Subscription software turns editing into an ongoing commitment instead of a one-time decision. When updates add features you don’t want and friction you didn’t ask for, the tradeoff becomes impossible to ignore.
Coming to you from Adam Karnacz of First Man Photography, this blunt video lays out why Karnacz is walking away from Lightroom, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro, then maps the real-world alternatives and the headaches he expects during the switch. He starts with the subscription problem and doesn’t treat it like a minor annoyance. He puts numbers to it, including what the monthly fee has done over a few years, and he frames that spend as a creative tax you keep paying even when your needs have not changed. He also talks about software getting slower after updates, then quietly forcing hardware upgrades just to stay comfortable. If you have ever opened an editor, watched it grind through the same kind of files it handled fine last year, and wondered why your machine suddenly feels old, you will recognize the pattern.
Karnacz also takes aim at features you may not want but still bankroll through the bundle, especially AI-driven tools added across the suite. He shoots landscapes and wants the result to look natural, so his frustration is not theoretical. He raises a 2024 Adobe terms update and the anxiety many people felt about content access and AI training, then leaves the trust question sitting on your desk instead of answering it for you. If you work with client images, private locations, or anything you cannot afford to have misunderstood, the privacy angle hits differently. He is not arguing that every new tool is bad, he is arguing that the direction of the product and the direction of his work no longer match.
On alternatives, he splits the field into “good” and “bad,” and his “good” list is narrow. He points to Capture One and DxO PhotoLab as serious Lightroom replacements, but he is clear about the tradeoffs: learning curve, cost, and the reality that some options still pull you toward subscriptions. On video, he calls out Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve as the practical off-ramp from Premiere Pro, including the idea of testing it without paying first and then moving to a one-time license. Then he pivots to open-source options like darktable, with the warning you should expect complexity rather than a gentle handoff.
The part you should not skip is where he admits what makes Adobe hard to quit even when you want out. He describes being deeply wired into an Adobe workflow, and he gives Adobe credit where it is due, especially around masking and selection speed in Lightroom and Photoshop. He also calls out the legacy problem most people avoid thinking about until it bites them: catalogs, edits, and old project files that do not move cleanly between ecosystems. If your Lightroom catalog is the spine of your archive, migration is not a weekend task. If you have years of Premiere Pro projects, you cannot simply open them somewhere else and expect things to behave the same, so you may have to choose between rebuilding and letting some history go. He connects this to a wider push toward owning your data, self-hosting, and keeping more of your work under your control, including a self-hosted photo system he has been using. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Karnacz.
15 Comments
When you cancel Adobe they send around a couple of tough looking employees to your home, wielding baseball bats and threatening you into renewing your subscription 😉.
"...software getting slower after updates, then quietly forcing hardware upgrades just to stay comfortable. If you have ever opened an editor, watched it grind through the same kind of files it handled fine last year" I'm right at the point of having to replace and upgrade my PC for exactly this reason. I am constantly using Premiere Pro, Photoshop & Audition and at times Photoshop is so sluggish I want to cry...same for Premiere Pro...I recently upgraded my GPU thinking that would suffice but no, the whole system needs an upgrade...it was originally a 2018 build but has had a few upgrades along the way. I no longer do any paid work so it is fast becoming a very expensive hobby. I sometimes wonder if rolling back to earlier but still stable versions would work but the newer versions have definitely made some areas much easier to use with useful features added. I have too many Premiere Pro projects (with their assets) saved that I still use at times to be able to move to Resolve easily...add to that the differences in workflow to learn...I'm in my 70's and have had 3 brain ops so learning new stuff is hard for me.
michael mcdonald wrote a song about this. it's called Sweet Freedom
Dear Adam, i'm delighted to hear all this. I kicked out C1 for the same reason, and didn't go into the subscription model of Adobe - they're raising the price too much.
I did a clean install of Photo Shop 2026 but had compatibility issues. Since I still had PS 2025 installed, I simply uninstalled the newer version.
In an article I published on my website back in 2013, I called "CC" to be "Captive Consumer", not Creative Cloud. I am also one of the captives.
I am posting a link to that article; the moderator should feel free to delete it if it is against your commenting policies.
https://www.keptlight.com/creative-cloud-or-captive-consumer/
Some folks are staunch defenders of Adobe’s subscription model and will often vociferously champion it on forums like this one. I will never understand why they like being captives. To me, it’s bit like turkeys fighting to defend the right to celebrate Thanksgiving.
Well, that person would be me. So how is it any different than being "captive" every month when you continually pay those Internet, mobile phone, water, electric, streaming bills? Asking for a friend.
Here we go again with the weeping and gnashing of teeth about the "Adobe subscription model." I don't get how people think software should be free, as if the company they work for gives out their product for free - sigh! I have seen the same price for at least the last 15 years for the photography plan and I'm still only paying $120 a year for both LRC and PS. That said, what other product out there has remain the same price for that long? People will pay $25 and up a month for their mobile phone and $$50 and up for their Internet and $10 and up for streaming services, not to mention your monthly utility bills that keep going up. And people complain that they are making huge profits (last I checked, that' what companies are in business for), yet Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia have pretty much the largest capitalization on the planet, but no one is crying foul there. But somehow Adobe should not charge or increase their prices for their product - Big Sigh!!
I believe we should be able to choose. I would like to be able to choose to purchase a perpetual licence version of Lightroom, while at the same time allowing others the choice to go for subscription; if that’s what they prefer. Unfortunately, this choice has been taken away from me.
They cannot offer it for free, this is true. I would gladly pay whatever it costs Adobe to produce a standalone version (plus a reasonable profit margin), even if that means me paying more than you do. I know for a fact that they can do this, because they used to do it years ago. And they still made a handsome profit back then. If Adobe offered a perpetual licence version of Lightroom now, I would buy it in a heartbeat. Not everyone needs constant access to updates. I don’t need them.
Apple is a very good example. I have bought several Apple computers over the years. Each time I bought it outright. It was mine to keep. No subscriptions there. And yes, you’re right. Apple is one of the largest companies on the planet. They are managing to do very nicely indeed without having to rely on subscriptions.
You can't buy your Internet or your mobile phone service or your utilities or your streaming services out right, so you're basically subscribing to those services. And yes you do have options to choose, you don't have to use any of Adobe's products, there are many alternatives out there. But to each their own.
That's a false equivalence. Internet and phone service provide ongoing service in the continued connection, providing of data, etc. Buying a piece of software as it is at that moment requires no continued service from the company.
It's still money going out the door on a regular basis. So it's the same to me - a recurring payment. And again, many options out there now, ON1, Affinity, C1 and others. The model works for them and others, soooo, I guess you can hate on them all you want.
Years ago, when I started to venture into digital photography, I started with a Photoshop intro offer that you could upgrade into a full paid license. When I tried to convert, the automated message was that the offer wasn't available and aside from having numerous issues that took me into the Mac OS, I swore off anything Adobe creative. Even in the early 2000s, dick moves were part of Adobe's main act with customers. In Mac, I fell in love with Aperture, but she left, and I jumped into Capture One. I was doing a lot of tethered shooting, and that was a purchase that was updated, and revised every couple of years, so my new license would cost $99 or so, and then they announced in the last year or so, a subscription model. I found Affinity Photo would take care of anything more than editing, but that is changing too. The only thing that doesn't change is change, oh, and that Adobe Corp is more concerned with government contracts with schools and agencies. My refusal to submit is less significant to them than peeing when swimming in the ocean, but it feels good to me.