The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

https://www.theverge.com/tech/913765/adobe-rivals-free-creative-software-app-updates

by tambourine_man • 3 months ago

253 189 3 months ago

bix62• 3 months ago

Paywall.

I assume everyone is tired of their subscription fee?

I love Lightroom but it’s too expensive for my hobby use. I wish all the photo systems had better interoperability. I’m losing quite a bit as I migrate to Darktable.

corndoge2• 3 months ago

Try DxO Photolab if you have a mac

bix62• 3 months ago

Better than Darktable?

j454• 3 months ago

acdsee is another one worth exploring.

alsetmusic• 3 months ago

Paywall at the Verge? I have them in my RSS feeds and load articles most days and have never seen that. I definitely don't subscribe to their site. Either way, here's a link:

https://archive.is/WCDgq

Mixtape• 3 months ago

Their articles seem to load fine in my reader (Fluent) if I fetch them as they're published. Beyond that though, if I try to fetch the full content or open the article in my browser, I hit the paywall. It seems like either their paywall takes a few minutes to apply to their new articles or they deliberately make them accessible to RSS users fee-free.

fluidcruft• 3 months ago

Yeah, theverge is subscription now.

tayo42• 3 months ago

All of the software is to expensive for hobbyists.

How do people make the jump from hobby to pro without going broke paying for all of this software on their own? Is the art industry alittle more leniant about learning software on the job?

Tanoc3• 3 months ago

Most of us start off as pirates and then go legitimate once we're big enough to work with others. Everybody knows someone who has a cracked version of some ancient version of Corel Draw, but we all know getting contracted under a big company means they want us using the latest file type standards because they'll only have access to the newest version of the file's publishing program. I know some people who still animate in Flash MX and go through all of the trouble of porting it forward to Animator CC 2025. Thought with Adobe killing Animator last month maybe they'll end up with some even more convoluted upconversion chain to get it into Toonboom.

egypturnash• 3 months ago

Student discounts, piracy. Mostly piracy.

varispeed• 3 months ago

They keep adding bloat instead of focusing on usability. Still can't get Illustrator to remember my print settings.

QuantumSeed• 3 months ago

So many competitors are releasing free or low-cost alternatives, that shifting away from Adobe is becoming plausible for many folks.

nehal3m• 3 months ago

http://archive.today/WCDgq

It’s so insidious to sell yearly subscriptions that you pay for monthly. I want to pay by the month precisely because I decide on a monthly basis whether I need a service. If you want out early with Adobe you have to cough up half of the remaining subscription time.

For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler. I’ll pour one out for the pro’s.

vladvasiliu4• 3 months ago

For hobby photography do yourself a favor and skip this dark pattern peddler.

Meh. It depends on how you view your photography.

I'm a Sunday photographer. Never made a dime from my work, and I don't look to. I just do it because I enjoy it. I particularly enjoy that I can use it as an excuse to move my ass away from my computer, walk around town to grab shots, etc.

I like editing my photos, but the editing is not why I take photos. I don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of time to learn a new tool. It's a hobby, and the software is only an accessory to it. If I have to spend hours to learn a new tool in front of my computer, it defeats the purpose.

I tried Darktable, and got okish results with it, but it's a pain to use. It doesn't have any serious noise reduction, and since I can't be bothered to lug around anything heavier than a m4/3 body with an f/4 lense, it's something I need, because I mainly shoot at night half the year.

I've looked at alternatives like capture one, but unless you intend to not upgrade your software for at least 3-4 years, they're not cheaper, even though they're not subscription based. You also have to cough up all the money upfront. And you get no Photoshop, either, which I use in addition to LR.

Now, I don't love lightroom. I have no idea wtf it lags when I open and close panels on a pretty hefty desktop. But boy, do I love the time I gain with "ai" masking, noise reduction and object removal.

All in all, it's just not expensive enough to make it worth my while to change to a different software and also lose all my catalog history, just to cough up the same amount of cash in the end.

Now, if someone came up with an actual equivalent that ran on Linux, so I didn't have to have a dedicated Windows box just for this, I'd line right up with my money ready.

dmbche3• 3 months ago

I think Resolve just released a lightroom equivalent didn't they?

Edit0: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/...

Yeah and seems the only limitation you get is no GPU acceleration with the free tier. I'd give that a spin I like resolve much better than premiere for video and it has AI integration as well

oliwarner3• 3 months ago

I struggle to think of it as insidious. The problem you have is you're reading it wrong. There is no monthly licence. It's an annual licence that you can either pay up front or split, either way, you need to pay.

