I wish Lightroom was good. I stopped using it because it's incredibly slow. Even on a 32 core Threadripper, things like "list the files in this directory" take seconds. I can't deal with it. Honestly, I would have dealt with it, if Adobe's mandatory extra software weren't so annoying. The installer auto-installs a "cloud drive", and then it's in every Explorer window, slowing down every file operation in the OS... that was the last straw for me. (They promised to remove it, but never did, so I stopped paying for their software.)
Honestly, Lightroom never really worked for me. It made easy things hard and hard things impossible. I take a lot of film photographs, and it just didn't integrate with any of the tools I use to capture the images. I do everything manually in several separate pieces of software, and adding one more didn't help much.
They're buggy and unreliable, and often slow. I'm on a Mac. They're good when they work but they just aren't ready for primetime. Ok, I might be picky, but I have been a photographer for almost 30 years and I invest in tools for long periods, like I'll want ten years of use from a camera, and I'll want an investment in learning software to pay off. I wish that a lot of the FOSS tools actually focused on UX and what users really need.
Throw cores at that particular problem all you want. Throw 64GB RAM at it, and GPU acceleration. Won't help, since that issue is very likely I/O bottlenecked. So it's unfair to blame Lightroom here.
My photos sit on a 5400 RPM, no SSD cache NAS behind 1G LAN. That is incredibly slow compared to local HDD or even SSD. I don't blame Lightroom here. In fact, the software only takes its time when operating on large volumes on that slow connection. CPU-bound tasks have been just fine for me (16k photos catalogue, i7 mobile CPU, 16GB RAM).
I have the same issues as the parent comment (maybe not quite as bad) despite also having a threadripper, 2080ti, 64GB of ram, and my photos living on a 10GbE connected NAS that's gets 1000+ MB/s. Similar issues when I move things into my pcie SSD I use for caching and temp storage.
I work with 8k raw video frequently for my day job and lightroom is by far the slowest app on my system my orders of magnitude.
Not saying that it is the problem here but often IOPS are the bottleneck. Your NAS may read 1GB/s sequentially but if it filled with HDD in RAID it will likely have terrible IOPS. And if you are accessing many pictures all over the platter that may be a problem.
"Note: there is still no alternative to PS, given it's both a raster and a vector editor."
Actually this is the core idea behind Affinity Designer and I use it in my design workflow exclusively.
Using Photoshop or Illustrator at this point in time is simply the power of habit. There are specific functionalities that are better, but in general are non business critical at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPXGLr95nN8
Deneba Canvas[0] is both raster and bitmap and using its own graphics engine is supremely consistent cross platform and the color engine is the Kodak pre-press one of old I've output countless high value advertising pages thru.
I use Affinity Photo instead of Photoshop, though only because I can also use it on my iPad. GIMP is quite good these days, and meets my needs (as someone who is not a hardcore professional artist).
I hope one day Krita developers could improve their vector layers. Krita is already great for raster graphics, but the vector layers is not polished at the same level. But I understand that Krita small workforce can't focus on everything, so the only solution is to either contributewith code or with money to the project.
A few years ago I've tried a couple of alternatives, and Lightroom was by far the easiest to use.
If the audience is casual editing (ie. a short time to improve a photo, and little user skills), I think Lightroom is significantly ahead of the competition - in particular, UX has never been a strong point of open source software.
I don't know if the latest years changed the landscape, but I suppose not - Adobe kept enhancing Lightroom.
License wise... that's definitely another story (I personally preferred when a license was valid for a single major version).
Sadly those mentioned open source products are still light years away from what Lightroom can offer.
It is like comparing Gimp to Photoshop. Yes, they can do some of it, but they can't do it better or even close to that if you are serious at what you do.
I am a developer, I have been Linux user for years and photography is my hobby. I periodically try some Lightroom "alternatives" in hopes of finding something good, but they are still nowhere near of replacing it. And with the limited budget they will probably never be as good.
I know only one great open source software example in the arts field, and that software is Blender. Blender can probably do it because they have been receiving millions in donations from major game development companies in the recent years. Unless something similar happens in the field of photography, I don't think we'll be able to get away from proprietary software soon.
