Unhappy About Adobe’s 50% Kick in the Teeth? Here's What You Can Do

Adobe has once again kicked photographers in the teeth with a huge increase in their subscription charges of 50%. They have also stopped new subscriptions for the cheapest photography plan. What can we do about it?

Admittedly, there hasn’t been an annual price increase since the Photographer’s Plan was introduced in 2013. Nevertheless, Adobe's profits saw significant growth from 2013 to 2023. In 2013, according to online sources, it reported a net income of approximately $1.011 billion. By 2023, this figure had risen to around $19 billion, with a profit margin up from $14.55 billion in 2022, and it is still rising.

Here in the UK, I pay £9.98/month for Lightroom Classic, Lightroom, and Photoshop, plus 20 GB of cloud storage that I don’t use. It’s going up to £14.99. Because the dollar is worth less than a pound, the price is cheaper in the US. Nevertheless, on that side of the Atlantic, there’s a similar percentage increase from $9.99 to $14.99 per month. That’s around a 50% rise.

There’s nothing wrong with a business making a profit. Indeed, my photography business does. However, the main purpose of a business is to provide a product or service to its clients, and the profit becomes a welcome additional outcome. When the aim changes to solely making money and seemingly treating its clients with contempt, people lose their respect for that company and walk away. Increasingly, there are discussions within the photography and wider art industries about doing just that.

My Personal Experience

When I pay a subscription, I expect substantial upgrades each year, whereas the changes have been uninspiringly dull, giving poor results. Its recent lens blur feature in Lightroom is hit or miss at choosing what it considers to be the background, and its AI denoising algorithm is not as good as other apps on the market despite their alleged historic use of our photos to train its AI. Moreover, its generative AI Remove tool gives bad results, often implanting weird elements into the pictures.

Additionally, I received no direct communication from Adobe telling me they were upping the price.

You Can No Longer Sign Up to the 20 GB Plan

Adobe is stopping new users from signing up for the minimal 20 GB Cloud Photographer’s Plan. Instead, they are insisting new subscribers take the more expensive $19.99/month 1 TB plan. Of course, if you take 1 TB of storage, you are more likely to become committed to using it forever as it’s a nightmare transferring it to another service.

Like the big camera companies that produced cheap, low-quality, short-lived DSLRs to hook novice photographers to their brand, Adobe appears to be treating photographers with contempt.

What ways are there around this? Firstly, if you want to get out of the plan, unless you are within a month of your contract renewal date, you must pay a penalty. Adobe's cancellation fee is 50% of the remaining balance of your contract if you cancel more than 14 days after your initial purchase. Therefore, it might be worth waiting for the renewal date before canceling.

However, if you are determined to keep an Adobe plan—and I can see why many people might—you could try telling them you are going to cancel. I did that, and after fighting with their bot, which didn’t understand the simple questions I reworded a dozen times, my query was escalated up the chain of command until I spoke to someone who gave me this reply:

I understand that you wish to cancel the plan. However, if you wish to continue, I will be happy to offer you a discounted pricing of GBP 8.33/month for a year + 3 free months. This means you will be paying the discounted pricing for 9 months only and receive services for 12 months. How does this sound to you?

Like with phone contracts, household utilities, and insurance policies, it’s worth telling them you are going to leave to get a better deal. I save the equivalent of over $1,000 a year doing that.

What Else Can I Do? Jumping the Adobe Ship

If you do cancel, then it’s worth noting that Lightroom Classic’s Library function will still work. However, you won’t be able to develop or open images directly into third-party programs. You can, however, open the image location in your file browser/explorer and open the image in other applications that way.

That’s a bit of a faff. But there are alternatives.

The ON1 Option

So, if you want to keep your workflow sleek and efficient without those extra steps, then the most obvious option is to swap to ON1 Photo Raw. That’s because ON1’s catalog functionality is very similar to Lightroom. Furthermore, in Lightroom Classic, you can export your catalog to ON1. After installing ON1, it’s in the File Menu > Plug-in Extras > Migrate Catalog to ON1 Photo. The migration process can take a long time if you choose to migrate not just the catalog but also Lightroom’s Develop module settings, which can be included too. However, I found these not-quite-perfect translations needed tweaking anyway.

ON1 has come a long way in the last couple of years. It’s stable and much faster than the Lightroom Classic/Photoshop combination. Besides giving raw development results that I always preferred over Adobe’s, its image-layered editing tool is a module within the same program, making it far faster to switch back and forth between the different modules than it is switching between Lightroom Classic and Photoshop.

