I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 and $2,500 adjusted for inflation if you still trust the BLS' CPI calculations.
If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.
We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.
Still using Photoshop CS3 for my daily image-editing needs in Windows 11 on my Framework Laptop 12. Mostly cleaning up album art for my music library metadata and cleaning up my flatbed scans (removing damaged spots, fixing UV fade, hiding the glare from the scanner passing a horizontal light over something that has been creased for years (like a DVD/BD case sleeve), etc.
For regular, undiscounted prices the subscription prices were somewhat fair. Regular Photoshop CS5 was $700, or $1000 for the extended version. And $200 to upgrade. Now it's a $300/year subscription.
But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student
There is a massive amount of criticism around textbook pricing, especially since they include licenses for the software you need to do your homework. Adobe and text book publishers are both inexcusably exploitative.
In my circles it is regular and routine for students to use an older edition, pirate, and/or use library copies. Many students literally can’t afford to buy the books at list price and find other ways to manage.
course materials packages, lab books, lecture slides, published in house by the prof/instructor/lecturer.
or, someone in the cohort copies and disseminates from textbook[s].
copyrightist would have to put an investigator, in the institution to break it up, but ive never heard of that beyond monitoring library usage of photocopiers.
I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against paying companies for their software, but it is clear that the conflated subscription models/licenses have come at a cost to their reputation.
ProgeCAD seems to be a viable alternative lately. I have heard positive reviews from a perfectionist that does _a lot_ of telecom-related projects in it after years of AutoCAD.
We all love to hate on Adobe. But as a photographer my primary software tool is Lightroom. And I continue to use it despite its $120/year price and less-than-stellar cataloging subsystem because its photo editing features (it's primary mission) still exceed the capabilities of its competitors.
I don't see anyone else here talking about the huge strides that Adobe has taken in the past few years with their masking tools in particular. Adobe is still the leader at least in this segment because their tools are still the leaders functionally.
If competitors want to leapfrog Adobe, they're going to have to continue to innovate past Adobe in functionality, not just price. After all, that price isn't really that onerous: their photographer's suite (Lightroom and Photoshop) are together only $120 year. That's not free, but it's not so much that I'm willing to make my job as a photographer harder or less effective because of it.
$120 a year for professional use is dirt cheap.
My daughter is a graphic design student and gets a free CC ride during her studies. If she would have to pay for the apps should would have a hard time.
What bothers me is that the school doesn't allow students using open source software. They're all locked in the closed ecosystem and keep their students in software jail too.
$120/year is cheap, but note that most of the other individual application plans cost at least as much as the $240 Lightroom/Photoshop bundle ($240/year for Acrobat Pro, $264/year each for Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, etc.).
This adds up quickly if you even ocassionally use more than a couple Adobe apps, especially as month-by-month pricing, where available, is considerably more expensive (e.g., $414 annualized for the $264/year products; not to be confused with the monthly pricing listed on the main page, which requires an annual commitment).
They also make it difficult to find the basic all-apps plan (Creative Cloud Standard) unless you know it exists, as the main pricing page[1] only lists a pricier plan (Creative Cloud Pro) that adds AI credits, web apps, and mobile apps and doesn't even mention the less expensive plan.
As a non-photographer, more of a hobby tinkerer type user that has used Adobe products for decades and has never even earned a single dollar off them or their derivatives, the prices are onerous and there's no license that matches my usage. That's my only complaint really. I dabble in all types of media for the fun of it. While I may only use a product occasionally, sometimes not even once a year, on occasion I want to animate, photoshop, edit video, audio, or they have a new app that I want to just tinker with (Firefly, etc). So I wish I could just pay some usage based rate that worked out reasonable on cost because when I look at my last ~10 years or so there's only about 100 hours a year I spend tinkering with these products. I don't think they care about people like me, but I think it's possible that I represent a pretty large potential market.
If you can afford it, that is wonderful. For those who either cannot afford it or who don't need its features, then be happy that the competition is stepping up. They get the software they need. You get the software you need.
I've never really understood why people insist that there can be only one or two products per software category, particularly when the category has a large enough customer base to support multiple products from multiple vendors.
no one is insisting there are can only be one or two products per category.
Rahter, at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month, that's two coffees, A MONTH!
I bought Affinity Photo at one point, when it was $50. Then I tried to use it for a work project where I needed to do a minor edit to 150 photos. I figured out how to do it but it's workflow was tedious. At 3 mins per photo it would have taken me 7.5 hours. I paid Adobe the $120 and got it done in 1.5hrs. Those 5 hours of my life were worth far more than the $120 I paid to Adobe.
I'm not saying you should buy Photoshop or Lightroom. Rather, I'm just making the point that spending money on a good solution should not be seen as a failure. Lightroom is designed around editing lots of photos. It has tons of batch processing features and it's UI is designed to make it easy to edit lots of photos in minimal time. I'm not saying there isn't a better design, maybe there is, but so far I haven't personally run into it so I stick with Lightroom because it gives me my life back. All for the price of 2 coffees a month
Doesn't seem any worse than deciding whether paying a huge sum upfront is worth the value in the long run. The old way wasn't like that though, it was 90% of users pirating Adobe.