Honestly darktable is more than a replacement for Lightroom for me. However I never liked Lightroom in the first place; Aperture was far superior for my use-case. But I am very comfortable editing photos and I don't go to extremes with editing, and I don't need anything more than what Aperture offered 10 years ago.
Blender looks great but is a bit oddball too (though less so now). I’d also nominate QGIS as a good open-source app (UI). Maybe not “art,” but I think it’s become almost de facto for what a hobbyist will reach for first, and it’s generally quite user-friendly. But they are rare!
More than the interface (which is a matter of taste; I prefer single-window), I refer to the experience as a whole.
I've used only Lightroom (as Adobe product), and it's hard to define what casual editing is, but the basic enhancement functionalities were easy to use, and especially, they were very effective (again, for a casual user).
It had, as far as I remember, very good automatic enhancement, that one could use as a base. The other products I tried weren't so effective. If, as I suppose, this type of functionality requires a significant investment to develop, then it's out of reach for non-very-well-funded open source development.
Dehazing was another typical example of LR functionality: it's stupid simple (a slider), and does effectively what's supposed to do for a casual user.
That really is a perfect example of why Darktable will never (I know, it's a long time) replace Lightroom on macOS at least.
(Most) users are not going to adjust their core working styles - which have been consistent on the Mac platform for 35+ years - to use a piece of software that gives inferior results, just to save $10 / month - which also gives access to Photoshop, for which there is no true replacement in any case.
And as mentioned in the issue you linked it isn't a bug but a feature request to support macOS hotkey conventions. There is a workaround in the meantime documented and a suggestion on how to address the feature request (that requires refactoring of the codebase) on the non-dupe ticket.
Since this is libre software anyone can improve the code along those lines and send a merge request or even commission a developer to do that refactoring; the DarkTable maintainers _didn't_ refuse contributions nor marked it as wontfix however that doesn't mean that the maintainers have development-time to spare in that macOS-specific code.
On the other hand if not using macOS hotkey convention is an example of it being "unusable" then I guess it is really great for something most people don't pay a penny or contribute otherwise for.
Man, this is perfect example of why most open source software has no chance to compete with commercial one.
One day I wanted to improve getting started documentation in open source f.lux alternative for linux, because it didn't work for me in Ubuntu without any visible error. I found the solution investigating terminal logs and did a 5 point write up "How to setup on Ubuntu".
Readme pull request got denied because "only one point applies to Ubuntu" (others were applicable to other distributions, too). Somebody even commented few months later that he found my pull request and it helped him make it work on his machine.
This mostly made me stop contributing to other projects.
Are you saying that every big you report against a commercial software gets fixed? I think you can find all kinds of people equally in both open-source software and commercial software makers.
Even if you only use Photoshop as a raster editor, it can be very hard to find a replacement, depending on your workflow.
Even the latest versions of GIMP and Krita are nowhere near capable of doing the things that I did in Photoshop 2.5 back in the early 1990s. I am not sure what the priorities are of the GIMP devs, but it seems like they aren’t at all serious about making a Photoshop alternative.
Color spaces is the big one—such as Lab and CMYK. I’d also count 16-bit support, since GIMP’s 16-bit support isn’t very good.
The list gets much, much longer when you compare GIMP to newer versions of Photoshop, like Photoshop 5 from 1998. Photoshop 5 completely blows GIMP out of the water in terms of both features and usability, it’s a complete joke.
I don’t use Photoshop any more, and I’ve exited the Adobe ecosystem, but once you’ve used tools like Photoshop, using GIMP feels like swapping your nice DSLR for an old point-and-shoot. Sure, you’re saving a lot of money, but you are constantly reminded that you developed a bunch of skills that you can’t use any more.
As someone who worked with Rawtherapee, it’s without exaggeration that I will say that the tool is _nowhere close_ to ready for serious photo editing. Frequent crashes, poor performance and inability to deal with large RAW files is a dealbreaker.
Huh. Did the ToS / other sale media mention that this was a time-limited feature?
I have seen things like google maps integrations listed with expiration dates on non-subscription software. It's unfortunate for users, but I do think it's reasonable for some of these "depends on a third party" features to expire (or when they change APIs), as otherwise it's implying perpetual upkeep, which will absolutely not happen. It just needs to be communicated... and crashing the program when that occurs is just plain inexcusably bad.