In 1995 it cost us the equivalent of $2k up front to buy Photoshop. I think there was actually a small discount but it was a hecking big payout. You'd get to keep that version forever, but what if you only needed it for a month? What happened when just a year later Photoshop 4 came out? Tough.

I get that software subscriptions suck, but it's the compromise that makes it both affordable to you in your life, and affordable to Adobe.

bnj3• 3 months ago

It’s insidious because you’re being required to agree to pay for a year of use, split monthly, but cannot decide to cancel during the term of the agreement without paying for use that you don’t want. Just because the terms are clear doesn’t mean it’s not an insidious pricing scheme.

If it were not insidious, it would be easy to answer the question: “what costs for adobe are being covered by the early termination fee?” - but there aren’t any costs, the fee is a punishment to dissuade you from cancelling and hoping that you will miss the window to prevent automatic renewal.

boltzmann64• 3 months ago

how is this a dark pattern? say that you bought a subscription of new york times for a year and put it on monthly installment. can you bail out of paying the credit card company after six months? only here, both the product and credit card company is adobe. in fact adobe is being generous by letting you "cough up" only a half the fee where your credit card company wouldn't. at this rate all credit companies are "dark pattern peddlers" according to you? adobe is pretty clear on the name of the subscription, "yearly subsciption, payed monthly" in big letters at the top of their pricing page.

remus• 3 months ago

The dark pattern is how it was presented. It wasn't "your total is X, split it in 12 monthly payments" it was a yearly contract disguised as a monthly contract.

classified• 3 months ago

What took them so long? It's about time.

diath• 3 months ago

If you're a hobbyist needing photo editing software, just use https://www.photopea.com/

Wistar2• 3 months ago

Photopea is very good. It is what I recommend to friends who just want an immediate solution.

jart• 3 months ago

Photopea is great but I switched to Pixelmator Pro. I just paid $49.99 one time. It's a clean native app. It doesn't install all these horrors of horror on my system like Photoshop did. It doesn't try to pressure me into using some half baked AI tool. (I mean could you imagine what that must be like being an artist who hates AI and Adobe shoves it in your face?) I can't believe I was paying $40/month for Photoshop for so long. Thankfully I got all my money back and more by shorting Adobe's stock. After spending so many years drinking unicorn blood, no software company deserves to fall more. Everyone who invested in them, hoping to get rich off torturing artists and tax payers, deserves to lose their money too.

breakfastduck2• 3 months ago

I did exactly the same, for creating graphics / posters. Love Pixelmator... is PS better at some stuff? For sure, but it's not stuff I need. Thats adobes issue.

bensyverson2• 3 months ago

For a long time, "pro" software was able to retain its price premium, even while consumer apps essentially all became free.

But two things are happening: First, competitors are realizing pro software can be a "loss leader" for a different offer (see: Blackmagic Resolve, Canva's Affinity suite).

Second, AI is making it possible to create open source alternatives that are very full-featured. Blender is a pre-AI example, but we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year.

I'm not moving away from Lightroom yet, because I have a massive catalog containing 20+ years of photos. But new users coming into the ecosystem have far more options now. It's a tough time to charge a subscription for something that's getting actively commoditized.

vrighter• 3 months ago

don't offend blender by comparing it to ai slop.

bensyverson2• 3 months ago

If you think anything created with the help of agentic coding is slop, you're in for a rough (checks watch) rest of your life

rpastuszak• 3 months ago

FWIW it took me waaaaay less time to import 30k+ photos from a Lightroom catalog to Capture one than into a fresh Lightroom install.

Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.

Calavar• 3 months ago

we're seeing an explosion of brand-new high-polish OSS apps this year

Do you mind sharing a few examples?

armadyl• 3 months ago

None exist, it's literally all slop.

timmytokyo• 3 months ago

A veritable "explosion"! Surely GP can name 3.

qrobit• 3 months ago

I personally like marimo[^1], the developers rely heavily on AI tools afaict

[^1]: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo

jauntywundrkind• 3 months ago

Ran into rapidraw yesterday looking for rust RAW processing (was looking for libraries or CLI tools but taking inventory as I went). Ran into rapidraw, which notably is GPU accelerated: https://github.com/cybertimon/rapidraw#rapidraw

The recent updates list is so impressive. Good steady stream of updates. And a good number of them take and integrate amazing incredible open source models, doing one shot depth processing, object detection, infill painting, denoising.

