the dxo upgrade for 69$ !

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Wrong. The way intra-European commerce works is that if you have a valid VAT number in one jurisdiction, another European company is obliged to sell to you without the VAT. The reason is that it’s literally impossible for the Slovak tax authorities to claim back VAT from the French tax authorities. So the EU settled on VAT checks and deduction at source.

On the other hand, for my purchases within Slovakia a company definitely pays VAT and claims it back.

In any case, DxO is more or less violating EU law here and stealing their customers’ money. Seems to be a bit of a trend as I have been flabbergasted by DxO’s behaviour as described on some of the refund and upgrade threads. It’s as if someone on the commercial/marketing side would like their loyal users to loathe the company. I wish DxO would handle their customers with more care. The software would sell itself and happy customers would sell the software.

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Here are the VAT rules for software in the EU: The Ultimate Guide to EU VAT for Digital Taxes

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Have you sent DxO support or sales a question regarding this?
What was their response if so?

Yes.

What was their response if so?

We don’t care and are closing the ticket. I should have reported DxO to the EU tax authorities last year. But I naively keep hoping that the commercial department would sort itself out and stop with the customer alienation policies. Two years in a row, now I’m really annoyed.

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That’s sad news to hear.
I fully understand your frustration.

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PhotoLab has been fine with the lenses that I have thrown its way. The lens correction is not limited to distortion, but also includes sharpness, which I appreciate.

That’s right, but a sharp yet distorted image will need additional manual work which then takes all the other lens profile corrections back to default. Plus, I have a couple of lenses without profile, and no, I don’t check compatibility tables of RAW converters before I buy a new lens. But what I check is: Can the RAW converter use manufacturer profiles instead home grown ones? PL can’t so I went back to C1 and keep PL for images in need for massive noise correction. It’s no longer my main app.

The reason/source for lens profiles is that the manufacturer opted for design compromises, right? So, who should clean up the distortion? I don’t see RAW converter companies as responsible for lens flaws.

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Thanks for the clarification.

You’re right Alec and from the time you filled with your VAT ID into your DXO profile, automatically you should have been billed without VAT. It’s a EU legal rule between two regular registered EU companies.

About upgrading this year for PL6, I am also really thinking twice about it. Less discount during this Black Friday, few improvement that did not justify a new version. Still lack of some basic features asked for a long time and so many times… No “woooaww” effect !
And last but not least, for 21€ more (Black Friday Amazon) , I can subscribe for one year to Lightroom + Photoshop + Bridge !

PhotoLab gives really a good flavour to our pictures but the way we work, the ressources it requires (heavy GPU for Deeprime, local retouches, not optimized for Quadro) , and the so many bugs and lags just leaves a bitter taste.

Finally, thinking we would escape the Adobe subscription system, we unwillingly signed up for another one year after year. The promise was not respected !

I don’t like shouting with wolves but this time I hope that the DXO board and marketing would notice all those defections and complaints as the submit of a grievance book to getting back on track.

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I’m another one who is not tempted, even with BF discounts, to update my version of Photolab this year.

Last year the prospect of the PL5 code being optimised for the Apple M1 CPU was tempting enough to make me update from PL4, but this year’s release doesn’t bring me enough to justify parting with my cash.

Although the crop tool being able to rotate too is tempting, I feel that such implementation should have been included ages ago and isn’t reason enough to pay for on its own!

Same here. Upgrade and support them in the hope there will be in the next year, for me, better or new tools or stay at PL5 Elite and wait and see?

Or maybe looking to another raw-converter witch support also my iPhone ProRaw files.

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Well, I decided to pass on PL6. I would rather that DXO fixed all the problems and addressed the requests from their customers for PL5.

My software budget for this year was used to buy Topaz Sharpen AI.

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