The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
theverge.comI bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 and $2,500 adjusted for inflation if you still trust the BLS' CPI calculations.
If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.
We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.
> You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3.
Were you able to get the DRM-free “offline” CS3 installers during the time they were offered? I will cherish mine forever lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24865636
Still using Photoshop CS3 for my daily image-editing needs in Windows 11 on my Framework Laptop 12. Mostly cleaning up album art for my music library metadata and cleaning up my flatbed scans (removing damaged spots, fixing UV fade, hiding the glare from the scanner passing a horizontal light over something that has been creased for years (like a DVD/BD case sleeve), etc.
No. I have a copy of Flash CS3 for helping with archival efforts or digging into Skyrim and Fallout 4 when friends ask though. As far as I know it's the last version that accepts all three versions of Actionscript.
For regular, undiscounted prices the subscription prices were somewhat fair. Regular Photoshop CS5 was $700, or $1000 for the extended version. And $200 to upgrade. Now it's a $300/year subscription.
But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student
At the CSU we had a deal for students to get the Adobe suite for $20 per semester. At certain CSU’s it’s now free for every student.
CSU is the California State University system.
You're not wrong, but students often have to spend more than $300 per semester (not year) just on textbooks.
There is a massive amount of criticism around textbook pricing, especially since they include licenses for the software you need to do your homework. Adobe and text book publishers are both inexcusably exploitative.
In my circles it is regular and routine for students to use an older edition, pirate, and/or use library copies. Many students literally can’t afford to buy the books at list price and find other ways to manage.
Why don't you ask the students how much they love doing that. I'm sure they'll have nothing but nice things to say.
I don't need to ask, I didn't love it when I was a student. I wasn't claiming that this is a good thing.
The fact that students are scammed in one area isn't a compelling argument for them to get scammed in others.
Textbooks cost more, therefore what?
course materials packages, lab books, lecture slides, published in house by the prof/instructor/lecturer.
or, someone in the cohort copies and disseminates from textbook[s].
copyrightist would have to put an investigator, in the institution to break it up, but ive never heard of that beyond monitoring library usage of photocopiers.
Only in America.
Oh no books cost money. Have you seen how much tuition is? To be in an old classroom and learn decades old math and English?
It's almost like I could drop out, work on campus and read books at the library for free. I just wasn't Good Looking Will Hunting.
age doesn't inherently make math less useful, and the parts it does affect it does non-uniformly.
i have undergone an undergrad differential equations module that taught exclusively ad-hoc methods for certain families of equation that no working mathematician needs to know since they were all subsumed into and superseded by computer algebra systems, but the subject i would enjoy replacing it with (generating functions) is similarly old in origin (perhaps even earlier, since Euler used most of the techniques that an undergrad class would cover before diffeqs were considered an object of study) but has happened to become more useful with the advent of CASes instead of less.
I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against paying companies for their software, but it is clear that the conflated subscription models/licenses have come at a cost to their reputation.
ProgeCAD seems to be a viable alternative lately. I have heard positive reviews from a perfectionist that does _a lot_ of telecom-related projects in it after years of AutoCAD.
I am surprised that patents (and not regulatory requirements) is what keeps autodesk alive in the field
We all love to hate on Adobe. But as a photographer my primary software tool is Lightroom. And I continue to use it despite its $120/year price and less-than-stellar cataloging subsystem because its photo editing features (it's primary mission) still exceed the capabilities of its competitors.
I don't see anyone else here talking about the huge strides that Adobe has taken in the past few years with their masking tools in particular. Adobe is still the leader at least in this segment because their tools are still the leaders functionally.
If competitors want to leapfrog Adobe, they're going to have to continue to innovate past Adobe in functionality, not just price. After all, that price isn't really that onerous: their photographer's suite (Lightroom and Photoshop) are together only $120 year. That's not free, but it's not so much that I'm willing to make my job as a photographer harder or less effective because of it.
$120 a year for professional use is dirt cheap. My daughter is a graphic design student and gets a free CC ride during her studies. If she would have to pay for the apps should would have a hard time.
What bothers me is that the school doesn't allow students using open source software. They're all locked in the closed ecosystem and keep their students in software jail too.
$120/year is cheap, but note that most of the other individual application plans cost at least as much as the $240 Lightroom/Photoshop bundle ($240/year for Acrobat Pro, $264/year each for Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, etc.).
This adds up quickly if you even ocassionally use more than a couple Adobe apps, especially as month-by-month pricing, where available, is considerably more expensive (e.g., $414 annualized for the $264/year products; not to be confused with the monthly pricing listed on the main page, which requires an annual commitment).
They also make it difficult to find the basic all-apps plan (Creative Cloud Standard) unless you know it exists, as the main pricing page[1] only lists a pricier plan (Creative Cloud Pro) that adds AI credits, web apps, and mobile apps and doesn't even mention the less expensive plan.
I am aware of the trap they set up. That's why I brothers me that the don't teach with FOSS in design schools. They'l do their studentes a favor. It's easier to switch from any FOSS alternative to Adobe cc than otherwise.
As a non-photographer, more of a hobby tinkerer type user that has used Adobe products for decades and has never even earned a single dollar off them or their derivatives, the prices are onerous and there's no license that matches my usage. That's my only complaint really. I dabble in all types of media for the fun of it. While I may only use a product occasionally, sometimes not even once a year, on occasion I want to animate, photoshop, edit video, audio, or they have a new app that I want to just tinker with (Firefly, etc). So I wish I could just pay some usage based rate that worked out reasonable on cost because when I look at my last ~10 years or so there's only about 100 hours a year I spend tinkering with these products. I don't think they care about people like me, but I think it's possible that I represent a pretty large potential market.
