Mac Loc: Pittsburgh, Philadelphia now Hernando Co. Fl.

IDguy Loc: Idaho

Competition at work.

My Adobe works great. I resisted the subscription for a long time. But I consider the $9.99 per month OK. They haven’t threatened me with a price increase.

pithydoug Loc: Catskill Mountains, NY

A lot of bias BS!

MichaelH Loc: NorCal via Lansing, MI

This guy seems to be trying to make a point to home users without his facts being correct in some instances. I am currently paid up on my home Photography Plan through Feb 2024 at roughly $100 per year. I buy a year or more whenever it goes on sale at B&H and just add another year to my subscription. And the subscription is measured by time to expiration so I am not going to experience any price increases for the duration of my paid subscription. I do not know where he got the $179 dollar per year option but he is overpaying. And at $8.50 a month it is less than 2 Starbuck's coffees!

And I doubt that the home non-professional user is Adobe's bread and butter. Professionals who use it for Design (page layout for magazines and advertising), Photography and Illustration would not be without this software. We are still using Creative Suite 6 where I work because we have lots of software that is not native 64bit. We are still using macOS Sierra. We own one license for Creative Cloud Suite in order to back save files that come from outside sources.

And from my experience Adobe's support is great. I recently had some work iMacs that had an issue with Adobe Acrobat (the pdf creation software) where it would crash after 5 seconds on Macs with macOS Sierra after an OS X update. I attempted to reinstall the software and was unsuccessful because the installer still saw Acrobat as being installed. I contacted Adobe over the phone and a technician remoted into the iMac and had the same issue I had. She spent three hours on this problem and eventually the issue was resolved. I saved the software tools that the technician downloaded to the iMac and applied the fix to all of our other Macs. Remember that CS6 is probably nine year old software at this point!!!

So consider me unimpressed with his argument.

And if you too want to buy it when it is on sale at B&H just create a "Wish List" and place the download version and the mailed out scratch off card versions in that Wish List and you will get an email from B&H when its price drops below $120. California has no tax on downloaded software and if I use my PayBoo card for the scratch off card B&H pays the tax for me.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

I am not a man of Adobe, but I also don't support the rhetoric of the non-Adobe haters. Frankly, it's not my problem and just too caustic.

I think there is a lot of bias on both ends of the argument. Adobe is still the industry standard, and did set the bar for any product that comes in to challenge any or all of the Adobe line of products. I have friends that use Adobe CC (or whatever it's called) and we all have great discussions on our own personal work flow and share our likes and dislikes. The important distinction is that not one of us has attacked any aspect of each others personal choice and celebrate the differences rather than argue over small nuances of which one is better, because at the end of the day, it's all about the final product and encouraging photographic creativity.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Article reeks of advocacy journalism and other BS. I would not trust “Petting a Pixie” if I worked there.

First of all, they say the photography plan is $179/yr. Who pays that much? It’s $9.99 a month plus tax. Yes, you can spend more, if you like the Lightroom CC enough to use it, and the Adobe Cloud, but millions don’t.

Then they completely ignore the fact that the Plan includes ACR (kept up to date with quarterly revisions), plus Bridge, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, and Lightroom Classic (the current evolution of LR 6.14).

Adobe isn’t perfect. But they make very good software. Whether YOU need it is not for me to say. But I do. It leverages everything I’ve learned over several decades.

Those of us who actually use this stuff for work think it’s a bargain.

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

Yeah, I don't know many photographers that are hating on Adobe. There are some that grumble about the subscription model, but most that I know find the value worth it.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Sounds like he is sponsored by Affinity. He had some misleading falsehoods in his article, for example saying the cost of the photographers plan doubled. It has not. But he displays that disingenuous graphic comparing the 20 GB plan to the 1 TB plan as if it had doubled, but those are two different plans. The 1 TB plan has always costed more than the basic plan.

There are many happy Adobe customers, he is not one of them. Ok. It is good that we have choices, and he can use something else. Viva la competition!

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

The guy who wrote the article is in Melbourne Australia, so he's probably reporting Adobe pricing in Aussie Dollars.

I compared the usual $9.99 a month price in U.S. dollars to my own upgrades of previous editions of PS and LR.... where I basically upgraded every edition but one, of LR from it's first introduction... and on average bought an upgrade of PS every other version. I was spending approx. $300 to $350 every three years, so very close to the same cost as the subscription.