Unlike Photoshop, the layered adjustments, called Effects in ON1, each have a little preview showing what the effect does, making it much easier for beginners than Photoshop.

Also worth mentioning is its Noise and Sharpening panel. I find it far superior to Adobe’s offerings, with its “Tack Sharp” deblur combined with its NoNoise results being spot on.

There’s loads more to this program and, after my extensive tests, I’ll be reviewing the latest iteration, ON1 Photo Raw 2025, soon. It’s an excellent program with an extensive set of tools. Furthermore, it costs far less than Adobe's offering. Although it is available as a far cheaper subscription, they have stuck by their promise of keeping a perpetual license. In other words, you can buy it outright and just pay for an upgrade in the future if you feel it is necessary.

On1 also comes with a mobile app similar to Lightroom.

You can explore the different package options and download a free trial of ON1 Photo Raw by clicking or tapping here.

DxO Photolab 8: Development Software for Serious Photographers

DxO PhotoLab got an update recently and I will be reviewing it soon. There are some very good reasons why photographers who are serious about their art consider this a big step forward. As another perpetual license (one-off payment) alternative to Adobe, it also has some major advantages over its competitors.

I develop photos for different purposes and use different software depending upon what result I am aiming for. All raw development software packages give different results. However, if I want to print photos and have the very best results, then it’s DxO PhotoLab I turn to because of its superior results.

When it comes to developing your photos, you probably want the best possible results too. I had been using Adobe Camera Raw and, subsequently, Lightroom since their first iterations and I was always relatively happy with what I got. Over that time, I built up a reasonable set of skills using those tools. I was happy with them until I started playing with other software and found they were better. However, when I first tried PhotoLab I said “Wow!” out loud.

It’s complex, though not complicated. With advanced algorithms used in its development adjustments, it gives outstanding controls over tone and color that, I think, outshines anything else on the market. Admittedly, Capture One also gives fabulous results, but, like Photoshop, that is also now only available as a subscription that many photographers balk at, and it’s more expensive. Its various DeepPrime denoising options are second to none.

PhotoLab does have presets that are good starting points for developing your pictures. Plus, it has a huge number of FilmPacks that precisely emulate the look of an enormous number of film types from the birth of photography to the present.

Also, the lens profiles are far superior to anything else on the market. For example, uniquely, each focal length setting for almost every lens on the market is individually corrected across its entire zoom range. It's not just one adjustment being applied to a lens no matter the focal length it's set to.

PhotoLab’s PhotoLibrary is a means of accessing your photos via a database. Consequently, you can enter information about the images and quickly search for images. Using the simple search box can find the shot date, file name, IPTC data, rating, and so on.

Although it does not have as wide a functionality as the Lightroom or ON1’s catalog, PhotoLab’s PhotoLibrary is serviceable. Unlike Lightroom, it also doubles as a file browser. It is one area in which I wish there were more functions. However, you can open raw files from Lightroom and ON1 into PhotoLab if you need the additional library utilities offered by those programs.

Editing Software Alternatives to Photoshop

If you want to carry out sophisticated layered edits to your images, other programs will do that. Many Photoshop users cut their teeth on the free and open-source GIMP. That recently got a large update making it less clunky and more user-friendly than before. Its layout is similar to Photoshop, but it is less intuitive and takes a bit of learning. Nevertheless, for someone on a tight budget, it’s an excellent choice.

To access raw files, you will need to install either RawTherapee or Darktable, both of which are also free.

If you are a Windows user, then there is another fabulous free photo editing tool called paint.net available at getpaint.net. (If you want to pay for it, then you can do it through the Microsoft Store.) It has an intuitive user interface, supports layers, and features a large variety of powerful adjustment tools

Affinity Photo is an affordable, popular and well-featured development and editing tool. It also has a raw development tool which gives good results. Many photographers are choosing this option.

In Conclusion

It isn’t just photographers who are disillusioned with Adobe. My son is currently doing his Master’s in digital art, and in the various academic and professional communities he uses, people are voicing their dissatisfaction and singing the praises of alternatives.

For us photographers, there are plenty more options available that do as good or an even better job of processing our photos than Adobe’s offerings, and certainly at less cost.

If you are happy with what Adobe has to offer, like the results, and are okay with the huge price increase, then that’s great for you. However, there are a lot of unhappy people who are opting for alternatives.

December is a good time to think about swapping to another program or challenging Adobe on their price because, in just under a year, you will be in time for the excellent Black Friday deals that usually happen every year.