If you can afford it, that is wonderful. For those who either cannot afford it or who don't need its features, then be happy that the competition is stepping up. They get the software they need. You get the software you need.
I've never really understood why people insist that there can be only one or two products per software category, particularly when the category has a large enough customer base to support multiple products from multiple vendors.
no one is insisting there are can only be one or two products per category.
Rahter, at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month, that's two coffees, A MONTH!
I bought Affinity Photo at one point, when it was $50. Then I tried to use it for a work project where I needed to do a minor edit to 150 photos. I figured out how to do it but it's workflow was tedious. At 3 mins per photo it would have taken me 7.5 hours. I paid Adobe the $120 and got it done in 1.5hrs. Those 5 hours of my life were worth far more than the $120 I paid to Adobe.
I'm not saying you should buy Photoshop or Lightroom. Rather, I'm just making the point that spending money on a good solution should not be seen as a failure. Lightroom is designed around editing lots of photos. It has tons of batch processing features and it's UI is designed to make it easy to edit lots of photos in minimal time. I'm not saying there isn't a better design, maybe there is, but so far I haven't personally run into it so I stick with Lightroom because it gives me my life back. All for the price of 2 coffees a month
It’s not the $10/mo that bothers me. It’s the nature of essentially leasing the software.
Before it was a subscription, you bought a version and could use _that version_ in perpetuity, possibly with some number of well-defined upgrades.
If you didn’t want to upgrade, your software still worked. The value proposition of the software was clear.
Now I need to decide whether paying the subscription, possibly forever, is worth the value. This just feels bad.
Doesn't seem any worse than deciding whether paying a huge sum upfront is worth the value in the long run. The old way wasn't like that though, it was 90% of users pirating Adobe.
I don't pay for $5 coffee. I make my coffee at home, from my own grind, with just some half and half. Sure, I splurged and paid for maybe a $100 grinder or something, but that is being used for years, meaning the cost per cup is abysmal.
It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.
> It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.
What does this mean, exactly? "We" didn't normalize it. People sold it for that - because they also have to pay rent, labor, etc - and people said "sure, that works for me, especially since I like the coffee you're making, I'll likely hang out here a while vs getting something cheaper elsewhere."
You can still get cheaper elsewhere.
Nobody "normalized" that, it just happened. You could say it's weird that people didn't complain, but... well, they did? It's a cliche at this point. But for a lot of people it's cheap enough to be fine ($5 is not a life-changing amount to add into your savings even if you're avoiding it once a day). If you really think it's a ripoff and nonsensically high, open your own coffee shop to make a killing?
Hell, if someone comes out with a super-amazing Lightroom replacement I'd be more likely to move to that than I would be to start avoiding coffee shops. Even though I spend more money on the coffee than on Lightroom. But the most viable option I ever saw has been abandoned for over a decade and only ran on Macs in the first place.
Speaking from Australia (Melbourne, where coffee is a religion), I get a freshly brewed, freshly ground, "dialed in" every morning, double espresso from a barista that has qualifications to understand the best roast and best grind for the coffee.
AUD6 (USD4.50) is not a lot for all of that.
I agree. It's up there with prices as high as $100 being described as "less than the price of a good meal".
It is getting pretty hard for my family of four to go out and eat for less than $100, but we have food at home.
And I don't drink coffee, just water. Since software is priced as beverage equivalence, logically that means I should get software for free.
I hate to say it, but $5.00 seems cheap compared to the last time I bought a fancy coffee.
I think I'm pointing out that it tries to trivialize a cost, as if everyone is just spending $2000+ dollars on coffee a year. If your doing that, of course you can afford a measly $10.
You don't need to try to equate $10 to something. People know what $10 is.
And I agree - last time I got coffee, it was closer to $10. In a low COLA area, technically speaking.
> no one is insisting there are can only be one or two products per category.
Then maybe people are trying to convince themselves. All that I can really say is that a lot of people pipe up to defend the titans when alternatives are suggested.
> at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month
For some people $10 is nothing. For other people, it is significant. Even for those who can afford $10/month, all of those fees add up when you consider all of the software someone may want to use.
I disagree. For a long time, Adobe insisted it was the only product in the category: that's how we got here.
I'm not sure how what Adobe insists on is at all relevant.
Reality informs us that there have always been competitors in the field: GIMP, DarkTable, ACDSee, Luminar, and many others.
It's surely true that their existence has been pushing Adobe to improve. And the good news for everyone is that they have: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are improved products now, and so are those other competitors.
Inertia, wide use across various industries, and specific features not available in other products.
Basically, it's the Microsoft Office of print and visual media.
So what was Adobe supposed to do, make a worse product to give the other ones a chance?
That's not necessarily true, that they have to out innovate Adobe. There's an old aphorism that you can always displace an incumbent with a product if it's 80% as good, at 20% the cost of the incumbent product (ibm/ms, cable/netflix, etc). As adobe increases the price, that 20% gets easier to hit. I suspect (well hope) that we'll see this happen to a bunch of incumbents.
Way back when the only real LR competitor was Aperture. I moved to LR when Apple discontinued Aperture, though I really wish they hadn't. I've tried all the competitors multiple times but keep coming back to LR for my DSLR usage.