> While many (or even most) photographers have embraced the switch to paying a subscription in exchange for having always-up-to-date apps, some photographers have still been holding out and riding their perpetual versions for as long as possible.
While I feel for the people in the former camp, it’s an interesting conundrum.
Should a company be forced to pay a license for external IP in perpetuity because they once sold licenses the way Adobe did?
If so that will likely only force more businesses down the rabbit hole of subscription services.
Years ago a software contractor in the UK got a criminal conviction for putting a hidden time lock in software he wrote. His intention was not to cause harm, merely to ensure he got paid.
This ought to be treated as a criminal matter. Of course it won't be.
Right, so just put software and services in the paragraph. I doubt this is the license in question, but the warranty terms here https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/lightroom.html are Adobe warrants to the individual or entity that first purchases a license for the Software for use pursuant to the terms of this agreement that the Software will perform substantially in accordance with the Documentation for the ninety (90) day period following receipt of the Software when used on the recommended operating system and hardware configuration.
> Should a company be forced to pay a license for external IP in perpetuity because they once sold licenses the way Adobe did?
This shouldn't require a perpetual license. Adobe should have been able to license the software for as long as they were selling Lightroom 6, with the license expiring when they ceased sales.
This, of course, assumes a sane license. Something is profoundly wrong with your licensing terms if they require the addition of a timed killswitch hidden in software installed on customers' devices.
>Should a company be forced to pay a license for external IP in perpetuity because they once sold licenses the way Adobe did?
Companies shoud mark it with huge red warning letters when they have a time-limited licensed tech in a product they sell you a "perpetual" license for.
I read it as "should business be responsible for decisions it makes" or "should a business satisfy its contractual obligations". I feel it simplifies the matter greatly.
My view as a serious hobby photographer is simple. No Adobe products in my life. Period. There are things that are logical with subscription plan, servers, cloud, collaboration functionality. Designing creative software with dark UX is Adobe business model. In the past their software was highly overpriced but you can have a lifespan of 3-4-5 years with updates. The reason that people are falling in Adobe Subscriptions trap was the notion that there is no alternative. But there is, Affinity, Capture One, Darktable - free, Raw Therapy- free, and more. I have invested in platform independent metadata workflow since Apple killed Aperture and left photographers in Adobe hell. Side note: One of the reasons people to shoot film is the focus on creative process without complicated software relationships. Can you imagine, if you are an artist and your brush "must" have subscription license and suddenly crashes without internet connection? This is the future according to software companies. Services, services, services:)
I bailed on Adobe products a year or so ago. Their CC app is one of the biggest piles of garbage I have ever had to use. Adobe gave me a free month this year. I tried the latest version of PS vs Affinity and uninstalled after a few minutes. The uninstall process took over 30 minutes because for some reason CC itself was broken and had to be reinstalled before being uninstalled. There is zero reason for this.
PS has a lot of good points, but one giant bad one: no real support for multi-threading. I have a 1GB test folder of images that Affinity can resize in 16 seconds. It takes PS one minute and 15 seconds longer to do the same task. Affinity uses all the cores available to it; PS uses only 1.
I have an old copy of CS6 that I use for adding text to photos, and that's all I use PS for anymore, and maybe the occasional touch up. It is small (install is 500MB), does not require CC to manage it, doesn't spam my system with a zillion services and various programs that launch on start up, and it doesn't need an internet connection to install or use.
Adobe is absolutely sitting still and everyone else is in the process of catching up or outright blowing past them in certain areas. Affinity 2.0 will probably be what a modern version of PS would be if Adobe didn't have outright contempt for their customers.
I've been a PS user since if first came out, and was befuddled as to why they changed some keyboard shortcuts. I tried the new version this year and thought something was wrong with my PC or my keyboard. All of the shortcuts are second nature to me, and changing them after all these years for no good reason is a baffling decision.
Adobe won't change their ways because they have massive lock in with professionals everywhere.
"I've been a PS user since if first came out, and was befuddled as to why they changed some keyboard shortcuts. I tried the new version this year and thought something was wrong with my PC or my keyboard. All of the shortcuts are second nature to me, and changing them after all these years for no good reason is a baffling decision."
