Mt Spokane Photography said:
There is a trick to use for editing raw images for non supported cameras. Raw images are all basically tiff images with some added flags, and then rolled into a wrapper. Canon uses lossless compression to make the file smaller, it expands to full size when opened to edit.
Canon DPP can convert the raw image into a tiff file that can be edited in any version of photoshop or lightroom. You can convert a single image, or batch convert a entire folder of images. You won't gain any new features added to Lightroom, but you can use the method to convert and edit images from new cameras into the forseeable future. You can also convert Raws to DNG files, which are also tiff files in a wrapper, and there are compression options as well.
So, its a additional step, but not a show stopper for those who want perpetual use of LR6.
The show stopper will come when Apple and / or Windows stops supporting LR6. That has already happened with older LR versions.
DNGs are actually good because you can use them with Xright Colorchecker, AND there's a convenient (and free!) Adobe tool that can painlessly batch process your photos from CR2 to DNG. It's even pretty fast.
The problem with DNG (or TIFF) in lightroom, though, is if you're stuck in an old version of Lightroom, you have no new camera or lens support -- so you'd be manually correcting the vignetting on your new 5DSR Mark II and 200-600 f/4-5.6L IS that you got next year
TBH, if I didn't want to spend on Lightroom subscription, I'd just say screw it and use DPP. The only thing that I really miss in DPP is dehazing and Colorchecker (and third party lenses). It's kind of slow for some things, too, but I'd live.
But hey, it's
free and will forever support all Canon bodies and lenses. Plus, it's excellent for culling, IMO, which is what I really like Lightroom for. And on the plus side, there's no catalog to worry about; everything is in XMPs that are easy to shuffle around.
To put on the other shoe, the real reason I started using Lightroom was probably because I get it free with both creative cloud (the full suite) and Photoshop + LR. I can't get out of at least 1 subscription of each -- I need 3 activations of Photoshop, and I absolutely must have InDesign and Illustrator at work and home, because people send me files in those formats. So the logic a while back was, "I might as well use it".