I switched to Capture One, which at least offers perpetual licensing, but their pricing has become sufficiently annoying that I plan to look very closely at DaVinci Resolve's new photography features as soon as I have time (I already use Resolve for video and have a paid license for it, and in fact have have considered using it for photography in the past because it has a much better UI for nondestructive editing than any image editor I've seen).
Apple being an off and on competitor in the space was always strange.
They failed to commit, and often let their tools languish, despite the following. Odd.
Apple moved into the space when Adobe's willingness to support the Mac faltered during the transition from classic MacOS to OSX.
Once Adobe finally committed to supporting the new platform, it wasn't as necessary anymore.
I’m referring to later things like the macpro and aperture.
Eh, Lightroom didn't exist when Apple released Aperture. OS X had been well supported for a couple years at that point, and Apple never went for Photoshop directly.
It's even weirder cause some of it was self-inflicted from making Macs very unfriendly to GPUs in various ways.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/...
Try this out, free too
Even as a not pro user who used Lightroom mainly for cataloguing and light retouche (+ panorama stitching ), I found Lightroom much better than the concurrence.
In open source the closest tool for my usage is digikam but the interface is incredibly clunky and last time I tested the tools were subpar compared to Lightroom.
I'm having hope that immich could fit the bill but If the fact it's web based has a lot of advantages, I'm afraid the ergonomics and performance will not be enough
How are you paying $120/year for the Photography bundle? It's been $20/mo for at least a year now, I think. $30/mo if you're going truly month-to-month.
You can call/chat to them and get a discounted annual plan. Also, there's usually a 50% off black friday deal you can buy on Amazon. Seems weird to buy a subscription discount on Amazon, but you can and it emails you a code that you can use. So I have the 1TB Lightroom Cloud sub for £60/year. Complete bargain.
People absolutely COULD design something better, but if there is a lesson that I have seen replayed across the internet over the last 20 years is that adobe users, only want adobe, they dont want anything else.
They want the shortcuts exactly the same, the screens exactly the same, the outputs exactly the same.
They simply dont accept anything else, it basically needs to be a carbon clone copy to keep them happy, and in that case, why bother writing software, you dont win those users, and there is MANY of them.
Never bet against laziness.
“You mean I have to go to adoby.com and not adobe.com to download? Forget it. It am out.”
That's quickly changing as the college grads are entering the workforce with experience on DaVinci.
You’ll never try a different product anyways so who cares about Adobe die hards? This might as well be a thread about using Linux and all the Apple die hards come here to tell us they just can’t use anything besides Apple for “reasons”. Great! Enjoy your setup.
Not GP, but as a LR user, I actually did try alternatives and wasn't impressed. They're usually just as expensive, except if you expect to use the software for multiple years without upgrading, which, to GP's point, would have had you miss out on quite substantial improvements.
I'm a hobbyist, and the new "AI" masking has saved me a lot of time during my edits. Is it as good as a professional path tool wielder? Probably not, but that's not relevant to my use case.
I abandoned LR a long time ago due to an issue with my Adobe subscription, and stuck with Capture One since then. To be honest I much prefer Capture One's workflow and tools, never felt I missed LR even though I had used it for 10 years prior.
Agreed. Lightroom is still a great package. The alternatives are either way less powerful, hard to use (looking at darktable), or cost even more (like Capture One). The AI masking in Lightroom is fantastic. There is almost no need for Photoshop anymore.
Their denoise algo as well, while there are some that can do a heavier reconstruction Adobe's seems to have a good balance for still looking relatively natural and not trying too hard to generate missing detail. I've seen some like DxO's just invent new text and faces on people.
I do wish Adobe would focus a bit more on the non-ML masking, give us saturation masking, let us expand or feather masks, etc.
It is nice to at least see some options like RapidRaw try their hand at AI/ML masking, and hopefully darktable's attempts in newer versions end up fruitful.
Adobe's camera support is still rather appreciated on my end as well, you're rather pressed to find a device or lens they dont have support for. I've been working on my own personal raw developer lately and while I'm very thankful for projects like lensfun, wont pretend I didnt have to borrow a number of corrections profiles from Adobe's files.
Capture One might cost more, but it's a one off payment. I'm still happily using CO11 (8 or 9 years old?) and if it was good enough for professional use when it came out, it's more than enough for me now.
... until you get a new camera and their support for new RAW formats on CO11 is just not there.
I'll worry about that when it happens, but I'm more than happy with my D500/D850 for the foreseeable future.
That's super annoying that you often need a new version just because you got a new camera
You don't 'often' need a new version, if you bought Pro today it'd work with all current gen cameras from the major manufacturers, and probably get updates for a couple of years.
I understand that Capture One aren't going to support old software for decades, and I'm fine with that.
The issue is 95% of users dont use the features that adobe is so much better at. I've moved from PS to Pixelmator and there are even more moving from PS to Canva. Doesnt matter to most users that PS generative fill is better.
Same goes for fusion 360 when you just want to do CNC. Use "GatorCAM for cnc". $30 with future upgrades included.
Have you vetted them? They are all the same. Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms. So does dcraw. In terms of the editing tooling they all can do the same things. They all have the same library management affordances. Ps has been feature complete in my eyes for over a decade might as well pirate it and not spend $1200 a decade for the same couple functions you actually use.
Have you vetted them? They are all the same.