Capture One is amazing. I tried it at some point and switched to it immediately. It does much more than Lightroom, its layer system is much more flexible, and is faster (and not made by Adobe). I highly recommend it, my Photoshop usage dropped by 90% ever since, since I could do much more in Capture Pro.
CO in my view is the only image editing tool created with "Grading" idea in mind. Colour correction control is amazing. Actually is the best software for photography, the only setback is €349.00 price. :) But LR is €144 per year, so..
My workflow is Fast Raw Viewer for organising and metadata, RAWTherapee for raw processing and Affinity Photo for final touches. Total cost: FRW - 20EUR / RAWTherapee - free/ Affinity Photo - 50EUR - Total: 70 EUR and no strings attached:)
If you only shoot with one camera (or your stable of cameras are all the same brand), you can get a single-platform version of Capture One for $130. Capture One is only super expensive if you need RAW interpreters for multiple camera brands.
Same, I switched 3-4 years ago. My mistake was using LR and never tried something else for long time and wonder why my color grading skill wasn't improved that much. Once I import the same photo to Capture One and grading color the same way I do in LR, I was having a stupid face because it's so much better in anyway in Capture One. It's amazing.
It's wise that they added the heal and clone tools, many people only use those two in PS.
After Lightroom went subscription-only, I tried all the major alternatives (On1 Photo Raw, DxO PhotoLab, Exposure, Luminar, and the open-source DarkTable and RawTherapee) except Capture One, because the camera-specific versions put me off. I came away disappointed; nothing I tried quite seemed to replace what I was missing with Lightroom.
A few months later, I finally decided to demo the Sony version of Capture One, and it clicked instantly.
To be fair, the "proper" use case is based around the Sessions rather than the "throw the Lightroom migrants a bone" database feature that was tacked on later. It was never intended to be an asset manager.
I've got an ancient version of Lightroom (maybe 2010?) that I still use to manage photos on Windows. Feature-wise, it's great, but it is very slow and a little buggy. I've been meaning to try out Darktable since it introduced Windows support around a year ago, but it's difficult to find time to replace something that works :)
"it's difficult to find time to replace something that works"
This is true. My process is hard and time consuming. The only added value is that is independent and can be fully migrated at any time. I use software for 20 euro - Fast Raw Viewer and then add Image Editing of your choice. Check out their suggested workflow: https://updates.fastrawviewer.com/data/pdf/FastRawViewer-Sug...
I've bought 3 versions of lightroom over the years, and I'm still on LR5. Fired it up for the first time in a couple of years, and it's ... not working well. Cropping doesn't focus right on the drag, and some of the commands don't seem to 'take'.
I'm done with Adobe, except for the _tons_ of photos and develop settings that I have in LR from 10 years back.
I do that, too. I also run some 15-ish year-old machining software. I've mostly moved these into VMs with a fossilized OS that works for them.
Between applications that keep getting worse with each revision, subscriptions and other annoyances, I think a lot of my software use will follow this model.
Same here- just put the whole setup in amber like the jurassic-park-fly - store the software at peak performance and keep it there. Bonuspoints if the VM is under Linux, to prevent the OS from sabotaging those efforts.
Ranting on my own comment. There is a clearly biased point of view that "SaaS is the only model of software development that is profitable and valuable". Just stop it. There are valid use cases for SaaS. But if applied in general SaaS is not long term value for customer.
The "old" model of software production is superior because of long release cycle, less bugs and incremental change with respect for established UX.
Having started out with Lightroom on their cheap $10/m plan, I tried a number of different tools and quite honestly, none of them came close. That is, until I purchased a license to Luminar AI. I also tried Luminar 4 awhile back, but it was too slow and clunky to replace Lightroom, but Luminar AI is so. damn. good.
> Adobe’s earnings have been shattering expectations in recent years, sending the company’s stock soaring over 700% over the past half-decade, so the Creative Cloud subscription model has definitely been a savvy switch.
While like many here I prefer other solutions, the marketplace is validating Adobe’s approach.
Rather than the marketplace validating it, I would say that they had no option. I feel Adobe made the switch at the right time when they had no competition. It's not like professionals had any other competing option for LR and Photoshop. They were just using their market power to push consumers to subscription model (not saying whether that was right or not). I doubt they would have been able to successfully do that if they had strong competitors.
