For most of the past decade, Adobe was not a choice. It was the default. Lightroom and Photoshop were where photographers learned to edit, where the workflows lived, where the presets came from, and where the entire industry quietly agreed to standardize. The price hikes were annoying. The subscription model was annoying. But the alternative was unthinkable, because there was no real alternative.
That has changed. Not all at once, and not loudly, but unmistakably. A growing number of working photographers are questioning whether Adobe is still the right default, and in the forums, podcasts, and peer conversations where these things surface first, the conversation is no longer "should I ever leave?" but "when does it make sense to leave?" That shift is real, even if it has not yet shown up in Adobe's subscription revenue numbers.
The Subscription Model Finally Broke People
When Adobe moved to the Creative Cloud subscription in 2013, the photography community was furious. Then everyone calmed down, paid the $9.99 a month for the Photography Plan, and kept working. The deal was reasonable for what you got: Lightroom, Photoshop, and ongoing updates for less than the cost of buying a new version every two years.
That deal looks different now. After Adobe's 2025 pricing changes, the standard Photography Plan for new subscribers (Photoshop, Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, and 1 TB of storage) sits at $19.99 a month. The legacy 20 GB plan at $9.99 or $14.99 is still available to existing subscribers, but it is no longer offered to new ones, which means the $9.99 entry point that got most photographers into the ecosystem in the first place is effectively gone for anyone joining today. The cost of getting started with Adobe's photography workflow has roughly doubled in a decade, while the value provided has not kept pace. And $240 a year is a lot of money if you're a hobbyist. And if you want the full Creative Suite, holy cow. The performance is the same or worse. The interface is more cluttered. The features added have mostly been AI experiments that working photographers did not ask for and do not use. Meanwhile, the bill keeps arriving every month, forever, and canceling means losing access to software you have been paying for since the beginning of the subscription era.
The subscription model is not inherently broken. The problem is that Adobe stopped behaving like a company that had to earn the subscription month after month, and started behaving like a utility company that expected you to keep paying because switching was too painful. The photographers leaving now are the ones who finally calculated the lifetime cost of that subscription and decided that switching, however painful, was less painful than continuing.
The AI Features Nobody Asked For
Generative Fill. Generative Expand. Generative Remove. AI sky replacement. AI denoise. AI super-resolution. A substantial share of Adobe's product marketing and headline feature launches in recent years have been AI-driven, and the photography community's reception has ranged from indifferent to hostile.
The hostility is not Luddite resistance to new technology. It is a specific frustration with the direction of the development. Working photographers wanted Lightroom to load faster. They wanted the develop module to stop lagging on heavy files. They wanted catalog performance to improve. They wanted bug fixes for the masking panel. They wanted the export queue to stop hanging. They wanted basic stability for the tool they use every single day. Instead, they got generative fill, which most of them will never use because it produces composite work that has nothing to do with photography as they practice it.
The deeper problem is the philosophical one. Adobe's AI tools are designed to make non-photographers feel like photographers, and that target market is not the same as the one currently paying the subscription. Wedding photographers do not need AI to invent a sky. Real estate photographers do not need generative fill to clone out a power line. Portrait photographers do not need AI to swap a model's expression. They have professional techniques for all of those problems, and the AI versions of those techniques are usually slower, less reliable, and less defensible to clients than doing the work the right way. Adobe is investing heavily in tools that the existing user base does not want, while the existing user base waits for fixes to features they use every day.
The Performance Got Worse
Open Lightroom Classic. Wait. Click on a folder. Wait. Click on an image. Wait. Move to the develop module. Wait. Adjust a slider. Watch the preview lag for half a second before catching up. Apply a mask. Wait longer. Export a batch. Walk away from the computer because it will be busy for the next 20 minutes.
This is the common experience of editing in Lightroom on hardware that was current two years ago, at least for a significant portion of the user base. Performance improvements have not kept pace with the increasing complexity of the software, and the standard advice from Adobe's support forums often amounts to "upgrade your computer," which is the kind of advice you give when the software has outgrown the hardware most users actually own. Photographers are not asking for miracles. They are asking for a piece of software that runs smoothly on a $1,800 laptop, which is a reasonable expectation that other editing applications meet without complaint.
Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, and Affinity Photo are all frequently cited by photographers who switched as running more responsively on the same hardware. Benchmarks vary and individual experiences will too, but the anecdotal pattern is consistent enough to have become a talking point in every "why I switched" post you can find online. Photographers who made the move consistently report the same observation: editing is suddenly enjoyable again, not because the new tool is dramatically better in features, but because it stopped fighting them at every step. If you want a deep dive into one of the most credible alternatives, The Complete Capture One Editing Guide walks through the full workflow and demonstrates why so many working photographers have made the switch.
The Alternatives Finally Caught Up
For a decade, the response to "why don't you switch from Adobe?" was that the alternatives were not good enough. That response is no longer accurate. The 2026 landscape of photography editing software includes credible options at every price point and feature level.
Capture One is the longstanding choice for working professionals who prioritize color and tethering. Its color science is regarded by many photographers as superior to Lightroom's, and its tethering capabilities are the standard in commercial studio work. DxO PhotoLab and PureRAW have built reputations for strong raw conversion and noise reduction, and DxO markets its optical corrections as lab-calibrated camera and lens modules built from testing specific hardware combinations, which is a differentiator the company leans into heavily in its positioning. Affinity Photo, which was acquired by Canva and made free in 2025, now offers Photoshop-equivalent capabilities for most editing tasks at no cost, which effectively removes the price barrier for photographers curious about alternatives to Photoshop specifically. ON1 Photo Raw, Luminar Neo, and Darktable round out the field with various combinations of features, pricing, and philosophy.
None of these tools are perfect. Each has tradeoffs. But the existence of multiple credible alternatives means that switching is no longer a leap into uncertainty. It is a deliberate choice between known options with known strengths and weaknesses, and more photographers are making that choice deliberately rather than staying out of inertia.
The Catalog Lock-In Is Weakening
The biggest reason photographers historically did not leave Adobe was the catalog. Years of edits, ratings, keywords, collections, and develop settings lived inside Lightroom catalogs that did not export cleanly to anything else. Switching meant either abandoning that work or laboriously recreating it in a new application, and most photographers chose to keep paying rather than face that migration.
The lock-in is weakening. Migration tools have improved. XMP sidecar files preserve develop settings in a more portable form than they used to. Some applications now offer direct catalog import from Lightroom, with varying degrees of success. The migration is still painful, but it is no longer impossible, and the pain is finite while the Adobe subscription is forever. Photographers are doing the math: a one-time week of catalog migration versus another decade of monthly bills that keep climbing and software quality that has not kept pace. More of them are concluding that the week is worth it.
New photographers coming into the field today are not locked into Adobe by years of catalog history. They are evaluating their first editing software with fresh eyes, and many of them are looking at Lightroom's price, performance, and AI obsession and choosing differently from the start. Adobe's market dominance was built on a generation of photographers who had no real alternatives. The next generation has alternatives, and Adobe has not given them a compelling reason to choose Lightroom anyway.
What Adobe Could Do (and Probably Will Not)
The path back to photographer loyalty is not complicated. Stabilize the software. Optimize performance for current hardware. Stop pushing AI features the existing user base did not request. Hold the price stable for a few years instead of raising it whenever the spreadsheet allows. Communicate transparently about the product roadmap. Treat the photography subscription as a relationship that has to be earned every month rather than a captive revenue stream.
Adobe will probably not do any of this, because the company's incentives point in a different direction. Adobe is a publicly traded company answerable to shareholders who want to see growth in revenue per user, and the easiest way to deliver that growth is to raise prices on existing users while developing AI features that justify upselling them to higher tiers. The photography community is not Adobe's primary customer anymore. Enterprise creative teams and the broader content creation market are. Photographers have become a legacy user base whose churn is acceptable as long as the new tier of generative-AI users keeps growing fast enough to replace them.
That is the honest reality, and once you see it, the question is not "will Adobe fix this?" The question is "what are you going to do about it?" Some photographers are staying because the migration cost still feels too high. Others are switching because the lifetime subscription cost has finally exceeded the migration cost. Both decisions are defensible, and both are happening more deliberately than they used to. The era of Adobe as the unquestioned default is over. What replaces it is still being decided, one frustrated photographer at a time.