I'm not sure how what Adobe insists on is at all relevant.
Reality informs us that there have always been competitors in the field: GIMP, DarkTable, ACDSee, Luminar, and many others.
It's surely true that their existence has been pushing Adobe to improve. And the good news for everyone is that they have: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are improved products now, and so are those other competitors.
I don't pay for $5 coffee. I make my coffee at home, from my own grind, with just some half and half. Sure, I splurged and paid for maybe a $100 grinder or something, but that is being used for years, meaning the cost per cup is abysmal.
What does this mean, exactly? "We" didn't normalize it. People sold it for that - because they also have to pay rent, labor, etc - and people said "sure, that works for me, especially since I like the coffee you're making, I'll likely hang out here a while vs getting something cheaper elsewhere."
You can still get cheaper elsewhere.
Nobody "normalized" that, it just happened. You could say it's weird that people didn't complain, but... well, they did? It's a cliche at this point. But for a lot of people it's cheap enough to be fine ($5 is not a life-changing amount to add into your savings even if you're avoiding it once a day). If you really think it's a ripoff and nonsensically high, open your own coffee shop to make a killing?
Hell, if someone comes out with a super-amazing Lightroom replacement I'd be more likely to move to that than I would be to start avoiding coffee shops. Even though I spend more money on the coffee than on Lightroom. But the most viable option I ever saw has been abandoned for over a decade and only ran on Macs in the first place.
Yeah if the alternatives were actually better, we wouldn't hear all this complaining about Adobe's pricing. People want the best thing for free/cheap I guess.
Way back when the only real LR competitor was Aperture. I moved to LR when Apple discontinued Aperture, though I really wish they hadn't. I've tried all the competitors multiple times but keep coming back to LR for my DSLR usage.
I switched to Capture One, which at least offers perpetual licensing, but their pricing has become sufficiently annoying that I plan to look very closely at DaVinci Resolve's new photography features as soon as I have time (I already use Resolve for video and have a paid license for it, and in fact have have considered using it for photography in the past because it has a much better UI for nondestructive editing than any image editor I've seen).
Eh, Lightroom didn't exist when Apple released Aperture. OS X had been well supported for a couple years at that point, and Apple never went for Photoshop directly.
Agreed. Lightroom is still a great package. The alternatives are either way less powerful, hard to use (looking at darktable), or cost even more (like Capture One). The AI masking in Lightroom is fantastic. There is almost no need for Photoshop anymore.
Capture One might cost more, but it's a one off payment. I'm still happily using CO11 (8 or 9 years old?) and if it was good enough for professional use when it came out, it's more than enough for me now.
How are you paying $120/year for the Photography bundle? It's been $20/mo for at least a year now, I think. $30/mo if you're going truly month-to-month.
People absolutely COULD design something better, but if there is a lesson that I have seen replayed across the internet over the last 20 years is that adobe users, only want adobe, they dont want anything else.
They want the shortcuts exactly the same, the screens exactly the same, the outputs exactly the same.
They simply dont accept anything else, it basically needs to be a carbon clone copy to keep them happy, and in that case, why bother writing software, you dont win those users, and there is MANY of them.
The issue is 95% of users dont use the features that adobe is so much better at. I've moved from PS to Pixelmator and there are even more moving from PS to Canva. Doesnt matter to most users that PS generative fill is better.
Whether you need masking or such level of tools is dependent on how you approach photography. You can change your method of taking photos to remove such a need for editing.
There's a kernel of truth here. But it's not true in the general case.
Others have responded about dynamic range and HDR, and that's one area where a particular feature set is necessary for certain kinds of photography.
Astrophotography and macrophotography both very nearly require focus-stacking abilities.
There's certainly a lot of photography you can do with just a camera, or with just a camera and very basic editing tools.
But having advanced tools opens up a whole world of possibilities. Those aren't all going to be things that everyone wants or needs to do. But there's a huge number of artists who will want or need some of them.
Being at the right place at the right time is more important than your equipment 80% of the time. Predict the composition and lighting and you don't need to do anywhere near as much editing.
Ha ha good luck doing that reliably with wide-angle underwater photography. You're always moving around, conditions are constantly changing, and wildlife is inherently unpredictable.
I mean yes. But the advent of exposure / focus bracketing lifted the dynamic range limit for most cameras. The only other way, at least for landscape I see is to buy expensive ND filter plates or invest into a camera with more dynamic range.
This is so wrong, on so many levels, that I don't even know where to start.
There are plenty of potential photographs that even modern sensor (or film) technology just can't do, like with questions of dynamic range. There are opportunities for cleaning up noise and sharpening to create a technically-better image. There are reasons beyond count for compositing of different kinds.
But most importantly, supporting the artist's efforts to achieve their vision is the whole point. If someone vision can't be achieved either with their physical toolset, or with their suite of tools, why should they limit themselves?