And oh by the way the developer is 18 years old.

jlarcombe• 3 months ago

before Affinity was a "loss leader" for Canva, it was a profitable suite of applications in its own right

Tanoc3• 3 months ago

I bought CS6 Suite back in 2012 and used it well into 2021. Before that I had a patchwork of CS3 programs from 2005 I was given the discs for second-hand. Nowadays I use Krita, ffmpeg, Blender, Zim Desktop Wiki, and Inkscape to replace Flash/Animator, Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. CS6 cost me $549 back in 2012 under a pretty generous student discount, but would've been $1,800 otherwise. That's $790 and $2,500 adjusted for inflation if you still trust the BLS' CPI calculations.

If you buy Adobe CC Pro's all-in-one bundle you get one year at a time to use it, for almost the same price as it cost me to use CS6 Suite for nine. You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3. The only way to get that nowadays is through piracy, which predisposes users to piracy anyways because the pirates actually disable Adobe's broken cloud features that hinder your work. Meanwhile Blender, ffmpeg, Krita, ZIM, and Inkscape are all free but which I support with donations.

We all saw this coming back in 2015 when CC first came out. It's just that the revolt was expected to happen sooner.

wongarsu• 3 months ago

For regular, undiscounted prices the subscription prices were somewhat fair. Regular Photoshop CS5 was $700, or $1000 for the extended version. And $200 to upgrade. Now it's a $300/year subscription.

But students really got shafted. You used to get 80-90% student discounts, and could keep using the same version for years. Including keeping the software when you were no longer a student

nradov6• 3 months ago

You're not wrong, but students often have to spend more than $300 per semester (not year) just on textbooks.

vondur• 3 months ago

At the CSU we had a deal for students to get the Adobe suite for $20 per semester. At certain CSU’s it’s now free for every student.

CSU is the California State University system.

Unbeliever69• 3 months ago

I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against paying companies for their software, but it is clear that the conflated subscription models/licenses have come at a cost to their reputation.

ghighi7878• 3 months ago

I am surprised that patents (and not regulatory requirements) is what keeps autodesk alive in the field

gljiva• 3 months ago

ProgeCAD seems to be a viable alternative lately. I have heard positive reviews from a perfectionist that does _a lot_ of telecom-related projects in it after years of AutoCAD.

Lammy• 3 months ago

You can't even get secondhand instances of the software like I did as a youth with CS3.

Were you able to get the DRM-free “offline” CS3 installers during the time they were offered? I will cherish mine forever lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24865636

Still using Photoshop CS3 for my daily image-editing needs in Windows 11 on my Framework Laptop 12. Mostly cleaning up album art for my music library metadata and cleaning up my flatbed scans (removing damaged spots, fixing UV fade, hiding the glare from the scanner passing a horizontal light over something that has been creased for years (like a DVD/BD case sleeve), etc.

Tanoc3• 3 months ago

No. I have a copy of Flash CS3 for helping with archival efforts or digging into Skyrim and Fallout 4 when friends ask though. As far as I know it's the last version that accepts all three versions of Actionscript.

CWuestefeld5• 3 months ago

We all love to hate on Adobe. But as a photographer my primary software tool is Lightroom. And I continue to use it despite its $120/year price and less-than-stellar cataloging subsystem because its photo editing features (it's primary mission) still exceed the capabilities of its competitors.

I don't see anyone else here talking about the huge strides that Adobe has taken in the past few years with their masking tools in particular. Adobe is still the leader at least in this segment because their tools are still the leaders functionally.

If competitors want to leapfrog Adobe, they're going to have to continue to innovate past Adobe in functionality, not just price. After all, that price isn't really that onerous: their photographer's suite (Lightroom and Photoshop) are together only $120 year. That's not free, but it's not so much that I'm willing to make my job as a photographer harder or less effective because of it.

righthand• 3 months ago

You’ll never try a different product anyways so who cares about Adobe die hards? This might as well be a thread about using Linux and all the Apple die hards come here to tell us they just can’t use anything besides Apple for “reasons”. Great! Enjoy your setup.

vladvasiliu4• 3 months ago

Not GP, but as a LR user, I actually did try alternatives and wasn't impressed. They're usually just as expensive, except if you expect to use the software for multiple years without upgrading, which, to GP's point, would have had you miss out on quite substantial improvements.

I'm a hobbyist, and the new "AI" masking has saved me a lot of time during my edits. Is it as good as a professional path tool wielder? Probably not, but that's not relevant to my use case.

dmbche3• 3 months ago

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/davinciresolve/...