Obviously I haven't tried all competitors, but I have tried many over the years. Some of them have innovations, some of them are crap.
Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms.
I've seen this argued before. It's clear that they're different, but it's far from clear that LR's are wrong. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste and style, or perhaps I've learned to take photos with an informed understanding of what will result, but I still get photos that win awards, and that people pay money for, through LR.
They all have the same library management affordances.
They don't and if you wanted to argue on this set of features, it would probably be your strongest argument. Lightroom's library management is barely sufficient; some competitors have clearly surpassed them here.
But in photo editing, the field is NOT all the same. Some competitors offer a different approach allow the artist to think about their images in a different way, and that may lend itself to better results, or easier results, for certain styles (Luminar comes to mind here). But in other ways - notably Adobe's advances in "AI" masking (I think it's really "ML" masking) - LR is head-and-shoulders above the competition. These differences make it worth the money, at least for my skills and style.
Whether you need masking or such level of tools is dependent on how you approach photography. You can change your method of taking photos to remove such a need for editing.
There's a kernel of truth here. But it's not true in the general case.
Others have responded about dynamic range and HDR, and that's one area where a particular feature set is necessary for certain kinds of photography.
Astrophotography and macrophotography both very nearly require focus-stacking abilities.
There's certainly a lot of photography you can do with just a camera, or with just a camera and very basic editing tools.
But having advanced tools opens up a whole world of possibilities. Those aren't all going to be things that everyone wants or needs to do. But there's a huge number of artists who will want or need some of them.
How?
A lot of pulitzer prize winners are straight out of a canon 5d jpegs. It’s about composition and using light well. Same as it has always been.
To quote Henri Cartier-Bresson:
“Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move. In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer's disposal is his own pair of eyes. [...]
If you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions. Besides, it very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom's enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there. There is a lot of talk about camera angles; but the only valid angles in existence are the angles of the geometry of composition and not the ones fabricated by the photographer who falls flat on his stomach or performs other antics to procure his effects.” (“The Mind’s Eye” p34, 1999 Aperture ed.)
OK so just always do it right the first time and never make mistakes. Also, get lucky. Got it.
Most of those shots are technically imperfect. Sometimes that adds a lot of impact to the image. Well composed though.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/apr/08/reuters.pressa...
Many creative pursuits are based on time put in. Giving yourself more opportunities to get a shot helps. You will make mistakes, you will miss shots, you will take shots that could of been better, but for me that makes those photos that I have taken that I do think are spot on that much more enjoyable.
That's easy for you to say. Most of my photography is underwater where we are inherently very limited on time. On deeper tech dives we might only get 20 minutes of bottom time, and I can only be shooting for part of that.
Being at the right place at the right time is more important than your equipment 80% of the time. Predict the composition and lighting and you don't need to do anywhere near as much editing.
Ha ha good luck doing that reliably with wide-angle underwater photography. You're always moving around, conditions are constantly changing, and wildlife is inherently unpredictable.
That is probably a good part of the excitement in wildlife photography. Some people camp for years waiting for a shot of a snow leopard, well the pros on contract at least.
Give us a tutorial please. Otherwise this statement makes no sense.
What is confusing? A well exposed shot shouldn’t need any editing really.
And a real programmer doesn't need a debugger because he gets his code right from the start...
I don't think too many people manage to get a wildlife, landscape, astro, macro or night shot so well exposed that no editing is needed.
Landscape, macro, and night are very much composition and the right equipment. I agree wildlife, action, and astro photography may need some editing to some extent although I took photos of skateboarding for years and never found much need to edit. For me the tool to create the photo is the camera, past minimal editing it becomes a different medium of art, not a bad one as I love some photos that people have edited but it is a different form of art.
This is so wrong, on so many levels, that I don't even know where to start.
There are plenty of potential photographs that even modern sensor (or film) technology just can't do, like with questions of dynamic range. There are opportunities for cleaning up noise and sharpening to create a technically-better image. There are reasons beyond count for compositing of different kinds.
But most importantly, supporting the artist's efforts to achieve their vision is the whole point. If someone vision can't be achieved either with their physical toolset, or with their suite of tools, why should they limit themselves?
I mean yes. But the advent of exposure / focus bracketing lifted the dynamic range limit for most cameras. The only other way, at least for landscape I see is to buy expensive ND filter plates or invest into a camera with more dynamic range.
It's no longer $120 a year. It went up to $15.99/month a few months ago (in the middle of my annual billing cycle).
As a hobbyist photographer who sometimes does a lot with photography and sometimes very little I despise subscriptions, I'm putting the effort into learning Darktable and look forward to canceling my Adobe subscription.
Yeah if the alternatives were actually better, we wouldn't hear all this complaining about Adobe's pricing. People want the best thing for free/cheap I guess.
Every time I see one of these HN threads, I am actually amazed with what Adobe was able to pull off. I'm not surprised that they could do this to pros who were used to a particular workflow. In fact, for some businesses, a subscription may have some benefits. You were probably upgrading regularly anyway, and the only downside is that it's an expense you can't cut back on in a lean year.
But there are so many hobbyists, including here HN, who just went with it and have given Adobe thousands of dollars over the past decade just to keep using Lightroom or Photoshop! It just boggles my mind. There was a brief period where you had no good alternatives - GIMP wasn't it - but for almost all hobby needs, you now have very good pay-once options (e.g., Capture One instead of Lightroom). It's basically a monthly fee you pay for not having to think about the problem, and people are willing to pay it for many years.