You’ll never try a different product anyways so who cares about Adobe die hards? This might as well be a thread about using Linux and all the Apple die hards come here to tell us they just can’t use anything besides Apple for “reasons”. Great! Enjoy your setup.
Not GP, but as a LR user, I actually did try alternatives and wasn't impressed. They're usually just as expensive, except if you expect to use the software for multiple years without upgrading, which, to GP's point, would have had you miss out on quite substantial improvements.
I'm a hobbyist, and the new "AI" masking has saved me a lot of time during my edits. Is it as good as a professional path tool wielder? Probably not, but that's not relevant to my use case.
I abandoned LR a long time ago due to an issue with my Adobe subscription, and stuck with Capture One since then. To be honest I much prefer Capture One's workflow and tools, never felt I missed LR even though I had used it for 10 years prior.
Have you vetted them? They are all the same. Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms. So does dcraw. In terms of the editing tooling they all can do the same things. They all have the same library management affordances. Ps has been feature complete in my eyes for over a decade might as well pirate it and not spend $1200 a decade for the same couple functions you actually use.
Obviously I haven't tried all competitors, but I have tried many over the years. Some of them have innovations, some of them are crap.
Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms.
I've seen this argued before. It's clear that they're different, but it's far from clear that LR's are wrong. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste and style, or perhaps I've learned to take photos with an informed understanding of what will result, but I still get photos that win awards, and that people pay money for, through LR.
They all have the same library management affordances.
They don't and if you wanted to argue on this set of features, it would probably be your strongest argument. Lightroom's library management is barely sufficient; some competitors have clearly surpassed them here.
But in photo editing, the field is NOT all the same. Some competitors offer a different approach allow the artist to think about their images in a different way, and that may lend itself to better results, or easier results, for certain styles (Luminar comes to mind here). But in other ways - notably Adobe's advances in "AI" masking (I think it's really "ML" masking) - LR is head-and-shoulders above the competition. These differences make it worth the money, at least for my skills and style.
Every time I see one of these HN threads, I am actually amazed with what Adobe was able to pull off. I'm not surprised that they could do this to pros who were used to a particular workflow. In fact, for some businesses, a subscription may have some benefits. You were probably upgrading regularly anyway, and the only downside is that it's an expense you can't cut back on in a lean year.
But there are so many hobbyists, including here HN, who just went with it and have given Adobe thousands of dollars over the past decade just to keep using Lightroom or Photoshop! It just boggles my mind. There was a brief period where you had no good alternatives - GIMP wasn't it - but for almost all hobby needs, you now have very good pay-once options (e.g., Capture One instead of Lightroom). It's basically a monthly fee you pay for not having to think about the problem, and people are willing to pay it for many years.
Makes me think I should be doing more bait-and-switch...
There isn't really a good alternative for After Effects, despite its flaws. There are other motion graphics tools, but they're usually missing enough functionality that you eventually go crawling back to Adobe.
Now that software development is apparently solved, can someone please build a GPU-accelerated version of After Effects? Every motion designer in the world would make the switch over night.
I'm not sure how many occasional LR users there were/are. Either it's software someone needs to manage their non-phone photo library plus editing or not. Those type of people are also likely to upgrade every year. So if you compare pricing you need to compare to also upgrading every year. In that case the subscription was pretty close in price.
As far as competitors, there are certainly other editing options. The number of real competitors quickly shrinks if you include DAM + editing. And LR's editing has made huge strides on top of something that was already top notch.
I think that's a goofy take. It's two coffees everywhere. Every other software vendor is trying to move to the subscription model. If you add up all the licenses you need to do work, have hobbies, or procrastinate (Netflix, Spotify, etc), is it still two coffees a month?
I know many folks who make $500k+ a year in the SF Bay Area and complain about affordability, and to a large extent, it's stuff like that that makes them poorer.
Also, my point is that there's nothing inferior about solutions such as Capture One, at least not as far as hobby workflows go.
> I know many folks who make $500k+ a year in the SF Bay Area and complain about affordability, and to a large extent, it's stuff like that that makes them poorer.
You don't have to make absurd extrapolations to make your point. Even with 20 subscriptions at $20/mo, that's $400/mo or $4800/yr, about 2% of net income.
I've tried the alternative for Photoshop and came out unimpressed. It's even worse for Illustrator, and I hate this software.
They're not perfect. I don't like the pricing either or their attitude. Still, After Effect, Illustrator, Indesign are very good. I'm not ripped off with the suite at the end...
I have the same issue with Maxon and Zbrush: nothing is close, but it's still the best at what it does.
We have an even worse company around: Autodesk. And they have competition in the CAD, 3D creation world (that they tried to destroy, but Blender changed the game and Houdini is another world)... but not so much around Revit. Architect would destroy them if they could. But no alternative works.
So let's not insult user here: people tries the alternative. They're not good enough. They're worse.
Yeah a bunch of people promised me GIMP is just as good as Photoshop. Look I'm glad GIMP exists and thankful for the free software, but it's not even close to equal.
It’s so insidious to sell yearly subscriptions that you pay for monthly. I want to pay by the month precisely because I decide on a monthly basis whether I need a service. If you want out early with Adobe you have to cough up half of the remaining subscription time.
