this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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Photography
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I honestly don’t understand the hate for Adobe.
Is it the subscription model? Ya… business is business. Please suggest a better model that funds software development consistently. I hated it initially, but like not having to buy and install updates all the time.
Is it the performance of the tool? Usability? These are both great to me…
I mean you get what you pay for, more or less. There are other good tools out there, but nothing that is way better all-around that I’ve seen.
Because it will cost people £120 a year for the rest of their lives to use it? Software shouldn't be subscription, it's an enormous con.
Lightroom and Photoshop are absolutely best of class applications, and if you have subscribed, you get endless support for them.
What do you expect ?? All that awesome development and free support for no cost?
As others have said, I remember when Photoshop (by itself) was £600 - and I bought it. Subsequent updates were cheaper, but it was the equivalent of many years of subscription now. I would much rather pay £9 per month now, get two apps (LR and PS), have endless support, and have pretty much the best software there is.
Also, My use of Adobe software earns me much more than it costs. If you make money from your use of some tool, how is it a con to have to pay for it??
'Support' is a con. You can't tell me they chose subscription for any other reasons than capitalistic greed.
I still use a pirate copy of photoshop 7, so I'm not interested in fancier versions. I'd use a basic Lightroom forever, I'm not interested in 'support'.
Students can not afford an extra £120 a year that easily, adobe want to allow professionals to gain an advantage.
£600 isn't reasonable either. A lot of the lightroom alternatives are £50-£200.
Far more complex software like Blender and Unity are free.
In my book support is also the fact that one can count on a huge knowledge base, which means that every time I have an issue, I can count on someone else having had it before me, and possibly many others having found a solution for it. In my professional experience this is an invaluable difference between using widespread software compared to more niche alterrnatives.
If the support is coming from the community, why am I paying Adobe for it?
I am not paying Adobe for the community support, I did not make myself clear. I am taking advantage of the fact that Adobe has a huge user base, therefore it is a lot easier to get help for very specific issues.
I could save the monthly fee by using some other software (assuming that there is one that suits my needs, which is not the case), but I would have to waste a much longer time to look for answers/help/howto guides because a smaller user base means that specific issues might not have been encountered/solved by others.
Support can come from the community though, and i don't remotely need it to edit photos, i use 1% of lightroom, turn b&w, use sliders, that's it. It's the basic photo processing i want, not the billions of options I'll never use. I don’t even know what 'support' means for photography. I get videogame engines because they're extremely complicated.
The community is exactly what I referred to. The reality is that such community is often an order of magnitude larger around well established products, regardless of whether they are sold or are free (often they are commercial products, think MS Office for example).
Moreover, nobody said that you should buy something that you do not need. That would be coercion indeed. I would not pay 1 quid, let alone 10, if I did not need Lightroom.
I do not feel forced in the slightest when I pay my 10 euro a month (I actually pay a lot more than that for the full suite) when such money makes me do the work in 10% or less of the time I would need with alternative products.
What else should they do? I am genuinely curious
Er i dunno just sell a purchase copy once? I know we live in an ultra capitalistic world full of extreme greed, people don't have to be cheerleaders for it. Especially when it's the leading art software company who have chosen to lock out a lot of creatives who can't afford it.
More complex videogame engine programs like Blender and Unity are free to use.
Last I heard, Unity has introduced substantial fees for developers.
Yeah developers. When you sell a game. Anyone can download it and use it. I'm not selling any photo on lightroom. I have no business, it's a hobby.
Videogame engines are different, but the principle remains to use basic unity it's free.
This is their students and hobbyists Unity on their website:
Latest version of the core Unity Platform
Free assets to accelerate projects
Resources to get started and learn Unity
Obviously I've heard about Unity recently charging obscene amounts but it revolves around sales. It doesn't cost anyone a penny to download Unity and make a game, once you try to put it on a console and sell it it's different.
You mean like capture one? Or do you mean you should have access to all future updates as well?
There is hardly any technology that will accompany us for the whole life. I would be more worried about losing decades of digital images simply because of a technology shift, than to be enslaved by Adobe in using their tools for the rest of my life.
BTW, when the sort of money I pay monthly for LR will become an issue, I have about half a dozen similarly priced subscriptions to get rid of first, which are far less useful to me.
Why would you lose decades of digital images? Only if Adobe fix it so you rely on them. All i want from a photography edit program is to bring in photos, edit them, save them into my own folder, done. I don’t want Adobe to make a digital copy that's saved in their cloud 'so i can access it on another computer'. Because it just means i can't access that photo when I'm offline and spending time in my campervan i am often offline. I'd copy the photo, rename it, still couldn't open it again to edit. It's nice being to able to go through hundreds of photos sat there unfinished in lightroom but that's it.
But that's a shit system designed to trap you into Adobe. I have photo, i open photo in program, i edit photo, i save photo into my desired folder on my computer, that's it, that's all i want.
I don't think £10 a month is value for money at all, at least something like Netflix will put new films and tv up they've financed. With Lightroom I'm paying for access, that's all. I use 1% of it.
Ever tried to open a file that was made with an application only running on a computer that was last made 30+ years ago, or to read a medium for which the last reader was seen in the wild 20 years ago? Digital files are volatile, they can be lost for many reasons (backup is not a "forever" solution in the digital world).
Adobe is the least of my concerns in this regard. Besides, are you aware that many of the most common file formats, often including the ones used by backup applications, are proprietary or were developed by those big companies that are considered as evil? It is funny, isn't it, that many of the tools that are supposed to bring our digital possessions into the eternity are proprietary? Ever use TIFFs in your image management workflow? PDF in your daily life? Not to mention raw files made by cameras, a format that easily disappears ten years after it was introduced or less?
I remember editing softwares like LR and PS and others being well over $1000 before the subscriptions came out. I’m personally more than happy to pay the monthly fee for the full use of the Adobe suite and they constantly push out updates that you used to have to wait 3-4 years to get.
Same here. Professionally I have been (and still am) an Adobe suite user for 20+ years and an MS Office user for 30+.
I can't remember for how long I had to stick with the same feature set whilst reading of how fantastic and time saving were some newer tools that I could not afford, because at best I could upgrade once every 5-7 years.
Most of the reasons I am sticking with both suites of software are identical, and none of them is being a fan of either these companies.
We used to exchange R1 for $1. Now it is 20 to 1. So paying per month is just too expensive.
When R1 was $1, a meal at a restaurant with your family might cost R50
Now a meal with your family can cost R1000.
It is the value of your currency that has changed, not the value of the software.
And that is why we cannot afford it. Unless you are doing very well in your photography field, these extra costs simply drain your bank balance.
Exchange R1? I have no idea what you are saying
South Africa: One Rand for one Dollar.
How do you expect the rest of the world to “just know” that R1 is Rand?
Off topic, but that’s just as much a problem with the ignorance of the “rest of the world” as it is OP’s harmless assumption
Perhaps, but one can't expect to know the nicknames of every currency in the world, and what the exchange rates are vs. every other currency, etc. OP could have said that they were from SA, and that was one of the things driving their decision.
This is why it's useful to use standard abbreviations for currencies (ISO 4217). For the South African Rand, it's ZAR.
disappointed it's not R&