Well, your ORIGINALS remain unchanged. If you drop your Lr subscription, you can still export from Lr with previous stored changes applied.

Software companies are not legally allowed to prevent you from using your data — and they would be stupid to do so, anyway! Your previous edits are accessible, but no changes can be made until you resume paying your $9.99 per month for the Photography Bundle of Lr, Lr CC, Ps, and Br.

Lots of people panic, thinking Adobe is ransoming them or something by charging subscription fees. That's crap. People with the previous Lr 6.x stand-alone version can keep using it until it is inconvenient to do so (meaning their computer OS won't support it any longer, or they need a new feature that wasn't in the original, such as support for a new camera raw profile).

Since I need both Ps and Lr CC, I subscribe. I've used Ps since version 1.0 back in the late 1980s. I used Lr since the first beta test.

I used to skip every other version of Ps, because the Adobe upgrade fees were too expensive. I couldn't afford $300 to $400 for a Ps upgrade, but I can afford $10/month. That's a decent bottle of wine, two or three Starbucks coffees, or four gallons of gas. You can't even buy a roll of film and processing that cheap, these days (That's about $30 if you want prints!).

I've said this before: Digital photography is an expensive hobby. By the time you get the equipment to do it right, a $10/month charge for software licensing is cheap, cheap, cheap! I have a small setup:

iMac $1200
Backup drives $1200
Network infrastructure $550
100Mbps Network access $50/month
Monitor Calibrator Kit $150 (The single most important tool I own!)
Desktop Printer $150
Photo Printer $400
Lumix GH4 $1300
Three lenses $1700
Other items (tripod, flash, filters, case, light stands, exposure targets, shoe mounts, LED lights, memory cards...) about $2000

So another $10 is not a big deal.

Bebu I was with a female friend who's also into photography. She persevered more than me with aperture/shutter priority/bracketing/exposure compensation....and her photos weren't any better than mine. In the end, she too gave up and went to Programme and Auto. I was in San Pedro De Atacama (North Chile) and Easter Island. Places which have been on my bucket list for many years and I know will never go again so wanted to soak up all the scenery and history. When I sort all my pics, might put some on the Photo Section of this site if I think they're decent....

OMG, I've been muddling through the trial subscription of LR for 3 days and I am making very little progress. Yes, I've listened to many of the tutorials. Is there something one of you could recommend for a new beginner? I have managed to import a few photos. One I even love! BUT I want to import more. And I think I'm doing everything I'm supposed to but then I can't find them. Where did they go? What am I doing wrong? Many thanks! (Should probably add that I am using Lightroom Classic CC.)

Sometimes, my greatest ally is sheer dumb luck. As I got out of the car, "Billie Jean" was blasting at 80 decibels, even though the sound system was was a half a block away. This man was on his own planet. I just grabbed the camera out of the back of the station wagon and had a frantic feast, in sports mode. I know it's good practice to pick the best photo and post only that one, but I just couldn't do it. These are all adjusted a little, for exposure, saturation, contrast, and cropped for interest, aesthetic contrast, and to remove some of the back hatch strut from one that was just too good to throw out. Am posting these just because I like them.D70S with 18-55 1:3.5-5.6
My question is really about levitation photography. I said in my first post that I am on a pretty tight budget, and can't afford Photoshop, but I have purchased a copy of Corel PaintShop Pro Ultimate, with hopes of learning to use transparent layers to do levitation. I asked for technical help at Corel, and they said they don't have a tutorial for that, but I told them that was the wrong answer if they were selling me this program. They said they would get back to me. I am thinking if I knew how to use layers, well, i should be able to use any of the better programs to do this. Perhaps my question should be should the background picture be taken first, with a tripod, then the subject inserted in different positions for layering the best one into the background, then removing the props, somehow.
I got great help, in reply to my first post, here, and look forward to your comments. Now that I'm into my second post, is "Introduce Yourself" the wrong place to post?
Peace from the Streets,
Creeksong

This is not a comfortable subject.

Many folks here are much older than I am (61). I see many threads on what to save or not to save and where.

I have another one more to the point as we all will die sooner than later...

What is the need of preserving anything if you can safely assume that very few will be interested in looking at it especially if there are gazillions of them*?

How many of us have seen cameras in estate sales with all type of stuff including memory cards, drives and the like?

I certainly have and quite frankly I know that 99.9999% of all images created will never be seen more than once.

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* My grand father was a photographer and had archived tons (as weight) of images on glass documenting the life of his town from the 1890 to 1950. When he died the family who did not know about that went through everything trying to get the family pictures. They 'saved' about 250 glass plates. They were stored in an attic, in a trunk. When I learned of it I tried to get it and was unable to get to it. Now no one knows where the trunk is, my uncle moved and has died since. As to the rest of the collection? It was simply destroyed after no one expressed any interest on the collection. Destruction method? The dump, by truck load.

Thank you everyone for the information, and especially the videos on lens construction. Being an engineer, I find those to be very interesting. Although I guess that my question has been answered for the most part I guess my next question would be why don't they just make the best lenses that they can at a reasonable price for everyone rather than only making avery small number of the better lenses, as I'm sure we all want the best that we can afford, and if the prices were lower we could all afford the best.