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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Lightroom because it seems to want to modify the Windows Explorer to have a Creative Cloud section and their background software constantly pops up to tell you that it still exists.

What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it.

(I switched to Affinity Photo for editing but never found anything I liked for organization/library management. I just copy files around now. It ends up being OK because about 50% of my photos are from my phone, 25% are from a DSLR, and 25% are from film scans. Lightroom never helped me with phone or scanned photos, really, so I didn't give much up. Would still like some central self-hosted photo collector, though. Maybe Perkeep is what I want.)

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> What's nice about their subscription model is that there is no sunk cost when giving up. It's $5/month and you just stop paying it.

Don't they try to get you to make a year commitment? I remember spending about 30 minutes with someone at Adobe getting them to cancel it when Lightroom was too slow to use on my Mac at the time (which had been more than fast enough for Aperture). After the second or third time that I told them I wasn't going to buy a new computer just for the privilege of running their software, they agreed not to charge a hefty early termination fee.

Yes, I had to pay a fee equal to 50% of the remaining year contract. I will no longer receive PSDs directly from designers, so the designers must now to export stuff to web spec so I can work with it outside adobe.

I marked my card as damaged, and when it was replaced I refused to give them the new details...

I've done this an number of times to avoid the usual cancellation nightmares.

Be careful though, some card issues will forward the new card details on to (some?) services you have a payment agreement with.

GIMP handles PSD, no?

I've not tried for several years, but it was never that great at doing that. Last time I had to do this, I gave up and bought a photoshop subscription. Has it improved now?

Nope.

Adjustment and FX layers don't translate, as well as some compositing and blending options.

I managed to get out of this by just explaining that I didn't have the money to pay the subscription anymore. They seem pretty sympathetic to that.

That’s probably a better angle

Thanks for the tip! I took a look, and it turns out Affinity Photo is 50% off right now. So, a one-time $25 purchase (via App Store for family sharing)! And it handles PSDs. And the iPad version is $10. Adobe is toast.

> Adobe is toast.

I really, really wish that was the case, but there's no competition for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Even after years of destroying their software with cloud crap, useless home screens, changing 30 years of muscle memory just because, all while adding a WebKit and Node.js instance for every new dialog box…

…nothing comes even close to any of those tools.

QuarXPress thought they owned the market and then they started taking advantage of their users. Same goes for Adobe. The resentment is building up. Once there's a viable alternative people will quickly switch and never look back.

It took many years and millions, being bundled with the rest of the Adobe suite and, perhaps most importantly, the arrival of OS X and Quark’s inability to migrate to it, for InDesign to displace Quark. And let’s not forget that Adobe had years of experience with PageMaker.

Pro software is hard.

Hell, I remember 2003-2005 and being _excited_ to switch to InDesign. I think the issue pro software has is that at some point it's basically "done", with only small updates still required, yet the developers of said pro software need to make their sales numbers.

I'd be fine with cloud subscription software if the TCO ended up being lower than buying a boxed product, but it's seemingly more expensive than it ever was. $10USD/mo doesn't seem bad, but if you're comparing to a two-year, $200 upgrade price, then you're spending $40 more and can't opt to skip the latest menu reshuffle.

Affinity is definitely a step in the right direction. The Photo/Designer/Publisher combo holds its own and the iPad apps are pretty slick. It would be nice if they added something similar to Data Merge in InDesign, but for the most part, you can pretty much accomplish a lot of the same things for a fraction of the cost. And it's really not that big of a switch, considering a good swath of the market had to make the switch from PageMaker/Quark/Freehand/whatever as Adobe gobbled up the desktop market. It's similar to what Adobe did to the workstation suites 30 years ago.

I just wish I understood what everyone is doing that needs adobe? Anything.

For Photoshop, a big part of it is inertia. Companies worked with PS for years, and changing costs money. So students are taught what they’ll use (which is PS), and the cycle continues.

Do you print anything? Draw? Layout?

If you assume the answers to these questions are "yes", what is your response to GP?

If you assume the answers to these questions are "no", what is your response to GP?

I don't even want to use it but the client passes me a PSD which I have to open accurately.

Photoshop puts like 5 folders in Utilities folder for no reason in macOS and runs bunch of daemons (which apparently can be a cause of bad vulnerabilities) and is dog slow in performance compared to a modern alternative like Affinity Photo.

Market dominance surely puts customer satisfaction to the end of the line.

Affinity Pro seems to deal w PSD pretty handily; have you tried it?

Let's not forget the postgres instances they start. Why my illustration app needs a postgres server? Who knows

Sheesh. Why didn't they use sqlite?

"No competition" -- for some users, for now, maybe. (Speaking as someone doing web-related UI for a living since the late 90's, and using tools for digital art since the 80's.)

I have 2 licenses for affinity photo, Mac and Windows. But when I actually needed to get work done for a project, at least for my particular needs, I ended up going back to Photoshop.

It was a small thing. With Photoshop I can open a .PNG or .JPG file, edit, and pick Save (cmd-s/ctrl-s) and it saves back to the .PNG/.JPG. If I added layers or something I can press Ctrl/Cmd-Shfit-E to merge it all down then Cmd/Ctrl-S. This means the workflow is fast.

Affinity has no such workflow. You can open a .JPG but you have to follow the export workflow to save back to .JPG which is tedious.

I had say 150 files to edit. I reasoned my time was worth more than $120 to pay for a current version of Photoshop than to put up with a slow workflow.

I also recently tried to use Affinity's batch processing features but they aren't ask good as Photoshop's. I think they are trying to be helpful in that they scan all the photos before you start so you can see what they are going to operate on before you pick "Go". Unfortunately that's not actually a good flow if you're going to process 100s or 1000s of files. Instead of getting stuff done you have to wait for Affinity for several minutes while it goes and makes a thumbnail of all 100 or 1000+ images just so you can then click "Ok, do it!"

There are other ways to automate workflow that don't require the tool to do everything for you. IMHO, limiting yourself to what Photoshop can do is a trap, eg "export for web" which doesn't come close to generating production-ready assets. Given a need for workflow automation that's external to the editor, I feel it makes more sense to compose a workflow from tools that follow a less monolithic, more unix-y "do one thing well", kind of approach. But use cases abound. YMMV.

Try DarkTable and RawTherapee. Both of these options are pretty decent open source alternatives to Lightroom for the majority of basic workflows and common cameras.

I'd say they both are more than adequate, and allow for some pretty advanced workflows, since they expose a lot more tools with more fine-grained control than Lightroom.

For anyone who tries these programs, many of their developers and users hang out at https://discuss.pixls.us/

I've found DigiKam to be the most fully featured of the photo managers I've used. It even does facial recognition on your local box w/o sharing your data like most of the cloud hosted options. I'm not in love with the UI/workow but it works and can be installed on most OS I think.

If you need fast import/large curation/file management and you're willing to pay, I haven't found anything like Photo Mechanic.

Wouldn't Syncthing do the collection part for you?

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