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Adobe is taking advantage of the power of it's photo bundle, forcing their customers into a hostage situation by increasing the price. People that don't rely on these apps to make a living, like me, might say there is no better alternative of what this bundle offers, as you get an iOS app with the best RAW capture (I haven't found any app that takes that good RAW quality pictures), Lightroom that can edit all sorts of formats and photoshop that is the benchmark of all image manipulators. I did a quick research of the alternatives and didn't really find a replacement for the iOS app, capture1 is super expensive (they offer Sony and Fuji only software for 150$, but what happens if you need to edit a photo from another manufacturer) and GIMP is a no-no for me as I tried it in the past and couldn't get it to work. So, personally I'm stuck to whatever Adobe's planning for the future.
Did you have a look at Affinity Software?

http://affinity.serif.com Mac Win iPad

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ipad/ RAW
 
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Adobe is such a greedy company... ever since they bought Macromedia years ago I knew they just cared about the bottom line, not the tools they were providing for so much amazing work in the world.
[doublepost=1556890594][/doublepost]Serious question: do you guys think we will see companies move away from subscription models? or just more and more? is it just a trend or is it the way forward forever? Or will we see more and more open software? I want your insights please
Companies can provide subscription model that give good value. Example, Microsoft Office 365. Office was expensive, and most home users pretty much pirated it. Office 365 makes the genuine Office software to be more affordable, and Microsoft is quite lenient in its licensing (the personal version can now be installed in 5 different computers).

I have yet to see any actual professionals (those who make real money from using these software) complain about Adobe”s subscription. Most simply adapt to it. And for Adobe, the subscription model allows them to have a much more predictable stream of revenue.

And if you actually utilize most of Adobe’s high profile apps like Photoshop and Premiere, the subscription actually turns out to be not bad as those software originally were priced extremely high. The issue for me mainly is Lightroom, where its original standalone price was actually quite inexpensive. Thus moving to subscription actually made it more expensive to use.
 
The people behind Capture One Pro are also a little bit greedy and they do not support all cameras i.e. they do not support Hasselblad.

This thread showed me Photo Mechanic and as a hobbyist I probably will go in future with Photo Mechanic to fast view / cull photos and Affinity / Pixelmator to edit them.
Agree - Photo Mechanic 6 for ingest/tagging etc also a great solution. Damn fast. And cheap. And you can manage the folder hierarchy in Finder without software lock-in.
 
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We've used Illustrator and Photoshop since the 1990's. When they went to subscriptions, it was difficult to get our entire department updated, due to older computers and operating systems. Some machines stayed with CS6 as long as possible before transitioning to CC.

I miss being able to own the software, even with paid upgrades.

If $19.99/month sounds greedy, try $550/month for a small in-house art department!

The more you use the software, the more advantages you can find, no doubt. Mobile apps are included, some have free professional brushes. You can use all Adobe apps, not just 1 or 2.

But, that's a large monthly fee to justify to a CFO!

Younger designers find Adobe to be corporate, compared to Procreate that fits their lifestyle in a more dynamic way. At this moment, Adobe still is #1 in the marketplace by far. But, if Procreate is a one-time purchase, and you can draw your ass off on a cool iPad Pro, I think a lot of new designers will find that to be a good fit for them.

Hmmm, I guess the long-term question would be, what do they teach at the college level? Is it all Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop? Or, do they sprinkle in Procreate and Affinity. If young students are brought up on Procreate, and work in that platform for a few years, they're not going to want to re-learn their workflow on Adobe products later on.

That would be the biggest risk for Adobe, that, a new generation isn't stuck with their platform. Once they're 25-30, Adobe has lost most of them for good.

After learning Photoshop and Illustrator, I didn't want to have to re-learn everything in Corel Draw.
Corel Draw?? Try Affinity suite.
Education follows market. So don't follow education if you are part of the market.
 



Adobe today quietly debuted new pricing for its Photography bundle, which has long been available for $9.99 per month. Starting today, Adobe's website is listing a price tag of $19.99 per month, which is double the previous price.

The bundle includes access to Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, and Lightroom Classic, and is aimed at photographers. In a statement provided to PetaPixel, Adobe said that it is testing new pricing tiers.

adobephotographyplan-800x488.jpg
Most users appear to be seeing the updated pricing on the Adobe website, but there is a hidden section of the site where one can still purchase the Photography plan for $9.99 per month.

The new plan does offer 1TB of storage instead of 20GB of storage, but for those who do not use Adobe storage, the new pricing doubles the cost with no added benefit.

It is not clear if Adobe is planning permanent pricing changes for its Photography plan or if prices are going to change for existing subscribers in the future. If you previously signed up for the Photography option, you're likely paying $9.99 per month at the current time.

Adobe offers other plans, pricing a single app at $20.99 and access to all apps at $52.99 per month, but it has offered the lower-cost $9.99 per month Photography plan option since 2013.

Article Link: Adobe Tests Doubling the Price of Photography Plan With Photoshop and Lightroom
 
If my photoshop plan goes up, I'll cancel it immediately. Too many other alternatives. Have been slowing getting used to using some of those alternatives. I prefer photoshop, have been using it since version 1 all those years ago. But the $9.99/month is all I can stomach .
 
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Try Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and soon Affinity Publisher
They are all on the App Store, so powerful that they rival the Adobe products and a fraction of the price.
Adobe are NOT alone in this and do not have the only products that can achieve powerful results.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

You have no idea how much I want to buy Affinity Publisher. I'm still using the last installable version of InDesign.
 
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$240 a year for software that essentially never changes. Its time to abandon Adobe and go with alternatives like Phase One. I have used Photoshop extensively for years, and its amazing how little it has changed over decades. They add some new features which are essentially bells and whistles. Lightroom is very useful mainly as an organization tool, but there are alternatives too.
 