For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. I’ll pour one out for the pro’s.
> For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler.
Meh. It depends on how you view your photography.
I'm a Sunday photographer. Never made a dime from my work, and I don't look to. I just do it because I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy that I can use it as an excuse to move my ass away from my computer, walk around town to grab shots, etc.
I like editing my photos, but the editing is not why I take photos. I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time to learn a new tool. It's a hobby, and the software is only an accessory to it. If I have to spend hours to learn a new tool in front of my computer, it defeats the purpose.
I tried Darktable, and got okish results with it, but it's a pain to use. It doesn't have any serious noise reduction, and since I can't be bothered to lug around anything heavier than a m4/3 body with an f/4 lense, it's something I need, because I mainly shoot at night half the year.
I've looked at alternatives like capture one, but unless you intend to not upgrade your software for at least 3-4 years, they're not cheaper, even though they're not subscription based. You also have to cough up all the money upfront. And you get no Photoshop, either, which I use in addition to LR.
Now, I don't love lightroom. I have no idea wtf it lags when I open and close panels on a pretty hefty desktop. But boy, do I love the time I gain with "ai" masking, noise reduction and object removal.
All in all, it's just not expensive enough to make it worth my while to change to a different software and also lose all my catalog history, just to cough up the same amount of cash in the end.
Now, if someone came up with an actual equivalent that ran on Linux, so I didn't have to have a dedicated Windows box just for this, I'd line right up with my money ready.
Yeah and seems the only limitation you get is no GPU acceleration with the free tier. I'd give that a spin I like resolve much better than premiere for video and it has AI integration as well
Yeah, I saw the thread on HN the other day, and was genuinely intrigued. But according to the reviews I’ve seen, the workflow is fairly different. I have 0 experience editing video, so picking up a tool with a completely different approach isn’t exactly appealing, but maybe I’m missing something.
I'm biased as I have been editing video (including color, exposition, curves and luts) with Resolve for a while (and have edited pictures in their color editor before because I really like their workflow), but for what it's worth I would give it maybe one (1) hour of trying out yourself, you might be very pleased ( or you're welcome to curse me for wasting an hour of your time).
If you are pleased indeed, you might just put 120$ in your pocket rather than adobe's this year. Who'd say no to that?
I struggle to think of it as insidious. The problem you have is you're reading it wrong. There is no monthly licence. It's an annual licence that you can either pay up front or split, either way, you need to pay.
In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only needed it for a month? What happened when just a year later Photoshop 4 came out? Tough.
I get that software subscriptions suck, but it's the compromise that makes it both affordable to you in your life, and affordable to Adobe.
It’s insidious because you’re being required to agree to pay for a year of use, split monthly, but cannot decide to cancel during the term of the agreement without paying for use that you don’t want. Just because the terms are clear doesn’t mean it’s not an insidious pricing scheme.
If it were not insidious, it would be easy to answer the question: “what costs for adobe are being covered by the early termination fee?” - but there aren’t any costs, the fee is a punishment to dissuade you from cancelling and hoping that you will miss the window to prevent automatic renewal.
I can understand not wanting to pay Adobe every month, but the commercial reality would require a month-long contract would have to be extraordinarily expensive, to offset the people who do only need it occasionally who'd otherwise be on an annual contract.
Is that predatory? Maybe, but is it worse for those users than only offering the $1k package they used to? Of course they're trying to get you hooked, pricing at a point to minify budget issues, and recurring year-round to avoid expense approvals. Educational licenses also pretty predatory.
Don't get me wrong, they want your money; as much of it as they can extract. You don't have to play the game if you don't want to.
You are paying less monthly if you commit to annual pricing, if not, you can still pay monthly pricing which is higher. Commitment means you will likely be a paying customer for a year at the least and hence company gives you a discount. What’s the insidious aspect? The whole thing can be confusing, yes, but it does what it says.
Subscription pricing just sucks. I want to rewind back to the past where you bought software one time, and that was it. You had no further relationship with the vendor. You aren't paying them periodically to "keep it working." You don't need them to keep a server running. You aren't tethered to them providing them "metrics" and "telemetry." You don't have to worry that the software is suddenly going to change out from under you or get silently "updated." Updates suck--don't justify subscriptions "because you have to keep paying your engineers to keep fiddling with the software." I don't want them fiddling. I buy a hammer once. I use it until I die or it breaks.
I'm a Darktable user and Affinity mobile user. I was pretty happy with both.
I was using Affinity for quick edits. I happily paid for their software as it's worth what they were charging for and not subscription based.
Then it was bought and Canvas decided to release it for free. What sounds like good news, for me it's concerning: Companies need to make money. If users are not paying, well, they might actually be the product the company sells: either with ads or intelligence. I hate ads as much as I hate my data being harvested, so I'm out now.
A couple of weeks ago I found what seems to work for me now: I bought a tablet capable of running Fedora and Darktable, and that's what am using now.