The old software development model where users are buying the license for a specific version of a program and then use it and only come back to spend more when they need an upgrade is pretty much dead now. Most software moved to either free downloads with paid support (even Windows these days?) or to membership-based model (Adobe, Office365).
The reason is that as you add features and fix bugs in a software, fewer users need the upgrade (why spend another 150$ on this year's release for some features I never use?). But the development team still needs to be paid and the advanced features they add each year tend to be harder to implement, so over time the costs are increasing while sales go down.
Adobe might be successful with this business model because they have a strong market in professionals but they definitely lost the amateurs and hobbyists.
EDIT to add: also it didn't help that CPUs and OS APIs haven't had major changes in more than a decade. There was no major reason for a large majority of users to upgrade (such as the move to 64 bit CPUs).
> But the development team still needs to be paid and the advanced features they add each year tend to be harder to implement, so over time the costs are increasing while sales go down.
Do they need to? I mean, if users don’t see the value in spending $150 for a few new features they don’t use, that says that maybe the ROI isn’t there for those features.
Think about the marginal value of each hour of developer time.
Value = number of feature’s users across the product’s lifetime * utility of the feature per user / cost to implement that feature.
Early in a product’s lifecycle the features added have high utility (you add the most important features first) and most of your users haven’t bought your product yet. (So features are a long term investment). Marginal expected value is high - assuming you get the sales. Later in a product’s lifecycle the features are more marginal (and often more costly to implement). If users don’t want to pay for the upgrade, what they’re saying is the new features being added aren’t worth the development cost. If the user base is still growing it might still be worth adding those features. But at some point you should entertain the idea that the product is essentially done. The best play might be to move most of the engineers to a new product. Keep a small team which can fix bugs, renew google maps API keys and add ARM support and so on and call it a day. Profit should go up at that point because you should keep getting sales while your costs plummet. Over time sales drop as your old product has sold to most users who want it, and in that time the income can be used to bring a new product to market.
This is the model the video game industry uses (to great effect). Why are we so allergic to the idea of “feature complete” in software?
The alternative is what Adobe does - try to wring ever more money from your customers while providing them less value each year. It’s no wonder customers are desperate for alternatives to their products.
What other option did we have? The ones of us who held out on CS6 had to move on eventually because it got more and more crashy as MacOS went on until it wasn’t really functional at all anymore. Windows users might have better luck.
There are some alternatives but in particular nothing to match After Effects.
It is a very different thing, wether you are responsible IT guy for a +20 seat Agency/Studio, where everything has to run top-notch all the time and everyone is schooled in Adobe from college on.
Or if you are, for instance, a freelance photographer who does wedding cards.
If you are looking for an extremely performant Lightroom alternative, a very common program among professional photographers is Photo Mechanic. I use it and it's stupid fast at rendering RAW images as fast as you can scroll.
I’m happy with my perpetual LR (4.X) license. Obviously I don’t use anything that would need internet access such as a third party API and I understand that anything that relies on a third party API is never really perpetual. I’d be annoyed if a library “expired” crippling my software though.
While I'm not a fan of Adobe, people need to realize that the software industry changed a lot in the last decade. In the past one could write software for an OS such as Windows or Classic Mac and have it working for decades. Nowadays, any software developer will tell you how difficult it is to maintain software even across single digit changes. Companies like Apple, Google, and even MS have forced developers to toil on rewrites year after year to support the new operating systems they release. In the web this is even worse. So I think that the old model of buying software and expecting that it will work for a long time is dead, killed by the process used by big companies. What is left is either well-maintained open source or subscription-based commercial software.
Seeing a lot of comments like this here. Lightroom v6 still seems to work, in spite of what you reference in your comment. This article isn’t about Adobe failing to maintain software, or that Lightroom v6 needs a rewrite. The software still works if you change the system clock.
The software breaking seems to be a licensing issue. Adobe sold customers this software under a perpetual license when Adobe did not have a perpetual license for the libraries they bundled in the sale.
The computer market has never been more consolidated, less diverse and running less operating systems than now. Adobes software runs on the same OSes it ran years ago - Windows and macOS.
