My everyday workflow is Capture One + Photoshop, has been for a couple of decades and it's never been LR/ACR +PS. I still use LR/ACR on occasions, but don't feel I can't tick any of these boxes.
When Adobe first switched to the subscription plan, I was as aggressively anti-Adobe-subscription as anyone here. I was already a long time Adobe user who regularly moved to each new version and paid for it, regarding the software as a tool that was as important to my photography as a camera or a lens.
I assumed that Adobe’s move to the subscription plan was going to be bad for consumers in just about every way:
1. Once they hooked us they would radically raise the price.
2. Once they had us hooked and no longer had to persuade us of the value of each new update to generate cash flow, they would stop updating and improving the program(s).
3. They would nickel and dime us to death by charging separate subscriptions for each app.
I did not upgrade for the first year or more, but eventually I simply had to for compatibility and so that I cold keep up to date on the software everyone was using. So I swallowed hard and got a subscription.
About my three fears listed above — was wrong.
1. After an initial higher price, Adobe reduced it to $10/month. Adobe kept the price exactly the same for at least a decade. Many of us who bought in early and made the right decision along the way are still paying the same price over a decade later.
2. The pace at which features are refined and added has not slowed at all — in fact, it seems to be increasing. Just in the past few months several features that are extremely valuable to photographers (see my earlier post in the thread) have been added.
3. I was astonished when Adobe rolled Photoshop and Lightroom into the same subscription price. Before they were separate purchases which together cost many hundreds of dollars. They also include LR and PS on tablets in the price, along with a few other apps (that I do not use).
I know everyone likes to get free stuff, and I understand, but it still surprises me to see people so strongly objecting to paying… $10/month (OK, a bit more for some of you) for a software environment that is so powerful and which replaces essentially the entire physical darkroom we used to purchase and maintain. Heck it costs most of us way less than a relatively mundane lens!
(On the other hand, I’m also glad that there are still some Adobe competitors…)
