alt Hacker NewsThe creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile revenue is up 12% YoY to 6.4B in latest earnings.
Prefer evidence from the eyes over noise from the ears.
If you're a hobbyist needing photo editing software, just use https://www.photopea.com/
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
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.
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.
m0nkrus
So many competitors are releasing free or low-cost alternatives, that shifting away from Adobe is becoming plausible for many folks.
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
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.
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.
What took them so long? It's about time.
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.
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
They keep adding bloat instead of focusing on usability. Still can't get Illustrator to remember my print settings.
Adobe is genuinely one of the shittiest companies on the planet.
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.
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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.
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.