Adobe won’t be hurt by this in the professional market because they have inter-app compatibility and a somewhat consistent language, plus you need their software to work with legacy files. Adobe is cheap, you can get the full suite for a very reasonable price. Competing software is always niche and you need to learn each one individually as they don’t share UX principles nor ontologies. They might be free now, but imagine managing individual subscriptions for each one later on; a nightmare for individuals and companies alike. Just needing to sign-up for multiple apps individually is a headache, all the emails and updates, etc. Unless someone makes a comparable and comprehensive suite, they won’t be actually competing with Adobe.
Photopea is great but I switched to Pixelmator Pro. I just paid $49.99 one time. It's a clean native app. It doesn't install all these horrors of horror on my system like Photoshop did. It doesn't try to pressure me into using some half baked AI tool. (I mean could you imagine what that must be like being an artist who hates AI and Adobe shoves it in your face?) I can't believe I was paying $40/month for Photoshop for so long. Thankfully I got all my money back and more by shorting Adobe's stock. After spending so many years drinking unicorn blood, no software company deserves to fall more. Everyone who invested in them, hoping to get rich off torturing artists and tax payers, deserves to lose their money too.
I did exactly the same, for creating graphics / posters. Love Pixelmator... is PS better at some stuff? For sure, but it's not stuff I need. Thats adobes issue.
Adobe does fine despite there being plenty of alternatives to their products and the relative ease of switching to them. Microsoft does fine because they have a captive audience to abuse.
For a long time, "pro" software was able to retain its price premium, even while consumer apps essentially all became free.
But two things are happening: First, competitors are realizing pro software can be a "loss leader" for a different offer (see: Blackmagic Resolve, Canva's Affinity suite).
Second, AI is making it possible to create open source alternatives that are very full-featured. Blender is a pre-AI example, but we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year.
I'm not moving away from Lightroom yet, because I have a massive catalog containing 20+ years of photos. But new users coming into the ecosystem have far more options now. It's a tough time to charge a subscription for something that's getting actively commoditized.
Ran into rapidraw yesterday looking for rust RAW processing (was looking for libraries or CLI tools but taking inventory as I went). Ran into rapidraw, which notably is GPU accelerated: https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw#rapidraw
The recent updates list is so impressive. Good steady stream of updates. And a good number of them take and integrate amazing incredible open source models, doing one shot depth processing, object detection, infill painting, denoising.
Since 2005, I’ve owned or subscribed to Adobe Photoshop suite of products in some fashion. 6 months ago I canceled everything, worrying that I’d miss Illustrator the most. I don’t.
The pushback has felt inevitable for a while now. Adobe's transition to a pure subscription model frustrated a lot of casual/freelance users, but it was really their recent terms-of-service shifts and aggressive cloud integrations that alienated the power users. It's exciting to see viable competitors finally taking market share.
For reference, the Creative Cloud Pro Suite (formerly All Apps) is US$1,259.88 per year at $104.99 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a non-refundable, non-cancellable 1 year contract.
Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $659.88 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)
Photoshop is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock
Lightroom is $215.88 / year or $143.88 / year if you lock
PS + LR is $359.88 / year or $239.88 / year if you lock
After Effects is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock in
Acrobat is $419.88 / year or $299.88 / year if you lock in
* EDIT (pasted in the wrong monthly price): Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $82.49 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)
Also the Reader has become so bloated and ugly that I abandoned it for the tiny SumatraPDF that starts faster than a blink of an eye and displays PDFs for reading very nicely. I don't need all that features which Adobe stuffed within Reader, only sometimes I miss the digital signature panel. I do hope, however, that Sumatra will add digital signature verification at some point. Fingers crossed.
These threads remind me of the MS threads. Just like MS doesn't care about home users, Adobe doesnt care about hobbyists. Unless you're a professional graphic designer, you're probably using less than 1% of its capabilities and frankly have a pretty worthless opinion on it. "Well I'm a software dev and I use Lightroom so I kinda know what I'm talking about". No, you don't.
People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option.
Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive.
Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.
Yeah, Adobe should be afraid because... checks notes... had the government not intervened, the "creative software industry" would willingly have sold out to Adobe completely years ago, and so there would be no "war" on them. Rally the troops.
There should be a way where I can use these tools using MCP so that I don't have to learn the particulars of how the tool behaves and what options they expose.
There are whole certficiations and tutorials for Adobe lightroom, photoshop etc. If I know what I want to achieve, I should be able to interact with an LLM and figure it out. Massive boost for me tbh.
I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee?
I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.
Paywall at the Verge? I have them in my RSS feeds and load articles most days and have never seen that. I definitely don't subscribe to their site. Either way, here's a link:
Their articles seem to load fine in my reader (Fluent) if I fetch them as they're published. Beyond that though, if I try to fetch the full content or open the article in my browser, I hit the paywall. It seems like either their paywall takes a few minutes to apply to their new articles or they deliberately make them accessible to RSS users fee-free.
acdsee, at least a few years ago when I was using it for large volume jpg commercial work, is fast and often good enough. The trickier stuff went for a spin in Photoshop.