Even more so, the software itself has never been less configurable, less flexible and less platform specific. From times where you had adjustable title bars, UI panels and configurable professional UIs we ended up with inflexible, hardcoded layouts with unchangeable fonts and built in HTML filled with recycled JS components that were given to developers for free from others.
And to top all that off, those developers now demand perpetual rent so they don't actually need to show value of updates while they forcefully shove them down our throats with no option to stop.
Lightroom has some critical problems limiting professional use.
* Forced lens profiles. (And more. There are reports of double application of profiles)
* Color and light correction also changes untouched parameters (it's ok but there is no workaround). If you need to do a more accurate job then use C1 or Photoshop.
I recently upgraded to an M1 Mac after my 2016 MacBook Pro died. It's an awesome machine; however, when I tried to install Lightroom 6, I wasn't able to because the installer isn't 64 bit. As a hobbyist who edits photos only a handful of times a year – usually after trips or photoshoots – moving to a subscription model is really costly. What's silly is that I was able to use Lightroom 6 on my 2016 MBP, even after upgrading to Big Sur. I don't blame Adobe for not supporting a product that came out 5 years ago but how nice would it be if they did.
Companies like Adobe don't have much of a reason to cater to these unprofitable use cases. They're going to go deep on maximizing customer lifetime value (CLV) for folks willing to pay more. That's how they keep (or more probably, their only option) for delivering double-digit growth year-over-year, which becomes challenging once reaching a certain size.
Absolutely agreed that it doesn't make much business sense to keep supporting LR6. And 5 years is a long timer in the software world. That said, I wonder if there are companies that do support older versions of software just for the sake of customer delight.
I had a similar issue with 32-bit software with a 16-bit installer. I've solved it by installing it within a VM running a 16-bit compatible OS, then copying the resulting program folder over to the main OS. Have you tried something like this?
There's one photo organization feature I really want that I haven't yet seen in any existing asset managers: a way to group bursted photos together and hide a set of images behind one "representative" image in the main stream, while still making them accessible if necessary. Anyone aware of software that comes close?
I figured out a way to do this in Lightroom using the stacking feature. It's not quite automatic as you need to run a command. Basically, there's a stack-by-time-taken option in a drop down menu and you set a time difference that fits your bursts (which it will save as default for next run).
I use this to auto-stack iOS motion photos with the still version so I just see one item. I set it to auto-stack all media that has a capture time within two seconds of each other. This works for what I need. Sorry, I don't recall the name of the specific menu item. Hopefully, my description is enough to get you in the ballpark (if you use LR).
Any suggestions for an Acrobat alternative that can do simple things such as rotate a PDF or extract a page from it?
I use SumatraPDF as my daily PDF reader but still have to resort to Acrobat for those things. And the latest update (that requires creating an online account!) finally did it for me, I'm sick of Acrobat.
Have you seen their list of applications lately? It's mental. And a language... Kotlin which is doing reasonably well.
I'm a full time user of IntelliJ and I love it.
As much as I agree with you, they best stick to what they do best and keep making it great... Not spreading themselves thin in industries they might not know it all.
Their business models are nearly identical and the different responses to them are interesting in themselves, perhaps suggesting it's not really about the cost or even the tools specifically.
This is not restricted to Adobe Lightroom. Many other companies are ignoring older versions and in some cases the file formats have been changed to force people to update. Symptoms are different but root cause is similar.
I have an older version of Sketch. Due to my use case, not a designer, I have no need to pay them actually. Lately I needed to use it, and none of the new templates work making my paid version of Sketch useless.
At least my old version of Acrobat still works with new and old PDFs.
I can offer some perspective on this because I was a senior employee at Adobe before, during and after the entire transition to Creative Cloud. I was involved in much of the management discussions and decision-making related to the CC transition and business model change.
First, a few "full disclosure" bullets:
* I left Adobe on good terms and still have several current or former employees as acquaintances and friends.
* Based on what I observed during my tenure, Adobe is a quality and ethical company that broadly tries to do right by customers, employees, shareholders, partners, and so on. Obviously, I'm speaking to overall ethos here. Adobe is a big, multi-national, publicly-traded, for-profit company and I'm certainly aware of a few notable exceptions over the years but such ethical lapses have been, to my knowledge, limited to specific individuals, groups or time-periods and not systemic or condoned at the senior management level.
