bakubo wrote:
Although I have had LR/PS CC for 2 years I am not a big fan of the subscription model. I don't use the cloud. From time to time I think about switching, but I have tens of thousands of edited photos in LR using non-destructive editing. That is a big lock in. The same, of course, is true with any non-destructive editor since they are all proprietary. I like LR a lot and the new LR Classic has gotten a pretty nice speed up. I am concerned about what other changes Adobe may spring on us in the future though. Also rental price increases will probably come along.
Actually I wish instead of $10/month for LR/PS that they had a $4/month for LR only. I never use PS CC. The few times I want to use a bit-mapped editor I have to use PSE 9 because the 2 plug-ins I use for film scans are 32-bit and they don't work in PS CC.
I also don't use Photoshop, I agree $4 per month is more reasonable for Lightroom only. Firstly, I now have layers and more processing capability in Capture One. Secondly, for the occasional stuff, I use the free GIMP software. Supports plugins, not sure about 32-bit ones.
My biggest fear of moving was exactly the thousands and thousands of photos that I would lose the ability to edit. But that was before Capture One. If I edit an old photo I now WANT to re-edit it in Capture One, because I can do better with it.
Bit of a rant here, apologies:
I'm not in principle opposed to rental, but the Adobe promise was that because they have a regular income stream we would receive many feature updates, even if in smaller batches, over time. Not only has this not happened, but the software itself has large performance issues which keep on getting worse. Maybe CC Classic helps with that.
The fact that Topaz and OnOne have both now created stand-alone software that reads RAW files and doesn't require Adobe as a starting point any more, speaks volumes about Adobe's falling behind. There are others, Luminar, I think, and more. These tiny companies are emboldened enough and take the risk to develop software that competes directly with CC, simply because Adobe have dropped the ball.
Another issue specific to me is that Adobe have acknowledged officially three years back that their Fuji processing is not optimal, and that they are working on fixing it. Lightroom Classic has a new process engine and Fuji processing remains unchanged. When I opened older Fuji files in Capture One to test it, I was just astounded at the extra level of detail it presents. I hear from others that it's not just with Fuji files, Capture One is just better at RAW demosaicing.
There's a ONE MAN company that has developed a preprocessor to read Fuji RAW files and feed them into Lightroom. Gives the same kind of detail as Capture One. One man. Adobe can't be bothered.
I pay $6 per month to Microsoft to get the full Office suite AND 1TB of cloud data. All my files, including all my photos, are in the cloud (as well as on the computer of course). I can access these on my iPhone any time I want. My emails, contacts, and calendar are in the mobile Outlook app and fully synced.
Actually, I can have up to four users on this same account, each with their own 1TB of data. That's 4TB of data for $6 per month and the full Office suite. And OneDrive, their cloud system, evolves the whole time. Sure, they have a larger market than Adobe, but what I get is not comparable.