Lots of photo editing workflows could be done in something like digital fusion which is free. You just have to use roto instead of painting masks, but the procedural graph workflow is more precise. It would also handle anything in a numbered sequence automatically so batch processing is trivial.
All of the software is to expensive for hobbyists.
How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?
Most of us start off as pirates and then go legitimate once we're big enough to work with others. Everybody knows someone who has a cracked version of some ancient version of Corel Draw, but we all know getting contracted under a big company means they want us using the latest file type standards because they'll only have access to the newest version of the file's publishing program. I know some people who still animate in Flash MX and go through all of the trouble of porting it forward to Animator CC 2025. Thought with Adobe killing Animator last month maybe they'll end up with some even more convoluted upconversion chain to get it into Toonboom.
lol adobe has fought off these tool for years, sadly it's just better and i hate it. Adobe's real threat is generative AI. While it's not there yet it will be. I should mention I'm a creative professional.
* anyone who thinks Maxon is any better than adobe should re-think that. They really hosed Z-Brush users
There was a memo floating around Adobe a couple years ago speculating that their AI features may well make many of their customers redundant. An interesting way to cannibalise your own business.
Are there any projects focused on getting 'creative' software to work well on Linux? Valve solved Linux gaming but it seems tools like DAWs and video/photo editing is still terrible on Linux.
If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.
We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.
Were you able to get the DRM-free “offline” CS3 installers during the time they were offered? I will cherish mine forever lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24865636
Still using Photoshop CS3 for my daily image-editing needs in Windows 11 on my Framework Laptop 12. Mostly cleaning up album art for my music library metadata and cleaning up my flatbed scans (removing damaged spots, fixing UV fade, hiding the glare from the scanner passing a horizontal light over something that has been creased for years (like a DVD/BD case sleeve), etc.
But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student
or, someone in the cohort copies and disseminates from textbook[s].
copyrightist would have to put an investigator, in the institution to break it up, but ive never heard of that beyond monitoring library usage of photocopiers.
It's almost like I could drop out, work on campus and read books at the library for free. I just wasn't Good Looking Will Hunting.
I don't see anyone else here talking about the huge strides that Adobe has taken in the past few years with their masking tools in particular. Adobe is still the leader at least in this segment because their tools are still the leaders functionally.
If competitors want to leapfrog Adobe, they're going to have to continue to innovate past Adobe in functionality, not just price. After all, that price isn't really that onerous: their photographer's suite (Lightroom and Photoshop) are together only $120 year. That's not free, but it's not so much that I'm willing to make my job as a photographer harder or less effective because of it.
What bothers me is that the school doesn't allow students using open source software. They're all locked in the closed ecosystem and keep their students in software jail too.
This adds up quickly if you even ocassionally use more than a couple Adobe apps, especially as month-by-month pricing, where available, is considerably more expensive (e.g., $414 annualized for the $264/year products; not to be confused with the monthly pricing listed on the main page, which requires an annual commitment).
They also make it difficult to find the basic all-apps plan (Creative Cloud Standard) unless you know it exists, as the main pricing page[1] only lists a pricier plan (Creative Cloud Pro) that adds AI credits, web apps, and mobile apps and doesn't even mention the less expensive plan.
[1] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html
I've never really understood why people insist that there can be only one or two products per software category, particularly when the category has a large enough customer base to support multiple products from multiple vendors.
Rahter, at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month, that's two coffees, A MONTH!
I bought Affinity Photo at one point, when it was $50. Then I tried to use it for a work project where I needed to do a minor edit to 150 photos. I figured out how to do it but it's workflow was tedious. At 3 mins per photo it would have taken me 7.5 hours. I paid Adobe the $120 and got it done in 1.5hrs. Those 5 hours of my life were worth far more than the $120 I paid to Adobe.
I'm not saying you should buy Photoshop or Lightroom. Rather, I'm just making the point that spending money on a good solution should not be seen as a failure. Lightroom is designed around editing lots of photos. It has tons of batch processing features and it's UI is designed to make it easy to edit lots of photos in minimal time. I'm not saying there isn't a better design, maybe there is, but so far I haven't personally run into it so I stick with Lightroom because it gives me my life back. All for the price of 2 coffees a month
Before it was a subscription, you bought a version and could use _that version_ in perpetuity, possibly with some number of well-defined upgrades.
If you didn’t want to upgrade, your software still worked. The value proposition of the software was clear.
Now I need to decide whether paying the subscription, possibly forever, is worth the value. This just feels bad.
Reality informs us that there have always been competitors in the field: GIMP, DarkTable, ACDSee, Luminar, and many others.
It's surely true that their existence has been pushing Adobe to improve. And the good news for everyone is that they have: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are improved products now, and so are those other competitors.
Basically, it's the Microsoft Office of print and visual media.
It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.
What does this mean, exactly? "We" didn't normalize it. People sold it for that - because they also have to pay rent, labor, etc - and people said "sure, that works for me, especially since I like the coffee you're making, I'll likely hang out here a while vs getting something cheaper elsewhere."
You can still get cheaper elsewhere.