Try this out, free too

II2II2• 3 months ago

If you can afford it, that is wonderful. For those who either cannot afford it or who don't need its features, then be happy that the competition is stepping up. They get the software they need. You get the software you need.

I've never really understood why people insist that there can be only one or two products per software category, particularly when the category has a large enough customer base to support multiple products from multiple vendors.

socalgal22• 3 months ago

no one is insisting there are can only be one or two products per category.

Rahter, at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month, that's two coffees, A MONTH!

I bought Affinity Photo at one point, when it was $50. Then I tried to use it for a work project where I needed to do a minor edit to 150 photos. I figured out how to do it but it's workflow was tedious. At 3 mins per photo it would have taken me 7.5 hours. I paid Adobe the $120 and got it done in 1.5hrs. Those 5 hours of my life were worth far more than the $120 I paid to Adobe.

I'm not saying you should buy Photoshop or Lightroom. Rather, I'm just making the point that spending money on a good solution should not be seen as a failure. Lightroom is designed around editing lots of photos. It has tons of batch processing features and it's UI is designed to make it easy to edit lots of photos in minimal time. I'm not saying there isn't a better design, maybe there is, but so far I haven't personally run into it so I stick with Lightroom because it gives me my life back. All for the price of 2 coffees a month

ktallett3• 3 months ago

Whether you need masking or such level of tools is dependent on how you approach photography. You can change your method of taking photos to remove such a need for editing.

nradov6• 3 months ago

How?

vjvjvjvjghv4• 3 months ago

Give us a tutorial please. Otherwise this statement makes no sense.

larusso• 3 months ago

I mean yes. But the advent of exposure / focus bracketing lifted the dynamic range limit for most cameras. The only other way, at least for landscape I see is to buy expensive ND filter plates or invest into a camera with more dynamic range.

CWuestefeld5• 3 months ago

There's a kernel of truth here. But it's not true in the general case.

Others have responded about dynamic range and HDR, and that's one area where a particular feature set is necessary for certain kinds of photography.

Astrophotography and macrophotography both very nearly require focus-stacking abilities.

There's certainly a lot of photography you can do with just a camera, or with just a camera and very basic editing tools.

But having advanced tools opens up a whole world of possibilities. Those aren't all going to be things that everyone wants or needs to do. But there's a huge number of artists who will want or need some of them.

matwood2• 3 months ago

Way back when the only real LR competitor was Aperture. I moved to LR when Apple discontinued Aperture, though I really wish they hadn't. I've tried all the competitors multiple times but keep coming back to LR for my DSLR usage.

newsclues3• 3 months ago

Apple being an off and on competitor in the space was always strange.

They failed to commit, and often let their tools languish, despite the following. Odd.

jasomill4• 3 months ago

I switched to Capture One, which at least offers perpetual licensing, but their pricing has become sufficiently annoying that I plan to look very closely at DaVinci Resolve's new photography features as soon as I have time (I already use Resolve for video and have a paid license for it, and in fact have have considered using it for photography in the past because it has a much better UI for nondestructive editing than any image editor I've seen).

vjvjvjvjghv4• 3 months ago

Agreed. Lightroom is still a great package. The alternatives are either way less powerful, hard to use (looking at darktable), or cost even more (like Capture One). The AI masking in Lightroom is fantastic. There is almost no need for Photoshop anymore.

petepete3• 3 months ago

Capture One might cost more, but it's a one off payment. I'm still happily using CO11 (8 or 9 years old?) and if it was good enough for professional use when it came out, it's more than enough for me now.

miladyincontrol• 3 months ago

Their denoise algo as well, while there are some that can do a heavier reconstruction Adobe's seems to have a good balance for still looking relatively natural and not trying too hard to generate missing detail. I've seen some like DxO's just invent new text and faces on people.

I do wish Adobe would focus a bit more on the non-ML masking, give us saturation masking, let us expand or feather masks, etc.

It is nice to at least see some options like RapidRaw try their hand at AI/ML masking, and hopefully darktable's attempts in newer versions end up fruitful.

Adobe's camera support is still rather appreciated on my end as well, you're rather pressed to find a device or lens they dont have support for. I've been working on my own personal raw developer lately and while I'm very thankful for projects like lensfun, wont pretend I didnt have to borrow a number of corrections profiles from Adobe's files.

worthless-trash• 3 months ago

People absolutely COULD design something better, but if there is a lesson that I have seen replayed across the internet over the last 20 years is that adobe users, only want adobe, they dont want anything else.