* I still use some Adobe creative tools including Lightroom for my personal needs and pay for them out of my own pocket. I don't make my living or earn income with creative tools. I also personally use some competitor's alternatives as well as open source tools if they suit my needs or preferences.
* While an Adobe employee I earned salary, bonuses, benefits and RSU grants. I worked hard, did well and have personally profited from the increase in Adobe's stock price. I still hold a sizable-for-me stash of fully-vested Adobe shares which I'm in no hurry to sell. I think Adobe is one of the better large tech companies in the valley and I'm happy I accepted their job offer.
With that out of the way... let's get to the meat. Note - I don't intend to share anything I learned while bound by confidentiality per my employment contract. I do intend to speak more frankly than I could while an employee.
* The Creative Cloud value proposition is quite good for creative professionals who earn all or most of their income using two or more of the major applications. Do the math and the subscription pricing works out lower than the old perpetual pricing for the full Creative Suite + bi-yearly upgrades.
* For single application users (except PS+LR), it's not quite as good. It is about equal if you were upgrading every cycle. If you opted to skip perpetual version upgrades sometimes then the subscription pricing is more expensive.
* PS+LR is different because it is offered at a lower bundle price to accommodate the sizable base of hobbyist or aspiring photographers.
* I plan to transition from using Photoshop and Lightroom to alternative tools for my personal needs by the end of next year. (No, I'm not sure which ones yet, there are several pretty good options ranging from open source to for-profit competitors)
* PS and LR are still good products getting good upgrades and Adobe is still a good company. The only thing changing is Adobe's business interests are growing less aligned with my interests as an occasional hobby user. This trend seems unlikely to reverse. Adobe's professional users want powerful professional tools with pro service options. Many of them are willing and able to pay for that. It makes economic sense for them and Adobe. It just doesn't make as much sense for me. I'm an individual retail user buying one year (or month) at a time of Adobe's lowest margin flagship SKU. Most of Adobe's Creative Cloud profit comes from enterprise and agency site licenses sold in multi-year deals by the hundreds and thousands.
* From support costs to sales costs to transaction costs (credit card bill backs and other PITA.) I'm just not as valuable of a customer by weight. Yes, there are companies that choose to cater to retail individual customers. This isn't easy but it can be done profitably if done at large enough scale and built as a core competency.
* It can be argued that Adobe should cut the subscription price to attract much larger scale and make it up in volume. The problem is that this level of powerful tooling isn't needed by casual or occasional users. As an individual home user I don't need the scripting features in PS, SSO, enterprise remote automated installers, and so on. But Adobe's most profitable customers do. Even the neat AI automation features they are spending big R&D on aren't very valuable for me. I don't even do enough to make learning the time-saving AI features worth the effort. But someone who needs to process hundreds of photos could find those capabilities an essential part of their usage.
I don't think this is anyone's fault. If we must place blame, I guess we should pin it on how the stock market values quarterly and yearly progress over 5 or 10 year progress. I hope the Long-Term Stock Market will become a thing but the reality is it won't be soon enough to change this situation. Making a big change now would be seen by Adobe investors as not worth the risk. Adobe's stock is up because they took a steep risk in making the leap to the cloud model. Back before committing to the leap, Adobe management knew it was going to be hard and perilous. Frankly, it was the least bad of the remaining options once it was clear the perpetual + upgrades treadmill was likely to turn into a downward spiral of ever-diminishing returns. Arguably, Adobe is one of the most successful examples of a legacy firm executing that difficult transition in a legacy market and doing so very, very well. They did the work, they are delivering value to a large and profitable segment of customers and monetizing it profitably. That customer just isn't me.
> Why Apple kept Final Cut Pro and killed Aperture is beyond me.
Same.
> Still no news from Affinity LR replacement.
I gave up waiting and when Capture One announced really good integration with Leica’s SL2 (and a SL2 can scan way better than my Coolscan 4000 and cover medium/large formats) I bought their perpetual license. Capture One 21 works for 4 years, I’ll be happy. Anything else beyond that is gravy.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I absolutely hate the SaaS model, the incentives are never in your favor as a customer.