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If you’re a professional photographer and make your living out of it by earning $2000 a month for example. $20 is just a 1% of your earning that is also tax deductible. 1%...

Using that logic, Scott Kelby, who probably makes $2,000,000 a month pressing shutter buttons, should be satisfied paying $20,000 a month for renting a software app because, after all, it's only 1% of his income.
 
I mainly used Photoshop InDesign Illustrator and Acrobat Pro.
My costs for upgrades were about 700 € every second year per person. With CC the costs would have doubled to at least 700 € each year per person.

Main reason for looking into Affinity was staying independent. Being able to open my own work without paying a fee, should I choose to switch to a competitor of Adobe.

Never subscribed.

2015 I started to transition from CS6 DesignWebPremiumSuite to Affinity Suite.
 
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If you’re a professional photographer and make your living out of it by earning $2000 a month for example. $20 is just a 1% of your earning that is also tax deductible. 1%...

Consider how small a percentage the pro's constitute, compared to the market of prosumers whose numbers fund the development of these technologies, and aren't making any money at all on this software, just spending it. There are a lot more users who used to be pro's than there are working pros at any time, and a ton more graduating college with skills and passion every year that will never have the chance to work in it. Just like in any creative field, actual pros making even $2000/mo would be a tiny fraction of the user base. If Adobe is trying to find the sweet spot of how many users they can eliminate and make more revenue with less seats to support, that's cynical but that's big business. However, someone has to keep the punters on board or the funding of tech progress grinds to a crawl.

It was actually there yesterday as I was looking to see how much it would be to upgrade from Lightroom 5. I saw the $19.99 a month and went NOPE.

and nevermind the subscription cost, Lightroom 5.1 is pretty much Lightroom at its peak anyway. 6 added what, a few video tools (when they hadn't even finished supporting still formats, like .png), and then they repackaged 6 with a resource-sucking cloud access & licensing manager for CC, gee thanks, then took the complaints and responded by creating an entirely different application, a web-based (& very basic) photomanager service, and called that lightroom instead, which it is not.

Given the choices between Apple's method, of killing Aperture execution-style, vs Adobe's method of death by a thousand cuts, I guess Apple's was at least less gruesome.

I still don't know what it is these companies have against professional photography software, but man they sure seem to despise the very concept.

"I've called this meeting today because it occurred to me on the drive in, that we've been making this photography software for a while now, so that's boring. Lets do something completely different. Who's got any ideas about some different things we could do? Nothing old! We want to get big press on this one. ...Dave? Dave's a good strong, confident kind of name. Do we have a Dave here?"
"Yes I'm David Bur..."
"Excellent, everybody, Dave is going to head up the new version. I'm sure you'll knock it out of the park Dave."
"I... work in accounting... just came in to get coffee..."
"Trial by fire, Dave."
"Lightroom 8CreativeSocialCloudVideo24-7FriendSpaceTimeFace360.app created. $200/mo forever. Upgrade!"
 
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So soon after the Aperture announcement, I wonder if the way they decide to show one price or the other is based on whether you are using Safari or not.
 
Let’s call "subscriptions" what they really are: software rental.

The only app I'm aware of using this pricing model as a true "subscription" is Agenda, which lets you subscribe to a year's worth of new features, but then those features are yours to keep once the year is up. With rentals like Adobe CC and so many others, you're left totally empty-handed the moment you stop paying.

And as far as Adobe is concerned, they're really riding the wave of market dominance right now, but I remember a little product called QuarkXPress that was once king of the hill too, and now it's basically a footnote. If Adobe keeps putting the screws to its users, sooner or later an affordable option is going to gain traction and they'll start losing their base.
 
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Whoever invented the whole push to subscription models for everything, I fart in your general direction.

Aim your arse towards Redmond, WA and Bill Gates as Microsoft was an early adopter of the trashy subscription model. I won't rent software just like I won't rent some stranger's pants and socks to wear.
 
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Looking at the upvotes on this thread one would think only poverty stricken users and non-users post here commenting on something they do not use and do not want.

I have a product I doubled the price on. A series of products actually. I updated the pricing from our 1992 level to our 2004 level, even that was below competitors for as comparable product as possible. The price change was done in 2018.

My experience is sales barely dropped, revenues went way up, and the increased "commitment" at the higher price point actually improved positive feedback, perhaps by dropping marginal user negative feedback.

$20 a month for such a feature complete resource is cheap, the price doubling notwithstanding.

Netflix recently increased the price on the family plan from $13.99 to $15.99 in a rapidly increasingly competitive market for "similar" services, and only won big.

The upvoters are loud but misguided and simply wrong.
 
Have you looked at the insider trading activity at Adobe over the past 12-18 months? It is truly staggering-and to me anyways a sign that the corporate heads there do not see decent profits in the future, thus they have sold sold sold. Perhaps they thought better sell shares now just in case doubling the fee goes badly...
 
Years ago, before I switched to a Mac, I got a full license CS5

Then I switched to a Mac,
got a Parallels license
got a Windows 7 license
moved the CS5 to a my VM 7.0 on the Mac
threw my windows desktop away
threw my windows laptop away

Now I pay about $50/year to Parallels for upgrades and gripe about that, less than a monthly CS subscription

Yeah, my software is old, and also fully paid for, but it works for me.

When Windows on the VM gets too messed up, I just reload an old version.

All I use the VM for is CS5

Buy once, subscribe never, it's a stable and known for proposition

TS
 
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You'd think they want to actually price the product such that it's deters people from software piracy, not such that it encourages it. *shrug*
 
Software as a Service (SAS) is a business model for crooks and only crooks. Even with updates, it's not a service, it's a product. That's why I refuse to use SAS products.
 
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