They want the shortcuts exactly the same, the screens exactly the same, the outputs exactly the same.

They simply dont accept anything else, it basically needs to be a carbon clone copy to keep them happy, and in that case, why bother writing software, you dont win those users, and there is MANY of them.

drfloyd51• 3 months ago

Never bet against laziness.

“You mean I have to go to adoby.com and not adobe.com to download? Forget it. It am out.”

slumberlust• 3 months ago

That's quickly changing as the college grads are entering the workforce with experience on DaVinci.

kjkjadksj5• 3 months ago

Have you vetted them? They are all the same. Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms. So does dcraw. In terms of the editing tooling they all can do the same things. They all have the same library management affordances. Ps has been feature complete in my eyes for over a decade might as well pirate it and not spend $1200 a decade for the same couple functions you actually use.

CWuestefeld5• 3 months ago

Have you vetted them? They are all the same.

Obviously I haven't tried all competitors, but I have tried many over the years. Some of them have innovations, some of them are crap.

Lightroom imo has the worst raw converter algorithms used. At least for fuji still not using the right algorithms. Capture one uses the right algorithms.

I've seen this argued before. It's clear that they're different, but it's far from clear that LR's are wrong. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste and style, or perhaps I've learned to take photos with an informed understanding of what will result, but I still get photos that win awards, and that people pay money for, through LR.

They all have the same library management affordances.

They don't and if you wanted to argue on this set of features, it would probably be your strongest argument. Lightroom's library management is barely sufficient; some competitors have clearly surpassed them here.

But in photo editing, the field is NOT all the same. Some competitors offer a different approach allow the artist to think about their images in a different way, and that may lend itself to better results, or easier results, for certain styles (Luminar comes to mind here). But in other ways - notably Adobe's advances in "AI" masking (I think it's really "ML" masking) - LR is head-and-shoulders above the competition. These differences make it worth the money, at least for my skills and style.

breakfastduck2• 3 months ago

The issue is 95% of users dont use the features that adobe is so much better at. I've moved from PS to Pixelmator and there are even more moving from PS to Canva. Doesnt matter to most users that PS generative fill is better.

cellular• 3 months ago

Same goes for fusion 360 when you just want to do CNC. Use "GatorCAM for cnc". $30 with future upgrades included.

https://sites.google.com/view/gatorcam/home

W3zzy2• 3 months ago

$120 a year for professional use is dirt cheap. My daughter is a graphic design student and gets a free CC ride during her studies. If she would have to pay for the apps should would have a hard time.

What bothers me is that the school doesn't allow students using open source software. They're all locked in the closed ecosystem and keep their students in software jail too.

jasomill4• 3 months ago

$120/year is cheap, but note that most of the other individual application plans cost at least as much as the $240 Lightroom/Photoshop bundle ($240/year for Acrobat Pro, $264/year each for Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere, InDesign, etc.).

This adds up quickly if you even ocassionally use more than a couple Adobe apps, especially as month-by-month pricing, where available, is considerably more expensive (e.g., $414 annualized for the $264/year products; not to be confused with the monthly pricing listed on the main page, which requires an annual commitment).

They also make it difficult to find the basic all-apps plan (Creative Cloud Standard) unless you know it exists, as the main pricing page[1] only lists a pricier plan (Creative Cloud Pro) that adds AI credits, web apps, and mobile apps and doesn't even mention the less expensive plan.

[1] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html

conductr• 3 months ago

As a non-photographer, more of a hobby tinkerer type user that has used Adobe products for decades and has never even earned a single dollar off them or their derivatives, the prices are onerous and there's no license that matches my usage. That's my only complaint really. I dabble in all types of media for the fun of it. While I may only use a product occasionally, sometimes not even once a year, on occasion I want to animate, photoshop, edit video, audio, or they have a new app that I want to just tinker with (Firefly, etc). So I wish I could just pay some usage based rate that worked out reasonable on cost because when I look at my last ~10 years or so there's only about 100 hours a year I spend tinkering with these products. I don't think they care about people like me, but I think it's possible that I represent a pretty large potential market.

