Adobe Tests Doubling the Price of Photography Plan With Photoshop and Lightroom

[ctg7w6]

The comments are going to be filled with a lot of upset users.

Photographer: Doesn't blink at spending $1500-5000 on a new lens, or $3000-5000 on a new camera body, or $300-800 on a new tripod, or $400-900 on a new flash, or $150 a pop on new UHS-II SD cards, or $800-3000 on a Thunderbolt RAID setup and SSDs, or $3000-7000 on a new Mac, or $800-2000 on a second and third display, or thousands of dollars on lighting equipment and backdrops and travel and paying models and grips.

Also photographer: Freaks out at having to pay Adobe a couple hundred bucks a year to edit, organize, share, and store all of their photos.

Y'all suck.

I’ve always been quite interested in consumers who don’t want the best for consumers. You do realize it’s basically an antagonistic system in which producers attempt to charge the most that consumers are willing to pay and consumers want to pay as little as producers are willing to charge, right?

I get disliking communist or socialist arguments that attempt to artificially lower the price and thus harm producers, but in a general capitalistic system it is perfectly fine for a consumer to want lower prices.

 

[Miguel Cunha]

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Still on Photoshop CS6

Still on… wait!…
Still not on any Adobe product whatsoever! This would happen eventually. I found excellent alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator and in addition to their sluggish performance, I don't even miss them anymore.
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I don't know what I will do because I know I will eventually need to upgrade.

Check out Affinity Photo and Designer

 

[Killfear]

My advice to everyone:

Learn Capture One & Helicon.

Use Capture One and Helicon.

Also, If you’re a Sony shooter, utilize the Imaging Edge app on Mac/PC and it will edit your photos MUCH better than anything Adobe has.

Being totally honest, Adobe is amazing and paramount for what it can do (motion graphics and as scripts, graphic design) but let’s be totally honest, there’s more headache than heaven.

Overall, i’m figuring out by myself that if you learn Capture one, you can not only edit & retouch your images to a much better result, BUT most importantly that’s what a lot of professional studios use.

I’m just saying. I understand all the frustration totally. I love Adobe, But I’m losing faith lately.

 

[drewaz]

Is using cloud storage optional with these plans? If not, do the images remain on the computer in addition to being available in the cloud?

 

[Dranix]

The Googlator just found these, and I’m sure there are more:

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4280776

https://www.shuttermuse.com/best-digital-asset-management-software/

None gives a decent replacement. All they give are always replacements for Photoshop which I don't use.

 

[Larvas]

As long as we're willing to pay, the businesses will charge more.

Amazon Prime
Apple
Adobe
Samsung

At one point they will hit a wall ofc, but until then they will have more then enough info about their users spending habits to price the services and products as they want it.

 

[Macintoshrumors]

The comments are going to be filled with a lot of upset users.

Photographer: Doesn't blink at spending $1500-5000 on a new lens, or $3000-5000 on a new camera body, or $300-800 on a new tripod, or $400-900 on a new flash, or $150 a pop on new UHS-II SD cards, or $800-3000 on a Thunderbolt RAID setup and SSDs, or $3000-7000 on a new Mac, or $800-2000 on a second and third display, or thousands of dollars on lighting equipment and backdrops and travel and paying models and grips.

Also photographer: Freaks out at having to pay Adobe a couple hundred bucks a year to edit, organize, share, and store all of their photos.

Y'all suck.

A couple hundred bucks a year adds up to thousands over a career when said photographer could have paid a one time fee for software like it should be.

Subscription based software should be illegal.

 

[chrisone]

Is using cloud storage optional with these plans? If not, do the images remain on the computer in addition to being available in the cloud?

Yes, the cloud part is quite good as long as you have enough space there (the 20gig plan that was temporarily removed is eaten fast). You can have smart previews stored locally (or only in the cloud if you prefer) and you work on them on mobile or desktop. The original files are in the cloud and can also be set to automatically or manually download to your computer, a NAS or an external drive.

Edit: sorry, regarding if cloud is optional I’m not sure, but I think it’s only optional if you use the Lightroom Classic. For the CC (Creative Cloud) versions, is really very cloud-based (but it does work well)

 

[Kabeyun]

None gives a decent replacement. All they give are always replacements for Photoshop which I don't use.