Adobe is not going to disappear. Lightroom and Photoshop will continue to be powerful tools, and many photographers will continue to use them productively for years to come. The shift happening now is not the death of Adobe. It is the end of Adobe's monopoly on the photography editing workflow, and the beginning of a market where photographers actually have choices.
If you are considering the switch and want a structured walkthrough of one of the strongest alternatives, The Complete Capture One Editing Guide covers the full transition from Lightroom workflows to Capture One, and Mastering Adobe Lightroom is still the right choice for photographers who want to deepen their existing Lightroom skills before deciding whether to leave. The honest answer for most photographers is that the right tool is the one that gets out of your way and lets you edit. For some, that is still Lightroom. For an increasing number, it is not.
46 Comments
Eyes rolling...
DxO Photolab, while once polished software, is not so anymore. Speaking from professional experience, I can say that the recent versions of PL have major regressions with their masking tools that BREAK the editing workflow. It takes 10 seconds or more for mask operations to apply. Search their forums and you'll find dozens of posts on this. The worst part is, DxO support has denied customers upgrades from affected versions and has not back ported fixes from their latest release (that resolves the issue) into the previous version which their release schedule reports they still support with regular bugfixes (and on the versions of Mac OS that encounter the issue, notably Sequoia and Tahoe).
So the real point here is, subscription or not, in my eyes, whomever has the best customer service wins. And DxO is not one of them.
"The biggest reason photographers historically did not leave Adobe was the catalog. Years of edits, ratings, keywords, collections, and develop settings lived inside Lightroom catalogs that did not export cleanly to anything else."
That's about it. Provided originals remain intact, loosing edits I could live with. However, the risk of loosing cataloguing, deep hierarchical keywording and other metadata, is too scary to contemplate. I remain unconvinced that transitioning is risk free.
Library module has always been free. Geotagging is lost but everything else remains. If Adobe ever changes that I expect a class action lawsuit...
Meanwhile, ON1 has a catalog converter introduced in ~2019 that I can only hope has gotten even better in the intervening years...
As a long time LR user (since it came on a CD) and a hobbyist, the subscription model really soured my opinion of adobe. But the latest price hike forced my hand. $15 a month was a bridge too far. I am using with On1 for for now. It's.... ok, and with a big learning curve. It's familiar/similar but also different enough from LR to be a pain. I can still import photos to my LR catalog even though my subscription ended, and I can use my LR catalog to browse old photos to edit in On1 if needed. Id go back to LR at $10 a month, but $15 was the straw that broke the proverbial camels' back. We all have our breaking point.
Totally disagree, Alex. Write about the fact that Topaz subscription costs MORE than Adobe for a lot less processing power. Write about needing Nik Effects and the Film pack IN ADDITION TO DxO PhotoLab just to get what Lr offers in B&W and toning.
Sure, I dumped Photoshop, saving about $10/month but I still subscribe to the Lightroom (only) plan with 1TB for less than CA$150/year. Lr is made for photographers; it’s like being back in the darkroom, but on steroids. PS is too graphics-oriented; if I need something like that, I use Affinity Photo or Affinity (now free!!).
But seriously, I can’t believe the whining about price. $150/year is less than the cost of 5 rolls of slides bought and processed back in the day. Five rolls! We used to shoot dozens of rolls each year. People have no context. They spend thousands on equipment now nickel-and-dime and quibble about the difference in price between processing options. This is silly!!
I’ve tried them all (except Capture One)—nothing comes close to Lr for nuanced processing in colour and monochrome AND cataloguing and albums and folders and smart albums AND regular updates of (mostly) useful additions AND 1TB of online space for access anywhere AND an online presence with sharing and Adobe Portfolio AND … Get serious!
BTW —thanks to Topaz, Capture One and DxO for providing competition to keep Adobe scrambling for constant improvements, though Adobe could ditch the push-button AI processing algorithms.
Well, then you tried all except the one you should have checked. :)
C1 is far superior to LR. Also in (Sony) colors btw.
Monthly subs for Capture One are on par with LR, and I would still need LR mobile for doing quick edits on the tablet since they refuse to release an android app
Just buy C1 every 4 years (or longer). Saves you money and your update makes a difference.