I'd argue that an awful lot of people sign up for the LR/PS subscription package and only use one or the other. And I bet that another large group of people sign up for the LR/PS package who don't really need them, find themselves overwhelmed by the complexity and eventually just let the subscription lapse. The "low cost" of subscriptions... a $120/year "entry fee".... seems very reasonable. Especially when it's compared to the previous cost of around $650 for a full copy of PS and $150 for a full copy of LR... or around $800 "entry fee" for both, perpetually licensed.

But, after the initial purchase (which I made with PS in the mid-1990s when it cost a lot less), upgrade costs were a lot less. The last time I upgraded PS it cost about $229. And the last time I upgraded LR it cost about $100.

My point, though, is that what appears to be a low entry cost has caused a lot of people who really don't need LR and PS to jump in and give it a try.... Folks who would be better served with Elements, for example, which can do virtually everything a relatively advanced amateur photographer might need. In fact, Elements can do more in the way of image editing than LR alone, which quite a few subscribers probably end up using by itself. PS is more likely to be needed by pros doing commercial work. Pros are also more likely to be shooting the volume of images where LR is most helpful.

In either case, whether people just use one of the two programs they pay for with their subscription... or if people subscribe for a year and never get very good at using either program, eventually dropping it.... Adobe is making tons of "money for nothing".

It would be no problem for Adobe to offer the programs both ways... giving people the choice of subscription or purchase. The way software is delivered via download these days, as far as the software publisher, it's the same cost either way.

Something I don't want is one of their strongest selling points.... automatic updates. I disable those on most software. Too often I've seen "updates" that were faulty and caused problems. There was a really good example of that with LR a couple years ago, when an update made a bunch of changes that everyone hated and Adobe had to roll it back. I let other people be the "Beta testers" and deal with the problems, then do my own updates when I know they're solid and reliable. Auto updates? No thanks! Send me a notice when an update is available and I'll get to it when I get it, after it's proven itself.

He also might make some good points about the cloud storage.... I don't use it so can't compare. I don't want my images sitting on hard drives somewhere on the Internet, that may or may not be secure. I have my own "cloud" storage with 36TB of storage space (gradually accumulated over the years.... not all bought at once). Works fine for me with LR and PS. So I don't know if Adobe's cloud storage would work better... but since I wouldn't use it, I certainly wouldn't want to pay for it as part of my subscription!

SuperflyTNT Loc: Manassas VA

I don’t use the Lightroom cloud as “storage”. Without paying more it’s only 20GB and would fill up rather quickly. I use it as work space. I have a “work” collection that is synced to the cloud. Stuff that I’m currently working on is in that collection. I can access it through Lightroom Classic or Lightroom CC on my desktop and my laptop or with Lightroom CC on my iPad or iPhone. Anything I’m not currently working on gets moved to my non-synced “archive” collection.

Delderby Loc: Derby UK

I feel sure that Serif (Affinity) would not (and certainly have no need to) trash Adobe, or would encourage the likes of the OP in a campaign of hate Adobe articles.
Personally, I prefer Affinity and a one-off purchase, and have used Serif programs for well over ten years, but each to his own. I am grateful to Adobe for free PDF readers etc.

Collhar Loc: New York City.

No. You are wrong.
It seems as if you may have a personal problem....or is it now called an issue??

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

I think he was using the title of article as the thread topic. Either way, I wouldn't take a thread title so personally.

nikonbrain Loc: Crystal River Florida

Sorry but , I thank Adobe for existing the attributes of the software is amazing . The Content aware from CS5 and onward is in itself worth the price of $9.99 a month . not to mention stitching the ease of printing from Canon Large format printers 24 inch and larger the layout the ease of layers and actions blending modes, masks, ACR the basis of Lightroom . To much to list . I am stuck at an earlier Standalone version of CS6 A 32 bit and a 64 bit still running on windows 7 and will use it till the day the motherboard dies . My mac is stuck at El Capitan and cannot upgrade to the Adobe subscription as it is 1 iteration to far behind being able to use CC6 or so says Adobe . I use these computers to make a living $9.99 or even $20.00 a month is o.k with Me I make that in less than 4 hours start to finish on 1 24 x 36 gallery wrap canvas think about it a whole year from 1 print . Thank you ADOBE I will subscribe when I build a new computer this year I have to finish paying for the new Canon pro 4000 I bought 2 months ago , with this last payment Tomorrow . you fellow Photographers need to start selling your images as I have seen some wonderful images here . remember you will make more money Printing for your Fellow photographers than selling your own work...because every image they sell as a collective is money in your bank account.... It has only been about 3 years for me to get to this point ..

Collhar Loc: New York City.

He was complaining. He was taking it personally. Hence his choice of using the title.