AndyGarcia

Hey T.O.D. do you have shares in Adobe?

Notorious T.O.D. Loc: Harrisburg, North Carolina

No I don't...

insaneo Loc: Byram, ms.

No apology necessary Bill. Sorry for being short with you. I use the dng converter with my daughter's g12 because cs4 won't open the raw files. Dpp will though, and affinity. If I were to purchase a new camera and if I wanted to use adobe camera raw then I'd have to go with a creative cloud subscription. Which I don't want to do. I do though like adobe camera raw better than the other two programs. If a new camera is in my future then I'll have to use the dng converter or dpp and affinity full time. I might as well get used to it because it's goodby adobe.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Take a look at alien skins Exposure (there is a 30 day trial) I am very impressed with it. It is very lightroom like, not identical but close enough to be like driving a different make of car.

It will take a little getting used to but it seems a good lightroom alternative at least for development (it also has layers).

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

I totally agree. When someone rants against Adobe and technology advancements it makes me want to say very disagreeable things.

SusanFromVermont Loc: Southwest corner of Vermont

Change is often good, but some people resist. For those who have been happy with the way things are, anything new creates a level of fear. Advice to them: try it before you reject it. You might even like it!

Yankeepapa6 Loc: New York City

We change Presidents every 8 years. That can be fearful. Right now there is strong resistance to change. I doubt the change to the new or updated LR creates fear.

blackest Loc: Ireland

Adobe was doing upgrades for lightroom roughly at 2 year intervals for $72 or $36 a year on average you could skip versions if you wanted e.g lightroom 1 to 6 was the same upgrade price as 5 to 6 now its $120 a year in the US $175 ish in Ireland. That is a big hike in cost plus cc hooks itself into the operating system costing performance. The technical improvements are for the most part marginal.

Thats not fear thats adobe raising the price by around 4x for marginal benefit to me. Sorry if I sound ungrateful.

Incidentally lightroom 7 classic is already available for downloading and the usual crack.

I am kind of glad that adobe did this move in that its caused me to evaluate competing software. Alien skins exposure is very lightroom like in its adjustments and improved preset options and you can see the effect of a preset just by hovering on it in the main image window. Its likely I will take the upgrade to Exposure and continue with lightroom 5.7 as my file organiser.

Notorious T.O.D. Loc: Harrisburg, North Carolina

I think you are leaving Photoshop out of your cost analysis perhaps...

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

Yes he did leave it out, but if he's like me, he doesn't use PS, which is why some of us feel moving to the $10 a month subscription is not cost effective. Obviously for those who use both, it may be an excellent value, but for LR only users it is not a good deal versus a paid standalone version.

I've been using LR since version 4. The historic cost to upgrade from one version to the next was around $80 - $90 or so, with the average version life, around 30 months. That's around $3 per month over the 30 month life. And if you decided not to upgrade when the latest version was released, it didn't stop working. If I continue to use happily Lightroom 6 for just 2 more years, the average cost per month will have fallen to around $1.66 a month. That's $20 a year vs $120 a year for the subscription. I'm not updating my camera anytime soon, and most of the enhancements to Lightroom from year to year, why nice to have, tend to be relatively minor and not necessarily critical to my needs.

For me, and apparently for others, there is no compelling reason to spend more money per month for few additional features, especially if the Develop module will stop working should we decide not to continue with the subscription as some point.

And for the occasional times I need a pixel editor I use PS Elements which costs around $50 at Costco when released each year. I upgrade that every other year or so, so that the average yearly cost is only $25 a year. I use it as a back-end to Lightroom similarly to the way Photoshop is used. While it doesn't have the same professional feature set as Photoshop, it is still a powerful program in its own right and meets my fairly minimal pixel editing needs.

Unlike some, I have no ill-will towards Adobe and don't feel they are ripping us off. It is a business and they are in it to make a profit. Nobody is being forced with a gun to their head to continue to use Adobe products. My decision not to upgrade is purely a personal one made by me after a careful cost-benefit analysis.

Anandnra Loc: Tennessee

.... and ofcourse one can choose not to PP their pictures ......

Notorious T.O.D. Loc: Harrisburg, North Carolina

Of course they can and they can also choose not to take pictures... But I think those who don't are not achieving the full potential that they could in their photos. It would be like printing a B&W negative directly to an 8x10 without trying to improve it in the darkroom...

AndyGarcia

My decision is the same as yours. Lightroom 5.7 for organising Alien Skin Exposure X and Luminar as my go to plugins for image enhancement. Best of both worlds.

SusanFromVermont Loc: Southwest corner of Vermont

Consider that "fear" has many levels of intensity. Not all of it is the "quaking in your boots" type. People often resist different types of changes, and for different reasons.

SusanFromVermont Loc: Southwest corner of Vermont

You are right about the price increases, and this change has also caused me to evaluate other software. But for now I am happy to continue with the Adobe CC subscription partly because of the access to PS CC, which was the main reason I subscribed. However, as other software choices continue to improve they may very well become my future choice if the price goes up any more. Hopefully Adobe will take note of this and act accordingly.