1. There’s no evidence that photogs are abandoning Adobe. 2. Capture One requires a subscription. This seems like a long, unconvincing ad.
Not true at all, C1 continues to provide a perpetual license option as well. Next time dig deeper.
Yes. From the price of 18 months, so pretty short payback.
NX Studio is the perfect choice for me. It is getting better and is FREE!
People complain about adobe shills.. now it's anti-Adobe shills. And some can be traced to competitors and/or AI. If you love it, you love it. If you don't, move on. The competitve cost for us - a pair of home body hobbyists, with continuously updated editor and DAM outweighs the competition (who slowly give into subs) and the endless "it's free open source" nonsense. Ask our gaggle of artists at a company I know why they demand Adobe and keep the company locked into it (NOT the other way around).
ALso, since when does it runs as slowly as writer portrays it??? LR/PS runs beautifully on my 2021 base-config'ed laptop (no ext vid card) WITH all the loading, edit, masking, AI, exports in a few hundred photo shoot (or more). Complete BS hyperbole. Do better F-stoppers. Patrick & Lee - please put in some editorial control. These types of articles doesn't help FS's credibility.
Well if you must ask, in the least 2 years LR has seen a very annoying issue that kills performance. Every nth photo the entire Desktop comes to a halt and spikes CPU usage across all 24 cores to 100% (similar across the GPU). Attaching a KiloWatt device between the computer and the wall socket proves that overall wattage jumps by 40-50% for this brief moment. Onboard fan also turns on. This was not an issue before and had yet to be fixed.
Meanwhile, my experience with ALL masking tools as well as vanilla (non-AI) remove/heal is horrible compared to what it was just 5 years ago where those tools were snappy and responsive. Night and day difference. Absolutely no comparison, and the introduced lag/latency makes it very frustrating to use those tools.
I currently have zero plugins installed or enabled to rule out that as the cause. My system has 128GB of DDR5 RAM and a 4090 with 24GB of vram... I see similar issues in my (mobile solution) 2023 MBP so it's not Windows.
Maybe you aren't pushing your setup, but I'm more curious why you appear so triggered and ate going after the author professionally. That's uncalled for.
Not me .... I only use the standard desktop version of Lightroom and it's still fairly affordable for me at about $28 a month and I make that easily back in print sales and other photography based work and I claim it on my tax so I'm really only playing $20 a month really and that's okay I don't see what the problem is... at my age I don't want to learn a new system either and with all respect to capture one it's clunky and slow and Photoshop is a nightmare to use especially for masking and affinity is just average and slow and clunky as well so for me no thanks I'm not a fan of Adobe but I only use Lightroom I don't use the other parts to it
That's an interesting take on Lightroom's functionality, and the suggested alternatives are interesting as well. And I'm not sure if you're arguing against this from a professional standpoint or a hobbyist. Hobbyists I can see being more up in arms about being locked in to Adobe's "pay or lose it" model, but ever pro I've known has always just amortized the cost of software whether the "subscription" was buying a CD every few years or on a monthly/yearly basis. Furthermore, even back then, you were at risk of old software becoming obsolete when you bought a new camera or updated your OS.
Regarding the slowness Alex ascribes to Lightroom: My 16 GB 2018 MacBook Pro was handling Lightroom better than Alex claims Lightroom handles a much newer computer. The only time it waited was ingesting and creating previews or when doing some of the intense AI tasks (like the AI de-noise or image resizing), and even then not 20 minutes. Only reason I upgraded was the battery and power manager component died about a month ago. Furthermore, if we were back in the days of CD buy-once-cry-once "ownership", I wouldn't be able to run the latest gen of Lightroom or Photoshop, and the cameras I have purchased since 2018 would most likely be unsupported by the Adobe software on that/those CDs.
Regarding the alternatives: Capture One costs the same as or even more than Adobe and requires re-learning a new interface. DXO isn't what it once was and seems to be getting worse. Affinity Photo is still ~ €150 per year and has no real organization or DAM (which incurs another cost if you want it, eating the "savings" over Adobe), nor does it offer a mobile version so I can use my phone to ingest and have my photos on my computer by the time I get home. So of the alternatives, there are no 1:1 replacements and even Affinity is only somewhat cheaper (assuming you don't buy a supplemental DAM).