Nobody "normalized" that, it just happened. You could say it's weird that people didn't complain, but... well, they did? It's a cliche at this point. But for a lot of people it's cheap enough to be fine ($5 is not a life-changing amount to add into your savings even if you're avoiding it once a day). If you really think it's a ripoff and nonsensically high, open your own coffee shop to make a killing?
Hell, if someone comes out with a super-amazing Lightroom replacement I'd be more likely to move to that than I would be to start avoiding coffee shops. Even though I spend more money on the coffee than on Lightroom. But the most viable option I ever saw has been abandoned for over a decade and only ran on Macs in the first place.
They failed to commit, and often let their tools languish, despite the following. Odd.
Once Adobe finally committed to supporting the new platform, it wasn't as necessary anymore.
Try this out, free too
They want the shortcuts exactly the same, the screens exactly the same, the outputs exactly the same.
They simply dont accept anything else, it basically needs to be a carbon clone copy to keep them happy, and in that case, why bother writing software, you dont win those users, and there is MANY of them.
“You mean I have to go to adoby.com and not adobe.com to download? Forget it. It am out.”
https://sites.google.com/view/gatorcam/home
Others have responded about dynamic range and HDR, and that's one area where a particular feature set is necessary for certain kinds of photography.
Astrophotography and macrophotography both very nearly require focus-stacking abilities.
There's certainly a lot of photography you can do with just a camera, or with just a camera and very basic editing tools.
But having advanced tools opens up a whole world of possibilities. Those aren't all going to be things that everyone wants or needs to do. But there's a huge number of artists who will want or need some of them.
I don't think too many people manage to get a wildlife, landscape, astro, macro or night shot so well exposed that no editing is needed.
There are plenty of potential photographs that even modern sensor (or film) technology just can't do, like with questions of dynamic range. There are opportunities for cleaning up noise and sharpening to create a technically-better image. There are reasons beyond count for compositing of different kinds.
But most importantly, supporting the artist's efforts to achieve their vision is the whole point. If someone vision can't be achieved either with their physical toolset, or with their suite of tools, why should they limit themselves?
I'm a hobbyist, and the new "AI" masking has saved me a lot of time during my edits. Is it as good as a professional path tool wielder? Probably not, but that's not relevant to my use case.
Obviously I haven't tried all competitors, but I have tried many over the years. Some of them have innovations, some of them are crap.
Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms.
I've seen this argued before. It's clear that they're different, but it's far from clear that LR's are wrong. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste and style, or perhaps I've learned to take photos with an informed understanding of what will result, but I still get photos that win awards, and that people pay money for, through LR.
They all have the same library management affordances.
They don't and if you wanted to argue on this set of features, it would probably be your strongest argument. Lightroom's library management is barely sufficient; some competitors have clearly surpassed them here.
But in photo editing, the field is NOT all the same. Some competitors offer a different approach allow the artist to think about their images in a different way, and that may lend itself to better results, or easier results, for certain styles (Luminar comes to mind here). But in other ways - notably Adobe's advances in "AI" masking (I think it's really "ML" masking) - LR is head-and-shoulders above the competition. These differences make it worth the money, at least for my skills and style.
But there are so many hobbyists, including here HN, who just went with it and have given Adobe thousands of dollars over the past decade just to keep using Lightroom or Photoshop! It just boggles my mind. There was a brief period where you had no good alternatives - GIMP wasn't it - but for almost all hobby needs, you now have very good pay-once options (e.g., Capture One instead of Lightroom). It's basically a monthly fee you pay for not having to think about the problem, and people are willing to pay it for many years.
Makes me think I should be doing more bait-and-switch...
Now that software development is apparently solved, can someone please build a GPU-accelerated version of After Effects? Every motion designer in the world would make the switch over night.
As far as competitors, there are certainly other editing options. The number of real competitors quickly shrinks if you include DAM + editing. And LR's editing has made huge strides on top of something that was already top notch.
I know many folks who make $500k+ a year in the SF Bay Area and complain about affordability, and to a large extent, it's stuff like that that makes them poorer.
Also, my point is that there's nothing inferior about solutions such as Capture One, at least not as far as hobby workflows go.
You don't have to make absurd extrapolations to make your point. Even with 20 subscriptions at $20/mo, that's $400/mo or $4800/yr, about 2% of net income.
I have the same issue with Maxon and Zbrush: nothing is close, but it's still the best at what it does.
We have an even worse company around: Autodesk. And they have competition in the CAD, 3D creation world (that they tried to destroy, but Blender changed the game and Houdini is another world)... but not so much around Revit. Architect would destroy them if they could. But no alternative works.
So let's not insult user here: people tries the alternative. They're not good enough. They're worse.
It’s so insidious to sell yearly subscriptions that you pay for monthly. I want to pay by the month precisely because I decide on a monthly basis whether I need a service. If you want out early with Adobe you have to cough up half of the remaining subscription time.
For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. I’ll pour one out for the pro’s.
Meh. It depends on how you view your photography.