Makes me think I should be doing more bait-and-switch...
I'm not sure how many occasional LR users there were/are. Either it's software someone needs to manage their non-phone photo library plus editing or not. Those type of people are also likely to upgrade every year. So if you compare pricing you need to compare to also upgrading every year. In that case the subscription was pretty close in price.
As far as competitors, there are certainly other editing options. The number of real competitors quickly shrinks if you include DAM + editing. And LR's editing has made huge strides on top of something that was already top notch.
There isn't really a good alternative for After Effects, despite its flaws. There are other motion graphics tools, but they're usually missing enough functionality that you eventually go crawling back to Adobe.
Now that software development is apparently solved, can someone please build a GPU-accelerated version of After Effects? Every motion designer in the world would make the switch over night.
Maxon literally just launched one last week.
Cavalry just become free thanks to Canva
The thing is, Lightroom is simply very good at what it does. There are infinite photo editing apps out there and many of them don't fit my workflow.
I want: RAW input, light/tone controls, colour grading, detail controls, lens corrections, basic masking, nondestructive adjustments, library management, and a tone curve that doesn't look like dog shit.
I do NOT want: complex layered editing, paintbrushes, preset styling junk, complex geometric transformations, a million menus, video editing, etc.
The more features you add, the more you detract from the core workflow. And all these other editors have watered down their core workflow too much for me, sadly. Lightroom might be corporate junk but at least it does the basics well and mostly gets out of my way.
Capture One is a new name for though, I might give that a try. It looks pretty promising.
It boggles the mind how many people will go and use an inferior solution to avoid spending the price of 2 coffees a month.
I think that's a goofy take. It's two coffees everywhere. Every other software vendor is trying to move to the subscription model. If you add up all the licenses you need to do work, have hobbies, or procrastinate (Netflix, Spotify, etc), is it still two coffees a month?
I know many folks who make $500k+ a year in the SF Bay Area and complain about affordability, and to a large extent, it's stuff like that that makes them poorer.
Also, my point is that there's nothing inferior about solutions such as Capture One, at least not as far as hobby workflows go.
> I know many folks who make $500k+ a year in the SF Bay Area and complain about affordability, and to a large extent, it's stuff like that that makes them poorer.
You don't have to make absurd extrapolations to make your point. Even with 20 subscriptions at $20/mo, that's $400/mo or $4800/yr, about 2% of net income.
If "make $500k+/year" means $200k in cash and the rest in options, their cash flow situation might be more strained than their paper net worth suggests. Also, high income does not necessarily correlate with frugality. Or they may be spending it on private schools for two kids. And people complain about prices, but that does not necessarily mean that it really affects them, or even that they think it materially affects them. Being nickled and dimed for software all the time is just as annoying if you are Warren Buffet or just graduated, and both with kvetch about it. Warren could gift me 100 A-shares, and I'd still kvetch about subscription prices (while knowing full-well it would have no material effect).
People on $500k salaries struggle to afford things because of the Bay Area’s outrageous property prices, not subscription software.
I don’t think it’s that surprising. People will pay for software that has better usability and better functionality.
Mostly people stick to what they know even if better alternatives exist
I've tried the alternative for Photoshop and came out unimpressed. It's even worse for Illustrator, and I hate this software. They're not perfect. I don't like the pricing either or their attitude. Still, After Effect, Illustrator, Indesign are very good. I'm not ripped off with the suite at the end...
I have the same issue with Maxon and Zbrush: nothing is close, but it's still the best at what it does.
We have an even worse company around: Autodesk. And they have competition in the CAD, 3D creation world (that they tried to destroy, but Blender changed the game and Houdini is another world)... but not so much around Revit. Architect would destroy them if they could. But no alternative works.
So let's not insult user here: people tries the alternative. They're not good enough. They're worse.
Yeah a bunch of people promised me GIMP is just as good as Photoshop. Look I'm glad GIMP exists and thankful for the free software, but it's not even close to equal.
> So let's not insult user here: people tries the alternative. They're not good enough. They're worse.
You mean you tried and thesy didn't suit your usecase. That's ok. But there are many others where alternatives would be suitable. Best example: MS Word
Because it's objectively non-expensive, compared to the hardware you want (not need) for photography.
Hobbyists and professionals have discovered tools like Affinity. Well, the non-subscription version of it anyways.'
I’ve used their software during my Multimedia studies and continued paying for some of it because it was just very, very good.
I despise Adobe’s pricing and the many things they are known for. But let’s not pretend that “competitor gives their product away for free” is a positive for the industry. Media work was already being stolen, copied, trained upon; all the companies making free creativity tools gotta profit off this somehow. It’s bait-and-switch as well.
If anything, it seems that the buy-once-and-keep-it model is what people liked. Adobe’s subscriptions and the competitors’ “you and your data are the product” are both a shitty replacement for software ownership.
It’s so insidious to sell yearly subscriptions that you pay for monthly. I want to pay by the month precisely because I decide on a monthly basis whether I need a service. If you want out early with Adobe you have to cough up half of the remaining subscription time.
For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. I’ll pour one out for the pro’s.
how is this a dark pattern? say that you bought a subscription of new york times for a year and put it on monthly installment. can you bail out of paying the credit card company after six months? only here, both the product and credit card company is adobe. in fact adobe is being generous by letting you "cough up" only a half the fee where your credit card company wouldn't. at this rate all credit companies are "dark pattern peddlers" according to you? adobe is pretty clear on the name of the subscription, "yearly subsciption, payed monthly" in big letters at the top of their pricing page.