Regarding the AI Bloat, I agree that I'm not asking for them either but then I never asked for or used Book or Web modules in Lightroom either--but many do. Based on the infatuation many people seem to have with Gemini and GPT, AI "bloat" is probably being sought by many people.
The only argument I see, and it's a valid one, is that Adobe locks you in with its subscription model. Keep paying, or lose access. But, buying and upgrading every few years for software that becomes obsolete due buying a new computer or camera or even updating your OS is a subscription, too.
Ridiculous. People subscribe to rent or a mortgage, utilities, Internet services, auto and homeowners insurance, magazines, newspapers, online music, and myriad other services. And they balk at a few $$ per month for the best image-processing applications on the planet? Ridiculous.
While it is true that certain services like broadband internet, or your mobile phone are subscription only, it does not necessarily mean that everything else has to be subscription only. Do you pay a monthly subscription for your shoes, or the chair you’re sitting on?
You argue that people also subscribe to magazines and newspapers. However, it is crucial to remember that magazines and newspapers can also be bought as a one-off purchase. It used to be like that with Adobe as well. It used to be possible to choose either to subscribe to their software, or to purchase a perpetual licence. That model worked perfectly fine and there’s no reason why they could not go back to it.
The issue for me is not how much it costs. I would be very happy to pay more for a perpetual licence version of Lightroom than you do for a subscription.
I would love subscription based footwear!
Would you love it if the subscription based model applied for everything though? What about heated seats that are adjusted installed in you car (Google it, I forget which but either BMW or Mercedes did that).
Ridiculous? What's ridiculous, David, is the cost of living in this country (US) and the tone deaf politicians in Washington who have no clue as to what to do about it. The guy in the White House thinks the solution to everything is higher tariffs and lower interest rates. Now that's ridiculous. Of course $20 a month going to Adobe probably won't be the single cause of pushing anyone into bankruptcy, but everything you mentioned on your list can be managed. Indeed my wife and I do everything possible to lower utility bills by turning lights off in rooms, or heat down in parts of the house we're not in. Facing double digit increases in home and auto insurance, we can reduce coverage. Drive less for fun when gas is $4 a gallon. We could buy a smaller house. I only buy a magazine once in awhile instead of a subscription. We cancelled cable TV entirely because we don't need 500 channels. Live TV will do. We have choices for every one of those services.
But Adobe insists on selling me a product that I can not custom fit to my needs. What you call the greatest software on the planet is filled with bloat that you probably don't even use. But it's only a few bucks a month... and apply that attitude toward every other choice to buy this or that, and that explains the terrible shape people are in financially. It also explains the $40 trillion in debt the country is facing. Oh but it's only $25 billion to go bomb Iran. Pocket change to the government. Meanwhile, the cost of living is nearly unaffordable, but why that should matter to the billionaires in Washington DC is anybody's guess.
What's even worse: that orange guy blows up the whole world economy right now + 80 year old relations. Start a war with no plan and come out of it (hopefully) close to how it was before (in terms of security) at best, but with big damage on economy and relations. And still 40% of America supports him. Total madness.
Why ridiculous and why use it in such a cavalier manner? Everyone has a budget and every budget has its breaking points and compromises. There's absolutely nothing ridiculous about that. Perhaps responsible is the better word ...
All people are saying here is this used to be covered by a perpetual licence and for about the same as I pay for 1 year of the basic CC I could upgrade to LR3/LR4/LR5/etc. I could then choose to upgrade those as needed feature wise and ignore features I didn't deem worthy of my hard earned money.
PS was an investment, but prior to that I used GIMP or Aldus Photostyler. As of 2009 I already owned a more than capable version of Photoshop (CS5 Extended) and personally had absolutely no reason to upgrade PS past that point. Meanwhile, LR broke that model entirely unless you were willing to switch 100% to editing DNG files for newer cameras. The only features in LR added the last ~10 years I use regularly are the expanded basic photo editing tools (dehaze, clarity, and texture) as well as improved masking abilities. I much prefer HSL to their new color grading feature. I could have instead upgraded as needed. Perhaps just 2x rather than doing the forced equivalent every year and saving upwards of $960.