I'm a Sunday photographer. Never made a dime from my work, and I don't look to. I just do it because I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy that I can use it as an excuse to move my ass away from my computer, walk around town to grab shots, etc.
I like editing my photos, but the editing is not why I take photos. I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time to learn a new tool. It's a hobby, and the software is only an accessory to it. If I have to spend hours to learn a new tool in front of my computer, it defeats the purpose.
I tried Darktable, and got okish results with it, but it's a pain to use. It doesn't have any serious noise reduction, and since I can't be bothered to lug around anything heavier than a m4/3 body with an f/4 lense, it's something I need, because I mainly shoot at night half the year.
I've looked at alternatives like capture one, but unless you intend to not upgrade your software for at least 3-4 years, they're not cheaper, even though they're not subscription based. You also have to cough up all the money upfront. And you get no Photoshop, either, which I use in addition to LR.
Now, I don't love lightroom. I have no idea wtf it lags when I open and close panels on a pretty hefty desktop. But boy, do I love the time I gain with "ai" masking, noise reduction and object removal.
All in all, it's just not expensive enough to make it worth my while to change to a different software and also lose all my catalog history, just to cough up the same amount of cash in the end.
Now, if someone came up with an actual equivalent that ran on Linux, so I didn't have to have a dedicated Windows box just for this, I'd line right up with my money ready.
Edit0: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/...
Yeah and seems the only limitation you get is no GPU acceleration with the free tier. I'd give that a spin I like resolve much better than premiere for video and it has AI integration as well
If you are pleased indeed, you might just put 120$ in your pocket rather than adobe's this year. Who'd say no to that?
Have a good one
In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only needed it for a month? What happened when just a year later Photoshop 4 came out? Tough.
I get that software subscriptions suck, but it's the compromise that makes it both affordable to you in your life, and affordable to Adobe.
If it were not insidious, it would be easy to answer the question: “what costs for adobe are being covered by the early termination fee?” - but there aren’t any costs, the fee is a punishment to dissuade you from cancelling and hoping that you will miss the window to prevent automatic renewal.
Is that predatory? Maybe, but is it worse for those users than only offering the $1k package they used to? Of course they're trying to get you hooked, pricing at a point to minify budget issues, and recurring year-round to avoid expense approvals. Educational licenses also pretty predatory.
Don't get me wrong, they want your money; as much of it as they can extract. You don't have to play the game if you don't want to.
they'd monetize the open air of the earth if they could figure out the logistics
Then I went to look at the image on my drive, and it wasn't there. LR had uploaded it and deleted it from my hard drive!
They broke faith with me with that action, I deleted LR and have never touched it since.
If you use Sony cameras, you should check out Capture One, which (last I tested) has a deft touch with Sony files.
I was using Affinity for quick edits. I happily paid for their software as it's worth what they were charging for and not subscription based.
Then it was bought and Canvas decided to release it for free. What sounds like good news, for me it's concerning: Companies need to make money. If users are not paying, well, they might actually be the product the company sells: either with ads or intelligence. I hate ads as much as I hate my data being harvested, so I'm out now.
A couple of weeks ago I found what seems to work for me now: I bought a tablet capable of running Fedora and Darktable, and that's what am using now.
Prefer evidence from the eyes over noise from the ears.
You need professional PDF creation with profiles, preflight tools, editing capabilities abd form creator tools.
Oh and there is InDesign which is an industry standard. You need compatibility with your clients' pipeline.
So until there is a real competitor for Acrobat and a change in the whole industry, Adobe is unavoidable.
But two things are happening: First, competitors are realizing pro software can be a "loss leader" for a different offer (see: Blackmagic Resolve, Canva's Affinity suite).
Second, AI is making it possible to create open source alternatives that are very full-featured. Blender is a pre-AI example, but we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year.
I'm not moving away from Lightroom yet, because I have a massive catalog containing 20+ years of photos. But new users coming into the ecosystem have far more options now. It's a tough time to charge a subscription for something that's getting actively commoditized.
Do you mind sharing a few examples?
Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.
The recent updates list is so impressive. Good steady stream of updates. And a good number of them take and integrate amazing incredible open source models, doing one shot depth processing, object detection, infill painting, denoising.
And oh by the way the developer is 18 years old.
I worry about the longevity of some of these. Are they going to be free with little further development and just languish?
If I was a graphics shop, I don't think I'd be jumping off Creative Cloud and re-gearing staff to Cavalry and Affinity in too much of a hurry.
Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $659.88 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)
Photoshop is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock
Lightroom is $215.88 / year or $143.88 / year if you lock
PS + LR is $359.88 / year or $239.88 / year if you lock
After Effects is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock in
Acrobat is $419.88 / year or $299.88 / year if you lock in
People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option.
Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive.
Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.
There are whole certficiations and tutorials for Adobe lightroom, photoshop etc. If I know what I want to achieve, I should be able to interact with an LLM and figure it out. Massive boost for me tbh.
I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee?
I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.
https://archive.is/WCDgq
How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?
* anyone who thinks Maxon is any better than adobe should re-think that. They really hosed Z-Brush users