The dark pattern is how it was presented. It wasn't "your total is X, split it in 12 monthly payments" it was a yearly contract disguised as a monthly contract.
> For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler.
Meh. It depends on how you view your photography.
I'm a Sunday photographer. Never made a dime from my work, and I don't look to. I just do it because I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy that I can use it as an excuse to move my ass away from my computer, walk around town to grab shots, etc.
I like editing my photos, but the editing is not why I take photos. I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time to learn a new tool. It's a hobby, and the software is only an accessory to it. If I have to spend hours to learn a new tool in front of my computer, it defeats the purpose.
I tried Darktable, and got okish results with it, but it's a pain to use. It doesn't have any serious noise reduction, and since I can't be bothered to lug around anything heavier than a m4/3 body with an f/4 lense, it's something I need, because I mainly shoot at night half the year.
I've looked at alternatives like capture one, but unless you intend to not upgrade your software for at least 3-4 years, they're not cheaper, even though they're not subscription based. You also have to cough up all the money upfront. And you get no Photoshop, either, which I use in addition to LR.
Now, I don't love lightroom. I have no idea wtf it lags when I open and close panels on a pretty hefty desktop. But boy, do I love the time I gain with "ai" masking, noise reduction and object removal.
All in all, it's just not expensive enough to make it worth my while to change to a different software and also lose all my catalog history, just to cough up the same amount of cash in the end.
Now, if someone came up with an actual equivalent that ran on Linux, so I didn't have to have a dedicated Windows box just for this, I'd line right up with my money ready.
I think Resolve just released a lightroom equivalent didn't they?
Edit0: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/...
Yeah and seems the only limitation you get is no GPU acceleration with the free tier. I'd give that a spin I like resolve much better than premiere for video and it has AI integration as well
Yeah, I saw the thread on HN the other day, and was genuinely intrigued. But according to the reviews I’ve seen, the workflow is fairly different. I have 0 experience editing video, so picking up a tool with a completely different approach isn’t exactly appealing, but maybe I’m missing something.
I'm biased as I have been editing video (including color, exposition, curves and luts) with Resolve for a while (and have edited pictures in their color editor before because I really like their workflow), but for what it's worth I would give it maybe one (1) hour of trying out yourself, you might be very pleased ( or you're welcome to curse me for wasting an hour of your time).
If you are pleased indeed, you might just put 120$ in your pocket rather than adobe's this year. Who'd say no to that?
Have a good one
Just downloaded it to take it for a spin. First off, it doesn't support Olympus raw files, but, fortunately, I had some DNG lying around, which did work. However, it expects to pick from a list of raw formats. All seem to work, but it's not immediately clear what the difference is.
The settings are a bit daunting at first; some are what you expect in a regular photo editor, and others are... weird for me. Like, what's "lift" and where are my white and black sliders?
Color tools seem to be interesting, but there seem to be multiple places where you select color spaces, and all defaults seem to be video-centric (which I guess isn't unexpected, but it just means you have to know to go hunt for them). There's also a dedicated "color" page, which I think is what all the fuss is about, but if I switch to it, my photo disappears and I'm presented with a video timeline...
I also haven't found any trace of masking, and noise reduction seems to be a paid feature, so in my case the free version wouldn't do...
All in all, I want to like it, especially since it runs on Linux, and will probably continue to check it out from time to time, even though I'd have to convert the raws to dngs beforehand.
I struggle to think of it as insidious. The problem you have is you're reading it wrong. There is no monthly licence. It's an annual licence that you can either pay up front or split, either way, you need to pay.
In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only needed it for a month? What happened when just a year later Photoshop 4 came out? Tough.
I get that software subscriptions suck, but it's the compromise that makes it both affordable to you in your life, and affordable to Adobe.
It’s insidious because you’re being required to agree to pay for a year of use, split monthly, but cannot decide to cancel during the term of the agreement without paying for use that you don’t want. Just because the terms are clear doesn’t mean it’s not an insidious pricing scheme.
If it were not insidious, it would be easy to answer the question: “what costs for adobe are being covered by the early termination fee?” - but there aren’t any costs, the fee is a punishment to dissuade you from cancelling and hoping that you will miss the window to prevent automatic renewal.
I can understand not wanting to pay Adobe every month, but the commercial reality would require a month-long contract would have to be extraordinarily expensive, to offset the people who do only need it occasionally who'd otherwise be on an annual contract.
Is that predatory? Maybe, but is it worse for those users than only offering the $1k package they used to? Of course they're trying to get you hooked, pricing at a point to minify budget issues, and recurring year-round to avoid expense approvals. Educational licenses also pretty predatory.
Don't get me wrong, they want your money; as much of it as they can extract. You don't have to play the game if you don't want to.
"commercial reality" is just executives deciding they don't like how the world really works, so they're going to change it out from under us
they'd monetize the open air of the earth if they could figure out the logistics
Yes, but it's theirs to monetize.
What post-scarcity utopia do you think you're living in?
The commercial reality is them finding the way to get the most from the market. This isn't a bizarre twist of software licensing, every company is doing this to you.
You are paying less monthly if you commit to annual pricing, if not, you can still pay monthly pricing which is higher. Commitment means you will likely be a paying customer for a year at the least and hence company gives you a discount. What’s the insidious aspect? The whole thing can be confusing, yes, but it does what it says.