In case anyone is looking to ditch Lightroom I can't recommend the FOSS alternative RawTherapee strongly enough. It's got a number of features I now find indispensable. I particularly find it easy to use to get that nice rounded off highlight quality film has using RT. I made the swap years ago and have never missed LR.
Does it have a good catalog module? I use LR 99% for organization and only do basic touch up. My requirements for a replacement would be an excellent import/export/organizer and a decent raw converter.
A popular path is to ditch Lightroom for the trio of Rapid Photo Downloader, digikam and finally RawTherapee.
This was entirely unusable for me. RawTherepee is only for RAW treatment/export. Digikam can only do photo organization. Now here's the kicker: the two won't talk. Metadata known and written by one is invisible to the other. Using Manjaro, Rapid Photo Downloader eventually started segfaulting on me.
I also tried Darktable which looked much better and much more like a Lightroom replacement, but didn't like it.
So back to Lightroom, and even Windows as a whole, it is for me.
Sorry that you saw segfaults when running Rapid Photo Downloader under Manjaro. I am the developer of Rapid Photo Downloader.
One thing to keep in mind is that Manjaro, similar to Fedora, is bleeding edge. Things break sometimes when running Manjaro or Fedora. That's the nature of a cutting edge distro.
The good news is that things that break are often quickly fixed.
It depends on your workflow I suppose. It has a catalog module that lets you tag images with a color, a star rating and inspect the image easily at 1:1. That's basically all I care about so I have no problems with it. I generally only keep the most recent 100 GB of photos or so locally and I have a decent organization system using folders so I don't lean on it too heavily.
the incentives are never in your favor as a customer.
They weren't really in your favor with the old model either. Adobe used to pile on new features without thought in an attempt to sell upgrades every other year. In the mean time bugs would continue to exist from one release to the next.
Fair enough, I was more thinking at the time I wrote the comment that people's collective decision to enable these business models was the "playing stupid games" aspect. I could have been less grumpy and more clear about it.
Sold for $150, released in April 2015. End of life was Dec 2017. 3 years after that it breaks. Eh.. 5.5 years is a good run. Do people really expect software to work forever after it's reached end of life? Even with Windows updates? And hardware changes? What does "end of life" mean to people if it doesn't mean what the words say?
>Do people really expect software to work forever after it's reached end of life?
Yes, actually. Office 97 still works on windows 10[1].
>Even with Windows updates? And hardware changes?
But neither of them occurred. The software simply stopped working after a certain timespan has passed. If it broke because a because of a OS update that's understandable, but because an arbitrary date has passed, that's less understandable.
I think people buying a “perpetual” licence might not expect it to work forever, but at the same time could rightly expect that it was licenced indefinitely.
If you buy software you expect all the dependencies to be licensed with the same timespan as the product. The issue here is that the dependencies weren’t perpetually licenced, but the software was, which is pretty bullshitty.
The expectation is that if most other variables within your control are held constant, then the software should continue to work... perpetually.
I don't get this idea that people expect this stuff to be temporary. The code itself is eternal and if you can control for changes it should be able to run forever.
Uhh, yes. I don’t expect any product I buy to suddenly stop working, unless it is defective or a wear-and-tear item that is expected to wear out. Software has no moving parts and therefore should not wear out, so it should work until I no longer need it.
Imagine if a hammer had a time bomb that destroyed itself after the manufacturer’s arbitrary “end of life” date. That would be totally unacceptable.
Yeah, I expect software to work for longer than 5 years.
MS works hard to keep software running and I may still have same computer that I had 5 years ago, so why wouldn't it work?
If I ever bought software, yes I'd expect it to work for as long as I have a technically compatible operating system. I'd certainly not expect someone to add code to it that would deliberately break it depending on what year it is.
tl;dr: It seems Adobe may have sold Adobe Lightroom v6 under a perpetual license, but Adobe didn’t have a perpetual license for the libraries they bundled in that sale.
According to the article, Lightroom v6 still works when you change the system clock. And it only breaks when you attempt to use specific plugins after a certain date.
Honestly, Lightroom never really worked for me. It made easy things hard and hard things impossible. I take a lot of film photographs, and it just didn't integrate with any of the tools I use to capture the images. I do everything manually in several separate pieces of software, and adding one more didn't help much.