Is It Time to Ditch Adobe for These Alternatives?

Adobe now runs on subscriptions, and that monthly bill adds up fast. If you rely on Photoshop and Premiere Pro to get paid work done, the idea of switching feels risky, but staying put can feel just as uncomfortable.

Coming to you from Brent Hall, this candid video walks through what happens when you seriously try to leave Adobe behind. Hall breaks down the Creative Cloud cost in a way most people avoid. When you pay $75 a month for the full suite but only use Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Bridge, the math gets hard to ignore. Roughly $55 of that goes toward Premiere Pro alone. That stings when you realize you never actually own the software. Hall cancels his subscription and gets offered two free months, which buys him time to test alternatives without pressure.

On the video side, Hall moves to DaVinci Resolve Studio, after testing the free version of DaVinci Resolve. The free version is shockingly capable, but it has limits. If you shoot high-end codecs like 4:2:2 10-bit or capture 6K, 7K, or 8K footage, you will hit those limits fast. The free version also caps timelines above 4K. Resolve Studio costs $300 once. No subscription. After about six months, it pays for itself compared to a Premiere Pro subscription. Hall admits there is a learning curve, but he also says the switch is realistic, even for paid client work.

The photography side is harder. Hall does not use Lightroom as a primary editor. Instead, he relies on Bridge and Photoshop, leaning on Camera Raw inside Bridge for adjustments before moving into Photoshop. If you did not know that Bridge includes the same raw engine as Lightroom, that detail alone changes how you think about the $20 Photography plan. Lightroom becomes optional in that setup.

Hall tests Affinity Photo after Canva makes it free. On paper, it looks like the obvious Photoshop replacement. In practice, it falls short for his workflow. Certain tools feel different. Some processes take longer. Years of muscle memory matter more than feature lists. He also depends on Luminar Neo as a Photoshop plug-in, which complicates leaving. Luminar Neo can run as a standalone editor, but combining it with Affinity Photo does not replicate the smooth handoff he gets inside Photoshop.

One of the more useful parts of the discussion is not the gear or the pricing. It is the shift in advice. Hall says that five years ago he would have told anyone starting out to just commit to Adobe. Now he is comfortable suggesting Affinity Photo or Luminar Neo as legitimate starting points. That does not mean Photoshop is suddenly weak. It means the gap has narrowed enough that you have options, especially if you are not locked into a decade of habits.

In the end, Hall keeps Photoshop and Bridge under the $20 plan and drops Premiere Pro for Resolve. That hybrid approach cuts the monthly bill without blowing up a working system. You may not make the same choice, but seeing the numbers laid out forces you to look at your own setup more honestly. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Hall.