The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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
or, someone in the cohort copies and disseminates from textbook[s].
copyrightist would have to put an investigator, in the institution to break it up, but ive never heard of that beyond monitoring library usage of photocopiers.
It's almost like I could drop out, work on campus and read books at the library for free. I just wasn't Good Looking Will Hunting.
i have undergone an undergrad differential equations module that taught exclusively ad-hoc methods for certain families of equation that no working mathematician needs to know since they were all subsumed into and superseded by computer algebra systems, but the subject i would enjoy replacing it with (generating functions) is similarly old in origin (perhaps even earlier, since Euler used most of the techniques that an undergrad class would cover before diffeqs were considered an object of study) but has happened to become more useful with the advent of CASes instead of less.
CSU is the California State University system.
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.
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.
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.
Try this out, free too
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.
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
Reality informs us that there have always been competitors in the field: GIMP, DarkTable, ACDSee, Luminar, and many others.
It's surely true that their existence has been pushing Adobe to improve. And the good news for everyone is that they have: Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are improved products now, and so are those other competitors.
Basically, it's the Microsoft Office of print and visual media.
It seems very odd we normalize coffee being $5.
What does this mean, exactly? "We" didn't normalize it. People sold it for that - because they also have to pay rent, labor, etc - and people said "sure, that works for me, especially since I like the coffee you're making, I'll likely hang out here a while vs getting something cheaper elsewhere."
You can still get cheaper elsewhere.
Nobody "normalized" that, it just happened. You could say it's weird that people didn't complain, but... well, they did? It's a cliche at this point. But for a lot of people it's cheap enough to be fine ($5 is not a life-changing amount to add into your savings even if you're avoiding it once a day). If you really think it's a ripoff and nonsensically high, open your own coffee shop to make a killing?
Hell, if someone comes out with a super-amazing Lightroom replacement I'd be more likely to move to that than I would be to start avoiding coffee shops. Even though I spend more money on the coffee than on Lightroom. But the most viable option I ever saw has been abandoned for over a decade and only ran on Macs in the first place.
AUD6 (USD4.50) is not a lot for all of that.
You don't need to try to equate $10 to something. People know what $10 is.
And I agree - last time I got coffee, it was closer to $10. In a low COLA area, technically speaking.
Before it was a subscription, you bought a version and could use _that version_ in perpetuity, possibly with some number of well-defined upgrades.
If you didn’t want to upgrade, your software still worked. The value proposition of the software was clear.
Now I need to decide whether paying the subscription, possibly forever, is worth the value. This just feels bad.
Then maybe people are trying to convince themselves. All that I can really say is that a lot of people pipe up to defend the titans when alternatives are suggested.
> at some point in your life, $120 a year is not that much. It's $10 a month
For some people $10 is nothing. For other people, it is significant. Even for those who can afford $10/month, all of those fees add up when you consider all of the software someone may want to use.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/apr/08/reuters.pressa...
“Composition must be one of our constant preoccupations, but at the moment of shooting it can stem only from our intuition, for we are out to capture the fugitive moment, and all the interrelationships involved are on the move. In applying the Golden Rule, the only pair of compasses at the photographer's disposal is his own pair of eyes. [...]
If you start cutting or cropping a good photograph, it means death to the geometrically correct interplay of proportions. Besides, it very rarely happens that a photograph which was feebly composed can be saved by reconstruction of its composition under the darkroom's enlarger; the integrity of vision is no longer there. There is a lot of talk about camera angles; but the only valid angles in existence are the angles of the geometry of composition and not the ones fabricated by the photographer who falls flat on his stomach or performs other antics to procure his effects.” (“The Mind’s Eye” p34, 1999 Aperture ed.)
There are plenty of potential photographs that even modern sensor (or film) technology just can't do, like with questions of dynamic range. There are opportunities for cleaning up noise and sharpening to create a technically-better image. There are reasons beyond count for compositing of different kinds.
But most importantly, supporting the artist's efforts to achieve their vision is the whole point. If someone vision can't be achieved either with their physical toolset, or with their suite of tools, why should they limit themselves?
I don't think too many people manage to get a wildlife, landscape, astro, macro or night shot so well exposed that no editing is needed.
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.
They failed to commit, and often let their tools languish, despite the following. Odd.
Once Adobe finally committed to supporting the new platform, it wasn't as necessary anymore.
I understand that Capture One aren't going to support old software for decades, and I'm fine with that.
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.
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.
“You mean I have to go to adoby.com and not adobe.com to download? Forget it. It am out.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
I have the same issue with Maxon and Zbrush: nothing is close, but it's still the best at what it does.
We have an even worse company around: Autodesk. And they have competition in the CAD, 3D creation world (that they tried to destroy, but Blender changed the game and Houdini is another world)... but not so much around Revit. Architect would destroy them if they could. But no alternative works.
So let's not insult user here: people tries the alternative. They're not good enough. They're worse.
You mean you tried and thesy didn't suit your usecase. That's ok. But there are many others where alternatives would be suitable. Best example: MS Word
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.
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.
You don't have to make absurd extrapolations to make your point. Even with 20 subscriptions at $20/mo, that's $400/mo or $4800/yr, about 2% of net income.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you are pleased indeed, you might just put 120$ in your pocket rather than adobe's this year. Who'd say no to that?
Have a good one
The settings are a bit daunting at first; some are what you expect in a regular photo editor, and others are... weird for me. Like, what's "lift" and where are my white and black sliders?
Color tools seem to be interesting, but there seem to be multiple places where you select color spaces, and all defaults seem to be video-centric (which I guess isn't unexpected, but it just means you have to know to go hunt for them). There's also a dedicated "color" page, which I think is what all the fuss is about, but if I switch to it, my photo disappears and I'm presented with a video timeline...
I also haven't found any trace of masking, and noise reduction seems to be a paid feature, so in my case the free version wouldn't do...
All in all, I want to like it, especially since it runs on Linux, and will probably continue to check it out from time to time, even though I'd have to convert the raws to dngs beforehand.
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.
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.
Is that predatory? Maybe, but is it worse for those users than only offering the $1k package they used to? Of course they're trying to get you hooked, pricing at a point to minify budget issues, and recurring year-round to avoid expense approvals. Educational licenses also pretty predatory.
Don't get me wrong, they want your money; as much of it as they can extract. You don't have to play the game if you don't want to.
they'd monetize the open air of the earth if they could figure out the logistics
What post-scarcity utopia do you think you're living in?
The commercial reality is them finding the way to get the most from the market. This isn't a bizarre twist of software licensing, every company is doing this to you.
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.
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.
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.
Prefer evidence from the eyes over noise from the ears.
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
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.
Granted it was a few years back, but we’re talking about minutes vs hours.
Do you mind sharing a few examples?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
* anyone who thinks Maxon is any better than adobe should re-think that. They really hosed Z-Brush users