FireBeyond2• 3 months ago

How are you paying $120/year for the Photography bundle? It's been $20/mo for at least a year now, I think. $30/mo if you're going truly month-to-month.

lylo2• 3 months ago

You can call/chat to them and get a discounted annual plan. Also, there's usually a 50% off black friday deal you can buy on Amazon. Seems weird to buy a subscription discount on Amazon, but you can and it emails you a code that you can use. So I have the 1TB Lightroom Cloud sub for £60/year. Complete bargain.

frollogaston5• 3 months ago

Yeah if the alternatives were actually better, we wouldn't hear all this complaining about Adobe's pricing. People want the best thing for free/cheap I guess.

halJordan• 3 months ago

That's not necessarily true, that they have to out innovate Adobe. There's an old aphorism that you can always displace an incumbent with a product if it's 80% as good, at 20% the cost of the incumbent product (ibm/ms, cable/netflix, etc). As adobe increases the price, that 20% gets easier to hit. I suspect (well hope) that we'll see this happen to a bunch of incumbents.

cbull• 3 months ago

It's no longer $120 a year. It went up to $15.99/month a few months ago (in the middle of my annual billing cycle).

As a hobbyist photographer who sometimes does a lot with photography and sometimes very little I despise subscriptions, I'm putting the effort into learning Darktable and look forward to canceling my Adobe subscription.

poulpy123• 3 months ago

Even as a not pro user who used Lightroom mainly for cataloguing and light retouche (+ panorama stitching ), I found Lightroom much better than the concurrence.

In open source the closest tool for my usage is digikam but the interface is incredibly clunky and last time I tested the tools were subpar compared to Lightroom.

I'm having hope that immich could fit the bill but If the fact it's web based has a lot of advantages, I'm afraid the ergonomics and performance will not be enough

chromacity2• 3 months ago

Every time I see one of these HN threads, I am actually amazed with what Adobe was able to pull off. I'm not surprised that they could do this to pros who were used to a particular workflow. In fact, for some businesses, a subscription may have some benefits. You were probably upgrading regularly anyway, and the only downside is that it's an expense you can't cut back on in a lean year.

But there are so many hobbyists, including here HN, who just went with it and have given Adobe thousands of dollars over the past decade just to keep using Lightroom or Photoshop! It just boggles my mind. There was a brief period where you had no good alternatives - GIMP wasn't it - but for almost all hobby needs, you now have very good pay-once options (e.g., Capture One instead of Lightroom). It's basically a monthly fee you pay for not having to think about the problem, and people are willing to pay it for many years.

Makes me think I should be doing more bait-and-switch...

j454• 3 months ago

Hobbyists and professionals have discovered tools like Affinity. Well, the non-subscription version of it anyways.'

teamonkey• 3 months ago

I don’t think it’s that surprising. People will pay for software that has better usability and better functionality.

croes3• 3 months ago

Mostly people stick to what they know even if better alternatives exist

raincole• 3 months ago

Because it's objectively non-expensive, compared to the hardware you want (not need) for photography.

matwood2• 3 months ago

I'm not sure how many occasional LR users there were/are. Either it's software someone needs to manage their non-phone photo library plus editing or not. Those type of people are also likely to upgrade every year. So if you compare pricing you need to compare to also upgrading every year. In that case the subscription was pretty close in price.

As far as competitors, there are certainly other editing options. The number of real competitors quickly shrinks if you include DAM + editing. And LR's editing has made huge strides on top of something that was already top notch.

socalgal22• 3 months ago

It boggles the mind how many people will go and use an inferior solution to avoid spending the price of 2 coffees a month.

chromacity2• 3 months ago

I think that's a goofy take. It's two coffees everywhere. Every other software vendor is trying to move to the subscription model. If you add up all the licenses you need to do work, have hobbies, or procrastinate (Netflix, Spotify, etc), is it still two coffees a month?

I know many folks who make $500k+ a year in the SF Bay Area and complain about affordability, and to a large extent, it's stuff like that that makes them poorer.

Also, my point is that there's nothing inferior about solutions such as Capture One, at least not as far as hobby workflows go.

maplethorpe• 3 months ago

There isn't really a good alternative for After Effects, despite its flaws. There are other motion graphics tools, but they're usually missing enough functionality that you eventually go crawling back to Adobe.

Now that software development is apparently solved, can someone please build a GPU-accelerated version of After Effects? Every motion designer in the world would make the switch over night.

kranke155• 3 months ago

Maxon literally just launched one last week.

richardfulop• 3 months ago

Cavalry just become free thanks to Canva

port11• 3 months ago

I’ve used their software during my Multimedia studies and continued paying for some of it because it was just very, very good.

I despise Adobe’s pricing and the many things they are known for. But let’s not pretend that “competitor gives their product away for free” is a positive for the industry. Media work was already being stolen, copied, trained upon; all the companies making free creativity tools gotta profit off this somehow. It’s bait-and-switch as well.