That’s fine. You do you. I’m just saying that there’s life outside the Adobe ecosystem, and there are plenty of enthusiasts, the folks you say have been left behind, who’d agree.

 

[639051]

But Capture 1 is either a serious one off price or no different to Adobe at GBP 20.00 a month so how is that being touted as an alternative (on cost alone)?

Show me the adobe product that has an option for purchasing a perpetual license. They don’t have one anymore.

This isn’t simply about cost. It’s about an increasing cost that is monthly with no other option.

 

[AppleHater]

No perpetual license, no deal for me. I have switched to Capture One this year, and I'm much happier. Truth to be told, it's more complicated than Lightroom, but way more powerful than Lightroom, and it covers all my need for Photoshop either. I love the layers and color editing capabilities.

 

[jagolden]

Any ideas on an Indesign replacement? Procreate/Affinity Designer is almost perfect for illustration (once the iPad pro's get a little better at handling huge files for commercial work) but finding a decent alternative to indesign has been tough.

Serif/Affinity will be releasing their page layout application this year.
Download the beta and try it out.

 

[DonutHands]

This software bundle is still absolutely worth the cost, I honestly thought it was under priced at $10/month. But unfortunately its just not a 'no brainer' anymore at $20/month.

If the service debut at $20, fine, its amazing software made for professionals. But doubling the price and adding nothing but increased cloud storage, super lame.

 

[msama]

The test is "will we lose less than half our sales if we double the price". If so, it's profitable and they roll with it. Beer did this a while ago... vote with your dollars people.

 

[Alan Wynn]

Eh, I’m not sure Fusion really works. AE’s strength is its versatility, whereas Fusion really focuses on FX work. I couldn’t do my animations in Fusion easily or well; there’s some workflows the mode based workflow doesn’t make much sense for.

I would be curious to see an example or two of things that you think you could not do in Fusion (or would be too hard - I get that it might be possible, but if it took two weeks to accomplish what is 5 minutes in AE, that is not a replacement ). The node based workflow is definitely different, and has a bit of a learning curve. While I am not an animator, compositor or motion graphics guy, I have written software for all three and have built work flow systems for many projects (from small corporate video projects to large features).

If you are making money using PP/AE, and the price works for you, there is no reason for you to switch. From friends and colleagues that have work with both, once one is comfortable with a node based workflow, one can see how much more powerful it is.

I am curious if you have tried HitFilm Studio. For under $500, it seems pretty competitive, but I the only people I know who have used it, have just played around, so no real projects. That price gives you HitFilm Pro (their integrated Editor/Animation System/Compositor), their Ignite Pro extension set for AE/PP/FCP/Motion/Avid/DaVinci Resolve/Edius/ Catalyst/Nuke/Vegas, and their new MoCap system. It also gives 12 months of updates and software support. They also have HitFilm Express, their free version.

 

[pika2000]

Not sure I completely agree. There are some really decent products out there, like Acorn and Pixelmator, which are an order of magnitude more powerful than Photos and pretty user friendly. Some do plugins well, and there are a host of great third party masking apps (I use FluidMask, which is excellent and has helpful tutorials) which don’t require a doctorate in computer science. The pros are sort of locked in, but there are options for those willing to break out of the (increasingly expensive) Adobubble.

Acorn and Pixelmator are Photoshop alternatives, which I agree there are a lot to choose from.
But Lightroom is another story. The are not much choices out there. With Apple quitting Aperture a while back, the choice got even fewer.

 

[selfmachine]

Acorn and Pixelmator are Photoshop alternatives, which I agree there are a lot to choose from.
But Lightroom is another story. The are not much choices out there. With Apple quitting Aperture a while back, the choice got even fewer.

Yep, same here. Lightroom is a simple program, but unrivalled. The open source alternatives (Darktable, Lightzone, Rawtherapee, I tried them all) are just not intuitive, user-friendly, fast, or mac-friendly enough.

In fact the Photos app is quite good, but the Photos library is a mess and you can't save presets, if not it would have been as good as Aperture.

