Something to think about 

Something to think about Adobe charges a small amount each month for creative cloud and you get photoshop and Lightroom plus all the updates and mobile apps. Still a lot of people complain about it. A fun (well not so fun) we pay for our online bookkeeping suite more per month than 3 months CC with ps and lr. 
Price adobe : one visit to Starbucks 

So for that amount you have the world standard software that works with all your plugins and you can find a boatload of instructional material about online. 
Other software is sold for $50.00 and promises lifetime free updates. Now this is where I think people should think about…….
Research and development is very very expensive especially when you design on different platforms. So how about support in 2-3 years when the big money is in from people switching. With adobe we know at least they have been there for years and years and always have new updates pretty fast. 
Now is this is a “I love adobe post”?

Not at all. 

I still think that adobe should add things like live previews for gradients, speed up premiere rendering etc. but overall I do like the fact I know that there are updates every few weeks and in all these years I’ve never had huge problems (I did experience some smaller ones). 
Would love to hear your opinions. 

6 replies
  1. DavidInVan
    DavidInVan says:

    Of everything I’ve paid for in photography, Adobe CC is probably the cheapest. A good bag costs the same as 2 years of CC. Sure, I don’t “own” it. When a new OS comes out, I also don’t have to worry about owning something I can’t use because I upgraded my computer, and now the version of PS I own doesn’t work. I don’t want my entire electronic ecosystem held captive to an out-of-date piece of software, waiting (hoping) that compatibility gets written eventually.

  2. Wotan
    Wotan says:

    I think people bitching are really unrealistic about the cost. Used to be, in order to stay somewhat on the latest technology level, one had to upgrade PS and LR at least every other version, i.e. year. Looking at the cost of the upgrade licenses added up, and dividing by 24 is what we need to compare to the $9.99 per month here.

    I think when you do that, you’ll quickly see that the value you get is actually pretty darn good…

    Also, for those of us running a business (yes, photography IS a business 🙂 ), the difference in a predictable monthly OPEX cost vs. a bi-annual CAPEX cost is a nice bonus “on top” of the value proposition.

  3. ArH
    ArH says:

    I used to agree the Adobe Photography Plan was a great deal, however Lightroom has become almost unusably slow now and it desperately needs a comprehensive update and major performance tweaks. I don’t care how cheap it is, if it’s become a PITA to use, I’d rather not pay for it. I rarely use Photoshop to it’s full capability these days either, so the argument to keep paying for the very occasional use that gets has gone as well.

    For now I’ve ditched Adobe and gone with existing software I own. ON1 PhotoRAW 2017 as my go to for my RAW processing, with the occasional use of Capture One Sony Edition (depending on my mood and if I need A+ quality) and Affinity Photo for any Photoshop type stuff. Couldn’t be happier at the moment. If Adobe finally give Lightroom the update we deserve, then I might think about going back – but I think by then the competition might pulled alongside or even have overtaken them. Especially if they offer the buy once, free upgrades model like some do.

    If Macphun’s Luminar can get the promised digital asset management update and use smaller sidecar files for editing data, then that could be a very intriguing alternative as well.

    • Frank Doorhof
      Frank Doorhof says:

      Don’t know why you experience such slowness in Lightroom. On the Mac it was up to speed with all my images in the database and now also on my pc and laptop.

      All machines are pretty fast with ssd drives but I don’t see any slowness. Although compared to capture one the zooming in on shots could be faster.

      Do you Have your database on a dedicated ssd ?

Comments are closed.