Point being, in the past Adobe compelled me to upgrade with new useful features. Now I feel trapped. Bug fixes mascaraed as lauded features. I nearly jumped to ON1/C1 7 years ago and I'm considering it again when my year is up in February next year. That's not ridiculous, it's a common sense option derived from careful analysis.
As far as "best" imaging software, that's highly debatable, especially these days. It's also an opinion, not a fact.
What is ridiculous is your equating all of these examples to the modern 'tech-bro' inspired subscription model as we know it today. AKA a boost to shareholders, not end users. A model that's done away with perpetual ownership and replaced it with a world of renters.
Meanwhile, a mortgage is not a subscription service. At the end you own your home. Very very different.
A magazine subscription is also different as you own the magazine and can do with it as you please unlike the gimped version of LR after canceling your subscription. You can also buy individual magazines at a slightly higher cost at the newsstand...
You also don't "subscribe" to utilities in the same way as the overwhelming majority of any utility bill is what you use. There are billed flat connection fees, but they exist too cover the most basic costs of maintaining the utility network and are evenly dispersed and computed based on the size of the network and how many are connected. It's to cover the basics for homes that don't consume as much (2nd homes, downtime during vacations, etc). Even those that rely on solar will at some point rely on the network if their setup isn't able to keep up with demand or conversely they feed the network with their excess solar.
It's the same with you home Internet, it's a utility service. There is no option for you to economically create your own global network infrastructure. At some point you pay someone to hookup your "home" LAN to the greater WAN. That's not equitable to a modern subscription service like CC. Especially now that CC forces you into 1 year contracts in perpetuity even when if you pay month to month. Even if you argue that ISPs provide unlimited data, unlike a traditional utility, that's not at all universal and throttling is a reality, especially since net neutrality was gutted.
Homeowners insurance is also not a subscription service beyond being a recurring monthly cost. It's a risk pool and only pays out after a disaster. Everyone pays a different amount based on their risk exposure.
Great comments, Pavlos. The concept of "responsibility" seems to have taken on a whole new twist in my lifetime, mostly because of the way home finances have turned upside down. Borrowing money in the 1960s was typically reserved for just high cost items such as houses and automobiles. Nowadays, it's not a matter of what the product costs, but whether we can afford to make the monthly payment. Financing and leasing terms grow longer. Credit cards are used for everything, and wrapped up into a monthly payment.
Google: "Consumer debt has transformed from a relatively niche financial tool in 1960 into a cornerstone of the modern American economy, growing from a modest factor in household finances to a massive, multi-trillion dollar burden. As of 2026, Americans hold over $4 trillion in consumer debt, with the average household owing over $31,000."
That summary basically explains the subscription model. Most people see the cost of using Adobe's products as something that can simply be absorbed into their total financial monthly budget -- people who own virtually nothing, but see the cost of living only relative to their earnings. As long as income meets or exceeds expenses, life is good. Get more new shiny things. For those people, interest rates are critical to maintaining a lifestyle.
On the other hand, there are people who view finances as a means of acquiring wealth rather than a lifestyle. Rather than determining whether the price of a product or service can fit into a monthly budget, these people look at the cost of the product and decide whether it fits their needs or not, and if the cash is available to pay for it. With Adobe, I only made the decision to upgrade as often as I felt necessary. I prefer being an owner rather than a renter, and that policy has served me well. The cost of using Adobe software is small, but the subscription model serves the human desire to acquire more and more stuff, and finance what they don't have the money for. Both sides are living their argument in bigger ways than an Adobe subscription.
The argument from my point of view is not just about whether the price or subscription model is fair or not. For the photographer who focuses on making authentic images, the continual emphasis by Adobe on AI features and artificial manipulation is more of a detriment than it's worth paying for. Technology is not the answer to everything. I stopped upgrading Photoshop with CS5, roughly 13 years ago simply because it ceased adding features that I needed. Large corporate environments and individuals with integrated product design, video, and computer generated graphics services will undoubtedly keep paying for Adobe's products, but the photographers who used to be the core of Photoshop's customer base, such as myself who focused solely on basic photo edits, are largely done with that company. That was the point of the article. I don't want a new version of Photoshop at any price. Of course, traditional photography may be dead in a few years anyway so it's hard to argue with the strategic planners at Adobe. It's just not for me.