If anything, it seems that the buy-once-and-keep-it model is what people liked. Adobe’s subscriptions and the competitors’ “you and your data are the product” are both a shitty replacement for software ownership.

mcdeltat• 3 months ago

The thing is, Lightroom is simply very good at what it does. There are infinite photo editing apps out there and many of them don't fit my workflow.

I want: RAW input, light/tone controls, colour grading, detail controls, lens corrections, basic masking, nondestructive adjustments, library management, and a tone curve that doesn't look like dog shit.

I do NOT want: complex layered editing, paintbrushes, preset styling junk, complex geometric transformations, a million menus, video editing, etc.

The more features you add, the more you detract from the core workflow. And all these other editors have watered down their core workflow too much for me, sadly. Lightroom might be corporate junk but at least it does the basics well and mostly gets out of my way.

Capture One is a new name for though, I might give that a try. It looks pretty promising.

int32_64• 3 months ago

Are there any projects focused on getting 'creative' software to work well on Linux? Valve solved Linux gaming but it seems tools like DAWs and video/photo editing is still terrible on Linux.

irasigman• 3 months ago

Meanwhile revenue is up 12% YoY to 6.4B in latest earnings.

Prefer evidence from the eyes over noise from the ears.

tempaccount5050• 3 months ago

These threads remind me of the MS threads. Just like MS doesn't care about home users, Adobe doesnt care about hobbyists. Unless you're a professional graphic designer, you're probably using less than 1% of its capabilities and frankly have a pretty worthless opinion on it. "Well I'm a software dev and I use Lightroom so I kinda know what I'm talking about". No, you don't.

crote• 3 months ago

You're forgetting about the pipeline.

People don't like switching to something different. If they already know product A you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to learn product B to do roughly the same thing - even if it is technically the better option.

Companies like MS and Adobe figured this out decades ago: give it away basically for free to schools and all the kids will be taught to use your software - meaning they'll also expect it when they join the workforce. A $1000 / year license fee is peanuts for a company when preexisting familiarity means it'll make their designers 10% more productive.

Stop caring about the home users, the hobbyists, and the students, and you'll rapidly start losing market share to more accessible alternatives.

callamdelaney• 3 months ago

Adobe is genuinely one of the shittiest companies on the planet.

smetannik• 3 months ago

That list is quite long

lousken• 3 months ago

It will take a generation, but once students at school will be using something else than Adobe, it is over for them. Same with Microsoft

mixmastamyk• 3 months ago

Oh they are present in schools all right, along with google. Giving away free samples to get them hooked.

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 3 months ago

Adobe does fine despite there being plenty of alternatives to their products and the relative ease of switching to them. Microsoft does fine because they have a captive audience to abuse.

ur-whale• 3 months ago

https://archive.ph/WCDgq

nike-17• 3 months ago

The pushback has felt inevitable for a while now. Adobe's transition to a pure subscription model frustrated a lot of casual/freelance users, but it was really their recent terms-of-service shifts and aggressive cloud integrations that alienated the power users. It's exciting to see viable competitors finally taking market share.

Balvarez• 3 months ago

lol adobe has fought off these tool for years, sadly it's just better and i hate it. Adobe's real threat is generative AI. While it's not there yet it will be. I should mention I'm a creative professional.

* anyone who thinks Maxon is any better than adobe should re-think that. They really hosed Z-Brush users

tonyedgecombe• 3 months ago

There was a memo floating around Adobe a couple years ago speculating that their AI features may well make many of their customers redundant. An interesting way to cannibalise your own business.

shrubble• 3 months ago

Adobe lost me when I got a deal on Lightroom, installed it, and edited an image.

Then I went to look at the image on my drive, and it wasn't there. LR had uploaded it and deleted it from my hard drive!

They broke faith with me with that action, I deleted LR and have never touched it since.

If you use Sony cameras, you should check out Capture One, which (last I tested) has a deft touch with Sony files.

lylo2• 3 months ago

There's a setting to keep them on your hard drive as well as in the cloud

simianwords• 3 months ago

There should be a way where I can use these tools using MCP so that I don't have to learn the particulars of how the tool behaves and what options they expose.