 

[zifty]

The comments are going to be filled with a lot of upset users.

Photographer: Doesn't blink at spending $1500-5000 on a new lens, or $3000-5000 on a new camera body, or $300-800 on a new tripod, or $400-900 on a new flash, or $150 a pop on new UHS-II SD cards, or $800-3000 on a Thunderbolt RAID setup and SSDs, or $3000-7000 on a new Mac, or $800-2000 on a second and third display, or thousands of dollars on lighting equipment and backdrops and travel and paying models and grips.

Also photographer: Freaks out at having to pay Adobe a couple hundred bucks a year to edit, organize, share, and store all of their photos.

Y'all suck.

At least new equipment offers utility to the purchaser. Whereas paying more for CC doesn't give you anything more but a larger hole in your wallet/budget.

 

[satchmo]

I'm not saying Serif doesn't have a shot at unseating Adobe, but it's going to be an uphill battle given how entrenched Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign apps are, in the creative community.

 

[drewaz]

Yes, the cloud part is quite good as long as you have enough space there (the 20gig plan that was temporarily removed is eaten fast). You can have smart previews stored locally (or only in the cloud if you prefer) and you work on them on mobile or desktop. The original files are in the cloud and can also be set to automatically or manually download to your computer, a NAS or an external drive.

Edit: sorry, regarding if cloud is optional I’m not sure, but I think it’s only optional if you use the Lightroom Classic. For the CC (Creative Cloud) versions, is really very cloud-based (but it does work well)

Thanks for the info. I guess I am an old school dude ... I am a hobbyist photographer and use Lr 6.14 perpetual license and PSE. I prefer to have my images stored on my iMac, backed up to an external drive and the cloud via Backblaze. Right now my only use for Lr is as an organizer and doubt the subscription model would be much benefit for me at any price.

 

[saudade]

Well if they change my plan to $19.99 I'll definitely cancel.

Dud i can help with some bucks if u need we’re talking bout just a few extra smackers here men, no big deal photoshop it’s amazing and it really worth 2 pay 4 it imho let me know

 

[dfs]

It's Adobe's piratically greedhead business models that keep me using Dreamweaver 5. Although this is a 32-bit app which won't run on the next version of OSX, I'm damned if I'm going to allow Adobe to make me keep paying and paying and paying for a product I have already bought for a hefty price. I especially refuse to go forward because Dreamweaver 5 has bugs which had survived several iterations of the app although surely Adobe was fully aware of but never got around to fixing, and I would scarcely be surprised to find that they are alive and well on the subscription version of CSS. This makes me very suspicious about exactly what "improvements" the newer versions have to offer.

I am astonished that no more responsible and ethical developer has ever brought out replacements for Adobe's key CSS offerings. Seems to me that there would be a veritable stampede of Adobe-haters eager to snap them up.

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

 

[Alan Wynn]

How can $120 per year change the equation much? Honestly.

It is simple. Doubling the price means that for some, non-pro users, it now exceeds the value they receive.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

The comments are going to be filled with a lot of upset users.

Photographer: Doesn't blink at spending $1500-5000 on a new lens, or $3000-5000 on a new camera body, or $300-800 on a new tripod, or $400-900 on a new flash, or $150 a pop on new UHS-II SD cards, or $800-3000 on a Thunderbolt RAID setup and SSDs, or $3000-7000 on a new Mac, or $800-2000 on a second and third display, or thousands of dollars on lighting equipment and backdrops and travel and paying models and grips.

Also photographer: Freaks out at having to pay Adobe a couple hundred bucks a year to edit, organize, share, and store all of their photos.

Y'all suck.

A photographer can utilize other cloud services, like AWS at the fraction of the cost of Adobe Cloud and smile.

 

[jagolden]

I'm not saying Serif doesn't have a shot at unseating Adobe, but it's going to be an uphill battle given how entrenched Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign apps are, in the creative community.

Definitely uphill and don’t see them unseating Adobe but think they’ll take a good chunk away as time goes on.
Photo and Designer can open native psd and ai files which is great.
I’m guessing their page layout application will open InDesign files. That’s something I haven’t tried with the beta yet.