Affinity, free. Davinci Resolve 21, sort of free. Darktable (my favourite), free. There's others too, I think. I got all those running on Linux Mint.
So for the hobbyist, shelling out £240 a year(!) on Adobe's Photographer package is completely unnecessary. Nor s anything Microsoft, to go a little off topic.
Then there's the ritual humiliation of Adobe's cancellation process and fee.£*&# that!
Interesting, but I can’t be the only photographer who’s benefitted from all the great tools Adobe has put into LR over the last few years - in some cases speeding up the workflow massively (such as auto detect faces and masking individual features such as eyes and teeth to perform more global edits quickly). Gen AI to help fix the smallest of issues that either would’ve taken a lot of time to correct in the past, or rendered a photo undeliverable. And for performance? I’m using first gen M1 MacBook Pro (2022) and have no complaints. As well, while I use DXO pureRaw for NR, if I upgrade every year (which, if you ever get new gear it’s the only way to get updates), it would cost me $120 anyway - just for NR. I don’t love the subscription model, but I’m used to it, and at the speed things change, it doesn’t seem too bad.
I've been using Blackmagic Design's Davinci Resolve for ten years to postprocess my videos. They have recently dropped a public Beta of DR21 which adds a stills processing page and it does anything LR or PS does. The best part is..... It's Free! I'll be dropping my Adobe subscription as soon as I get my wife up to speed on it. https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
I have never used Adobe Catalog. I just don't understand why anyone can't just use the standard File Explorer on Windows or a file management on Mac OS. I labeled my shooting sessions and saved them in folders (Catalogs) with searchable label name such as "2022 APR 16 Cannon Beach RAW". All folders are stored in removable 3TB HD docks by years, for example. This way, I never have to depend on any cloud storage or Adobe for access.
I agree. I was suspicious from the first day Lightroom was introduced that I would have been locked into and dependent upon a system that would be difficult to get out of. Friends of mine were pulling their hair out when migrating Lightroom catalogs from one computer or operating system to another.
I also never liked the idea of hidden files tagged to an image which contained editing information, separate from the RAW image file itself. Non-destructive edits were all the rage with photography instructors... probably still are. Compressing a file into one layer and being done with it made you sound like a total beginner. Guys teaching workshops would snicker at me when I said I was happy to make an edit, flatten all adjustment layers, save a 16 bit TIF file, and delete the RAW file. But what about making changes to an image 20 years later? ... As if I have time or interest in revisiting old image files. Fact is I can't remember ever wishing I had saved a RAW file. So there are numerous things about Lightroom and conventional workflow wisdom that I can do without.
Companies such as Adobe and Apple thrive in sucking you into their ecosystem. I love Apple computers but there's no way in a million years I'm gonna back everything up into their cloud services, or wear an Apple watch. Sorry, no Apple TV. I even dumped my iPhone in favor of a much less expensive Android phone.
That's pretty much what I do (and have always done).
Everything in folders and subfolders, named and dated.
I have images from when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I can still locate them in seconds.
That works well for landscape, travel, architectural, etc. Not so much if you shoot sports over multiple seasons and want to tag each individual athlete prominent in each shot so you can quickly pull up every shot you have of "Joe Smith" or "Steve Davis", or maybe even only shots that feature both "Joe and Steve" in the same frame from 117 different dates over the past 3-4 years.
I have a lifetime subscription for Capture One (purchased a month ago), and probably will buy a new one in about for years) and I have a Adobe photography 1TB subscription for €24 a month because I need psd for at least 3 things: cutting out products (if I use the right English term), doing some montages and generative fill for retouche. And ofc sometime I use psd for extra correction after c1, but this is not strictly necessary to survive. Correct me if I'm wrong, and if I can do these 3 things easily and more affordable with other software. I hate LR and don't use it, but this 1TB subscription still was better than PSD alone.
I can't believe how FStoppers allows such junk to be published:
"Open Lightroom Classic. Wait. Click on a folder. Wait. Click on an image. Wait. Move to the develop module. Wait. Adjust a slider. Watch the preview lag for half a second before catching up. Apply a mask. Wait longer. Export a batch. Walk away from the computer because it will be busy for the next 20 minutes."