There are whole certficiations and tutorials for Adobe lightroom, photoshop etc. If I know what I want to achieve, I should be able to interact with an LLM and figure it out. Massive boost for me tbh.

tucnak• 3 months ago

Yeah, Adobe should be afraid because... checks notes... had the government not intervened, the "creative software industry" would willingly have sold out to Adobe completely years ago, and so there would be no "war" on them. Rally the troops.

danilocesar• 3 months ago

I'm a Darktable user and Affinity mobile user. I was pretty happy with both.

I was using Affinity for quick edits. I happily paid for their software as it's worth what they were charging for and not subscription based.

Then it was bought and Canvas decided to release it for free. What sounds like good news, for me it's concerning: Companies need to make money. If users are not paying, well, they might actually be the product the company sells: either with ads or intelligence. I hate ads as much as I hate my data being harvested, so I'm out now.

A couple of weeks ago I found what seems to work for me now: I bought a tablet capable of running Fedora and Darktable, and that's what am using now.

mvdtnz• 3 months ago

Canva, not Canvas. It's free with optional paid add ons, mostly around AI features. Canva does not sell user data.

ryandrake• 3 months ago

Subscription pricing just sucks. I want to rewind back to the past where you bought software one time, and that was it. You had no further relationship with the vendor. You aren't paying them periodically to "keep it working." You don't need them to keep a server running. You aren't tethered to them providing them "metrics" and "telemetry." You don't have to worry that the software is suddenly going to change out from under you or get silently "updated." Updates suck--don't justify subscriptions "because you have to keep paying your engineers to keep fiddling with the software." I don't want them fiddling. I buy a hammer once. I use it until I die or it breaks.

JohnTHaller2• 3 months ago

For reference, the Creative Cloud Pro Suite (formerly All Apps) is US$1,259.88 per year at $104.99 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a non-refundable, non-cancellable 1 year contract.

Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $659.88 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)

Photoshop is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock

Lightroom is $215.88 / year or $143.88 / year if you lock

PS + LR is $359.88 / year or $239.88 / year if you lock

After Effects is $413.88 / year or $275.88 / year if you lock in

Acrobat is $419.88 / year or $299.88 / year if you lock in

JohnTHaller2• 3 months ago

* EDIT (pasted in the wrong monthly price): Creative Cloud Standard Suite is US$989.88 per year at $82.49 per month or $839.88 per year if you lock in for a year. You lose unlimited access to AI features and instead get 25 monthly credits for them. You also lose access to premium AI features like video generation as well as partner models (Google, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Topaz)

LocalH2• 3 months ago

m0nkrus

sir_brickalot• 3 months ago

So, no one here is a professional creative? In the print industry you can't avoid Adobe for one tool: Acrobat.

You need professional PDF creation with profiles, preflight tools, editing capabilities abd form creator tools.

Oh and there is InDesign which is an industry standard. You need compatibility with your clients' pipeline.

So until there is a real competitor for Acrobat and a change in the whole industry, Adobe is unavoidable.

adi_kurian• 3 months ago

Could you clarify profiles and preflight tools?

pilgrim0• 3 months ago

Adobe won’t be hurt by this in the professional market because they have inter-app compatibility and a somewhat consistent language, plus you need their software to work with legacy files. Adobe is cheap, you can get the full suite for a very reasonable price. Competing software is always niche and you need to learn each one individually as they don’t share UX principles nor ontologies. They might be free now, but imagine managing individual subscriptions for each one later on; a nightmare for individuals and companies alike. Just needing to sign-up for multiple apps individually is a headache, all the emails and updates, etc. Unless someone makes a comparable and comprehensive suite, they won’t be actually competing with Adobe.

anotherevan• 3 months ago

People love free.

I worry about the longevity of some of these. Are they going to be free with little further development and just languish?

If I was a graphics shop, I don't think I'd be jumping off Creative Cloud and re-gearing staff to Cavalry and Affinity in too much of a hurry.

sarbanharble• 3 months ago

Since 2005, I’ve owned or subscribed to Adobe Photoshop suite of products in some fashion. 6 months ago I canceled everything, worrying that I’d miss Illustrator the most. I don’t.

HackerThemAll• 3 months ago

Also the Reader has become so bloated and ugly that I abandoned it for the tiny SumatraPDF that starts faster than a blink of an eye and displays PDFs for reading very nicely. I don't need all that features which Adobe stuffed within Reader, only sometimes I miss the digital signature panel. I do hope, however, that Sumatra will add digital signature verification at some point. Fingers crossed.

icar• 3 months ago

I wish Adobe adopted Jetbrain's model. You pay for a version of the software. You then keep it forever. Then offer additional stuff like using their AI or some cloud save stuff.

The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe

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