Subscription pricing just sucks. I want to rewind back to the past where you bought software one time, and that was it. You had no further relationship with the vendor. You aren't paying them periodically to "keep it working." You don't need them to keep a server running. You aren't tethered to them providing them "metrics" and "telemetry." You don't have to worry that the software is suddenly going to change out from under you or get silently "updated." Updates suck--don't justify subscriptions "because you have to keep paying your engineers to keep fiddling with the software." I don't want them fiddling. I buy a hammer once. I use it until I die or it breaks.
I'm a Darktable user and Affinity mobile user. I was pretty happy with both.
I was using Affinity for quick edits. I happily paid for their software as it's worth what they were charging for and not subscription based.
Then it was bought and Canvas decided to release it for free. What sounds like good news, for me it's concerning: Companies need to make money. If users are not paying, well, they might actually be the product the company sells: either with ads or intelligence. I hate ads as much as I hate my data being harvested, so I'm out now.
A couple of weeks ago I found what seems to work for me now: I bought a tablet capable of running Fedora and Darktable, and that's what am using now.
Canva, not Canvas. It's free with optional paid add ons, mostly around AI features. Canva does not sell user data.
Adobe lost me when I got a deal on Lightroom, installed it, and edited an image.
Then I went to look at the image on my drive, and it wasn't there. LR had uploaded it and deleted it from my hard drive!
They broke faith with me with that action, I deleted LR and have never touched it since.
If you use Sony cameras, you should check out Capture One, which (last I tested) has a deft touch with Sony files.
There's a setting to keep them on your hard drive as well as in the cloud
So, no one here is a professional creative? In the print industry you can't avoid Adobe for one tool: Acrobat.
You need professional PDF creation with profiles, preflight tools, editing capabilities abd form creator tools.
Oh and there is InDesign which is an industry standard. You need compatibility with your clients' pipeline.
So until there is a real competitor for Acrobat and a change in the whole industry, Adobe is unavoidable.
Could you clarify profiles and preflight tools?
If you're a hobbyist needing photo editing software, just use https://www.photopea.com/
Photopea is very good. It is what I recommend to friends who just want an immediate solution.
Photopea is great but I switched to Pixelmator Pro. I just paid $49.99 one time. It's a clean native app. It doesn't install all these horrors of horror on my system like Photoshop did. It doesn't try to pressure me into using some half baked AI tool. (I mean could you imagine what that must be like being an artist who hates AI and Adobe shoves it in your face?) I can't believe I was paying $40/month for Photoshop for so long. Thankfully I got all my money back and more by shorting Adobe's stock. After spending so many years drinking unicorn blood, no software company deserves to fall more. Everyone who invested in them, hoping to get rich off torturing artists and tax payers, deserves to lose their money too.
I did exactly the same, for creating graphics / posters. Love Pixelmator... is PS better at some stuff? For sure, but it's not stuff I need. Thats adobes issue.
The whole suite of Affinity apps is now free (after Canva bought them). For a hobbyist there was never a better time.
Meanwhile revenue is up 12% YoY to 6.4B in latest earnings.
Prefer evidence from the eyes over noise from the ears.
For reference, the Creative Cloud Pro Suite (formerly All Apps) is US$1,259.88 per year at $104.99 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a non-refundable, non-cancellable 1 year contract.
Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $659.88 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)
Photoshop is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock
Lightroom is $215.88 / year or $143.88 / year if you lock
PS + LR is $359.88 / year or $239.88 / year if you lock
After Effects is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock in
Acrobat is $419.88 / year or $299.88 / year if you lock in
* EDIT (pasted in the wrong monthly price): Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $82.49 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)
Adobe won’t be hurt by this in the professional market because they have inter-app compatibility and a somewhat consistent language, plus you need their software to work with legacy files. Adobe is cheap, you can get the full suite for a very reasonable price. Competing software is always niche and you need to learn each one individually as they don’t share UX principles nor ontologies. They might be free now, but imagine managing individual subscriptions for each one later on; a nightmare for individuals and companies alike. Just needing to sign-up for multiple apps individually is a headache, all the emails and updates, etc. Unless someone makes a comparable and comprehensive suite, they won’t be actually competing with Adobe.
For a long time, "pro" software was able to retain its price premium, even while consumer apps essentially all became free.
But two things are happening: First, competitors are realizing pro software can be a "loss leader" for a different offer (see: Blackmagic Resolve, Canva's Affinity suite).
Second, AI is making it possible to create open source alternatives that are very full-featured. Blender is a pre-AI example, but we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year.
I'm not moving away from Lightroom yet, because I have a massive catalog containing 20+ years of photos. But new users coming into the ecosystem have far more options now. It's a tough time to charge a subscription for something that's getting actively commoditized.
> we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year
Do you mind sharing a few examples?
I personally like marimo[^1], the developers rely heavily on AI tools afaict
A veritable "explosion"! Surely GP can name 3.
None exist, it's literally all slop.
Ran into rapidraw yesterday looking for rust RAW processing (was looking for libraries or CLI tools but taking inventory as I went). Ran into rapidraw, which notably is GPU accelerated: https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw#rapidraw
The recent updates list is so impressive. Good steady stream of updates. And a good number of them take and integrate amazing incredible open source models, doing one shot depth processing, object detection, infill painting, denoising.