I use Lightroom most day and have done for years, all the above the author is complaining about is more or less instantaneous.. The only response I can say to the above is look to your computer and don't blame the software. I really don't see the point of publishing such biased tripe. The guy obviously does not like Adobe which is fine, but at least try and stick to actual real world facts. The whole move to making up 'your own truth' has really gotten out of hand with people such as this author with an axe to grind gets away with writing such utter nonsense.
The "facts" about Lightroom working slowly seem to be mixed....
Adobe dug its own grave, which is why the CEO left, the very person that introduced subscription, which I don't disagree with, but they have pillaged it, then they changed the Terms and Conditions, and until it significantly backfired they did nothing. Sorry I don't trust Adobe anymore, they dont act in the interest of creative professionals, they just tie them into software and pollute your OS. Affinity, C1, DXO, Pixelmator and a lot more are catching up. Just a shame that Apple dropped Aperture, I would happily subscribe to that if they brought it back.
"Capture One is the longstanding choice for working professionals who prioritize color and tethering. Its color science is regarded by many photographers as superior to Lightroom's,"
Absolutely. It surprises me how many LR adepts seem to leave out the color aspect.
I must admit that my tests are many years ago, but when I compared my Sony raw's between LR to C1 I found the difference shocking. With my Adobe subscribtion I can use LR too, but I didn't even install it. Instead I have a lifetime subscription C1 which I will use for 4 years or so before buying a new one.
Besides C1 I still keep Photoshop. Not for everything, just for what it does exceptionally well:
-clean cut-outs
-compositing / layers workflow (like a learned language)
-and especially generative fill for retouching
That last one alone saves a ton of time on real client work: faster, less frustrating cleanup.
Also, being able to jump into Camera Raw inside Photoshop for quick extra corrections is very important (even after my C1 proces).
Switching between multiple apps and losing a fluid layers workflow would cost more time than it saves.
So for now: Capture One + Photoshop = the most efficient setup for how I work.
At €24/month, 1TB subscription (tax deductible), it’s not really the problem people make it out to be, at least not for a working photographer.
Edit:
Probably my workflow once I only do travel photography and no longer assignments will be.
• Capture One lifetime license every 3 to 4 years (after 18 months it already pays off compared to month subscription) or by that time I move to DXO
• Affinity photo 2 (with Nik collection)
• Online firefly 1 month only, 2 or 3 times a year
Total software costs about €10 a month. Seems very reasonable for a beautiful hobby imho.
From my experience C1 wins in their quality of the basic sliders like dynamic control (the essence imho).
DxO wins in denoise (but ask yourself how much your camera needs it) and (typical) their micro contrast slider.
Its meaningless given the disparity of screens across the world. Only pixel peepers and technogeeks worry about perfect color science, each sensor captures a flavor and soft proofing is the ultimate factor at the end of the worlflow
Haha. Well I've seen so many exaggerated internet debates about so called bad "Sony colors", but something this obvious (the actual reason for how colors look) is pixel peeping? I'm a practice person and far from a "techno geek". LR colors (and especially skins) looked significant worse. But again: this was when i first choose to use C1, so i don't know if things changed in the meantime. Did you ever use Capture One? Why bother editing anyway? :)
Anyone who doesnt understand SAAS models within the software world should go back to film... oh wait, you know its better shooting digital. Adobe will eventually fall like most software companies. It'll be the laggards who latch onto legacy tech and its only a matter of a few years away, if that.
This article is full of sketchy claims, but in particular I'll single out the claim that pro photographers don't want or need AI tools. Erase a distraction in the background of a portrait? Select the irises/lips of a model with a click? Apply a context mask action across images? All AI, all huge time savers (which as a pro, I love). And Adobe has the compelling claim that they train on their own data, not on content scraped from the internet. That makes it AI I'm more comfortable using.
I do wish e.g. Bridge were able to handle my image libraries and large memory cards quickly. So yes, there's room for performance improvements.
Everyone disliked software subscription models when they arrived. But something has to pay for the progressive fix and improvement process, and I used to buy each new edition of Photoshop anyway. I don't love SAAS, but I understand it.
True. Personally I hate AI image creation (a discussion on its own). But I really don't want to go back to the clone stamp times. :)
I rather spend my time on more fun things.