gdanmitchell
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 p.1 #10 · Buy Adobe Photography Subscription Now or Wait for Sale | |
ruthenium wrote:
Adobe denoising has much improved in the recent years, and the quality has reached the level of the state-of-the-art. Nevertheless, DxO denoising is not inferior, and the denoising alone isn't a single decision-making consideration to subscribe LR. E.g., subscription with LR vs. buying a perpetual DxO license can be more important for some photographers.
In general, denoising in DxO and in LR reached the level when it is no longer a limitation, and future improvements can be expected to be marginal. Today, one can completely obliterate noise in a high ISO image, if this is wanted. This doesn't mean, of course that denoised high ISO images have the same or similar quality as low ISO images. The loss of image information to noise is real, and even the best ai reconstruction of the lost image information isn't equal to what is present at low ISO. ...Show more →
My main point about NR is that whatever one knows about Adobe’s NR from even a year ago on their products is now quite dated. If you have not seen what the AI Denoise does, you should check it out. (I’m not a giant fan of the whole AI thing, but this really works and it is sometimes almost miraculous.)
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As to the subscription software issue, I was initially quite opposed when Adobe introduced it — to the point that I refused to sign up and instead continued to use my original (and increasingly outdated) purchased version… and I spoke out about my concerns at the time.
In retrospect, it turned out that my worries were not borne out by the reality.
1. I believed that Adobe would roll out the software at the low initial subscription fee and then ratchet up the pricing once we had al committed. Instead, they actually _dropped_ the cost for photographers and then kept it the same for a decade (!). Recently we saw the first price increase, but we were able to continue to old, lower pricing simply by paying for the full year instead of paying each month.
2. I thought that the costs of the subscription would exceed those of the former purchase. But if you are the sort who keeps their software up to date — and not the sort who would continue to use outdated versions for several years — I figured out that the overall costs of purchasing were essentially the same as what I was paying for the subscription over time.
3. I believed that the subscription system would reduce Adobe’s inclination to update the software. Under the old license purchase model, it seemed to me that new features sometimes were introduced mostly to convince users to pay for an upgrade. But I thought that Adobe would slow the rate of updates once they had subscribers and no longer needed to persuade them to pay for periodic upgrades. I was wrong. If anything, the rate of updates and feature additions/improvements has increased under the subscription model, with quite powerful new features being introduced regularly.
I encourage anyone who is (as I once was) hesitant t out the subscription system to take a step back, try to suppress the emotional response, and look at this objectively.
All of that being said, it is good for photographers that there are some non-Adobe tools out there that force Adobe to remain competitive. (I worried a lot about that back when the Aperture program was taken off the market a decade or so ago.)
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Finally, back to the OP’s question about timing of an Adobe purchase, I think there are several things to keep in mind.
1. The value of having the software now versus waiting (e.g. opportunity cost) and how does hat value compare to the potential small savings in the initial subscription.
2. The “teaser” deals are real, but they are only for the initial subscription period — so while they can save some money at first they do not save much in the long term.
patotts wrote:
The analysts think fewer and fewer people will use their products as AI is taking over image creation and editing……
so I fully expect them to keep raising prices on their subscriptions, start charging more and more if you want AI adjustments, rate-limit how many AI edits you can make, etc, etc.
Regarding the first point, and related to my point about NR, Adobe is going all-in on the AI stuff, and some of it is pretty useful stuff for photographers. (I wrote about the powerful AI NR above, but some of the features for things like cloning, object removal, and extending the work area are quite useful.)
I think the jury is out on the “keep raising prices on their subscriptions’ idea. In fact, over time they have actually been very conservative about price increases, not raising them at all for the first decade!
As to the added cost for heavy AI tool use, I’ll be watching to see where that goes. I use some of those tools and so far I haven’t run into that issue. I will say that I’m not a fan of companies that actually build capabilities into their products and then charge you extra to “turn them on.” (There’s a lot of that going on in the automotive marketplace these days, and I suspect that there is going to be some serious consumer push-back before long.)
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