And oh by the way the developer is 18 years old.
FWIW it took me waaaaay less time to import 30k+ photos from a Lightroom catalog to Capture one than into a fresh Lightroom install.
Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.
before Affinity was a "loss leader" for Canva, it was a profitable suite of applications in its own right
don't offend blender by comparing it to ai slop.
If you think anything created with the help of agentic coding is slop, you're in for a rough (checks watch) rest of your life
You‘re free to share AI created polished examples
It will take a generation, but once students at school will be using something else than Adobe, it is over for them. Same with Microsoft
Adobe does fine despite there being plenty of alternatives to their products and the relative ease of switching to them. Microsoft does fine because they have a captive audience to abuse.
Oh they are present in schools all right, along with google. Giving away free samples to get them hooked.
The pushback has felt inevitable for a while now. Adobe's transition to a pure subscription model frustrated a lot of casual/freelance users, but it was really their recent terms-of-service shifts and aggressive cloud integrations that alienated the power users. It's exciting to see viable competitors finally taking market share.
Also the Reader has become so bloated and ugly that I abandoned it for the tiny SumatraPDF that starts faster than a blink of an eye and displays PDFs for reading very nicely. I don't need all that features which Adobe stuffed within Reader, only sometimes I miss the digital signature panel. I do hope, however, that Sumatra will add digital signature verification at some point. Fingers crossed.
So many competitors are releasing free or low-cost alternatives, that shifting away from Adobe is becoming plausible for many folks.
There should be a way where I can use these tools using MCP so that I don't have to learn the particulars of how the tool behaves and what options they expose.
There are whole certficiations and tutorials for Adobe lightroom, photoshop etc. If I know what I want to achieve, I should be able to interact with an LLM and figure it out. Massive boost for me tbh.
They keep adding bloat instead of focusing on usability. Still can't get Illustrator to remember my print settings.
> People love free.
I worry about the longevity of some of these. Are they going to be free with little further development and just languish?
If I was a graphics shop, I don't think I'd be jumping off Creative Cloud and re-gearing staff to Cavalry and Affinity in too much of a hurry.
Yeah, Adobe should be afraid because... checks notes... had the government not intervened, the "creative software industry" would willingly have sold out to Adobe completely years ago, and so there would be no "war" on them. Rally the troops.
I wish Adobe adopted Jetbrain's model. You pay for a version of the software. You then keep it forever. Then offer additional stuff like using their AI or some cloud save stuff.
Since 2005, I’ve owned or subscribed to Adobe Photoshop suite of products in some fashion. 6 months ago I canceled everything, worrying that I’d miss Illustrator the most. I don’t.
What took them so long? It's about time.
These threads remind me of the MS threads. Just like MS doesn't care about home users, Adobe doesnt care about hobbyists. Unless you're a professional graphic designer, you're probably using less than 1% of its capabilities and frankly have a pretty worthless opinion on it. "Well I'm a software dev and I use Lightroom so I kinda know what I'm talking about". No, you don't.
You're forgetting about the pipeline.
People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option.
Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive.
Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.
Adobe is genuinely one of the shittiest companies on the planet.
That list is quite long
Paywall.
I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee?
I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.
All of the software is to expensive for hobbyists.
How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?
Most of us start off as pirates and then go legitimate once we're big enough to work with others. Everybody knows someone who has a cracked version of some ancient version of Corel Draw, but we all know getting contracted under a big company means they want us using the latest file type standards because they'll only have access to the newest version of the file's publishing program. I know some people who still animate in Flash MX and go through all of the trouble of porting it forward to Animator CC 2025. Thought with Adobe killing Animator last month maybe they'll end up with some even more convoluted upconversion chain to get it into Toonboom.
Student discounts, piracy. Mostly piracy.
Paywall at the Verge? I have them in my RSS feeds and load articles most days and have never seen that. I definitely don't subscribe to their site. Either way, here's a link:
Yeah, theverge is subscription now.
Their articles seem to load fine in my reader (Fluent) if I fetch them as they're published. Beyond that though, if I try to fetch the full content or open the article in my browser, I hit the paywall. It seems like either their paywall takes a few minutes to apply to their new articles or they deliberately make them accessible to RSS users fee-free.
It's a good thing to reward RSS use.
Try DxO Photolab if you have a mac
Better than Darktable?
Only you can decide that for yourself, I use both
acdsee is another one worth exploring.
acdsee, at least a few years ago when I was using it for large volume jpg commercial work, is fast and often good enough. The trickier stuff went for a spin in Photoshop.
Lots of photo editing workflows could be done in something like digital fusion which is free. You just have to use roto instead of painting masks, but the procedural graph workflow is more precise. It would also handle anything in a numbered sequence automatically so batch processing is trivial.
now , that's a name I haven't heard in... decades.
Haha, when I saw 30 years, I went to go read about it and its really impressive.
m0nkrus
lol adobe has fought off these tool for years, sadly it's just better and i hate it. Adobe's real threat is generative AI. While it's not there yet it will be. I should mention I'm a creative professional.
* anyone who thinks Maxon is any better than adobe should re-think that. They really hosed Z-Brush users
There was a memo floating around Adobe a couple years ago speculating that their AI features may well make many of their customers redundant. An interesting way to cannibalise your own business.
Are there any projects focused on getting 'creative' software to work well on Linux? Valve solved Linux gaming but it seems tools like DAWs and video/photo editing is still terrible on Linux.