Giving up Adobe Subscription

[Ralf1960Mono]

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I would never look at cloud storage as backup of my data. So it’s always a good advice to backup your data on a separate drive. 

[Jeff S]

4 hours ago, Ralf1960Mono said:

I would never look at cloud storage as backup of my data. So it’s always a good advice to backup your data on a separate drive. 

+1 And keep at least one drive offsite. I do this for my system, catalogue and photo library, and back it up regularly.

Jeff

Edited February 28, 2021 by Jeff S

[andybarton]

My subscription ended and none of the older Desktop versions work any longer. I have upgraded myself out of options as far as Adobe are concerned.

So, with gritted teeth, I have had to re-subscribe to the cheaper Photographer pack at £10/month.

Oh, well. At least I have save a bottle of wine a month.

[wattsy]

11 minutes ago, andybarton said:

My subscription ended and none of the older Desktop versions work any longer. I have upgraded myself out of options as far as Adobe are concerned.

So, with gritted teeth, I have had to re-subscribe to the cheaper Photographer pack at £10/month.

I hate to do a told-you-so but I think some of us saw that coming. 😀

[andybarton]

Bloody annoying though.  

Let this be a warning to anyone else looking the release themselves from the tyrannical grip of global software companies...

You can't.

At least it's easy to re-subscribe.

Now to try to get rid of multiple versions of Photoshop and Lightroom that are filling up my hard drive.

[stunsworth]

I’ve considered buying Affinity Photo in the past, but am concerned that there’s be functionally missing that I’d want - even though I only use a tiny fraction of what Photoshop can do. 

[jaapv]

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25 minutes ago, andybarton said:

My subscription ended and none of the older Desktop versions work any longer. I have upgraded myself out of options as far as Adobe are concerned.

So, with gritted teeth, I have had to re-subscribe to the cheaper Photographer pack at £10/month.

Oh, well. At least I have save a bottle of wine a month.

Can't you do a restore from Time Machine?

[Anbaric]

52 minutes ago, andybarton said:

My subscription ended and none of the older Desktop versions work any longer. I have upgraded myself out of options as far as Adobe are concerned.

So, with gritted teeth, I have had to re-subscribe to the cheaper Photographer pack at £10/month.

Oh, well. At least I have save a bottle of wine a month.

You're probably tied in for another year, but it should be possible to make any of CS4-CS6 work again (provided they are compatible with your current hardware) as well as LR6 and at least some earlier standalone versions (maybe all of them). This might require completely uninstalling all Adobe products and maybe using their cleaning tool, then re-installing the old versions using the original licence keys. What won't work is anything you acquired under the Creative Cloud branding, which has always been subscription only (even the desktop apps).

[plasticman]

57 minutes ago, andybarton said:

My subscription ended and none of the older Desktop versions work any longer. I have upgraded myself out of options as far as Adobe are concerned.

So, with gritted teeth, I have had to re-subscribe to the cheaper Photographer pack at £10/month.

I think this is the Achilles heel of the subscription model - it really does lock you in, even if you have the illusion of being able to leave at any time. And because of this, the price of the subscription is beyond your control in the long-term.

Luckily for us, other (one-time purchase) options are available now that keep Adobe from gouging their photography users. I hope the other applications survive and continue to provide healthy competition in this segment.

In another software forum where the general subscription model was being discussed, one developer said that he considered buying software rather than just renting it to be an investment in his uncertain future: the software was still there, even if he wasn't working or had other expenses each month.

Nowadays I have probably 10-15 different subscriptions running. It all adds up.

 

[Anbaric]

35 minutes ago, stunsworth said:

I’ve considered buying Affinity Photo in the past, but am concerned that there’s be functionally missing that I’d want - even though I only use a tiny fraction of what Photoshop can do. 

Affinty Photo is an excellent editor (and right now it's on sale at half price). What it doesn't do is replace a lightbox-style raw converter like Lightroom or Capture One. Affinity's raw conversion is pretty rudimentary (one image at a time, without all the specific camera profiles that more sophisticated raw converters and the camera manufacturers' own converters have). If you do your raw conversion elsewhere, or work from in-camera jpegs, Affinity is a great choice.

[Anbaric]

On 2/25/2021 at 4:17 PM, jaapv said:

Correction: Photoshop 2021 IS massively better than Photoshop 6. 

It depends how you work, really. Even with CS6, I'm generally using basic features that already existed in CS3 or even PS7 - cropping, global contrast and brightness adjustments with curves or the sliders, slight rotation to fix horizons, maybe the channel mixer, sharpening with a Nik plugin, etc. The only local editing I commonly do is dust spotting.  I'm not using an Adobe raw converter, so the basic look of the starting image won't be any different. For me, a subscription would just mean I'd be paying again and again for the same relatively small subset of features I actually use. For others, who can find a use every new tool for manipulating an image, use LR or ACR all the time, would have bought every upgrade anyway, and use a Mac where OS upgrades routinely break old software, I can see the attraction.

[willeica]

1 hour ago, andybarton said:

Bloody annoying though.  

Let this be a warning to anyone else looking the release themselves from the tyrannical grip of global software companies...

You can't.

At least it's easy to re-subscribe.

Now to try to get rid of multiple versions of Photoshop and Lightroom that are filling up my hard drive.

The game is all about 'cloud real estate' these days. We have all been on a loser since the beginning of computing and digital photography etc as such matters are now completely beyond our own personal control. Regulators and governments turn a blind eye to the type of customer and market manipulation which you have described as they are more concerned about 'bigger issues' such as the manipulation of social media for political ends or whether Facebook should pay for news content. I have been wondering why the fight back on the last mentioned issue commenced in Australia. Answers on a postcard?

William 

[andybarton]

2 minutes ago, willeica said:

Answers on a postcard?

Murdoch.

[willeica]

7 minutes ago, andybarton said:

Murdoch.

I'd love to be able to say that you have won one year's free subscription to Adobe CC , Andy.

William

[jaapv]

30 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

and use a Mac where OS upgrades routinely break old software.

In my experience Windows is just as bad in this respect.

[wattsy]

1 hour ago, plasticman said:

I think this is the Achilles heel of the subscription model - it really does lock you in, even if you have the illusion of being able to leave at any time. And because of this, the price of the subscription is beyond your control in the long-term.

It only locks you in if you want to continue to use the Adobe features. Your old files – including 16bit PSD files – can be opened in Preview and then, if desired, re-saved as TIFF. Preview also opens DNG files and the programme has some basic editing and colour correction tools so is far from useless IMO. 

Edited March 1, 2021 by wattsy

[Anbaric]

1 hour ago, jaapv said:

In my experience Windows is just as bad in this respect.

Photoshop 7.0 from 2002 works fine under the current version of (64-bit) Windows 10 on recent hardware (older versions of PS may also work, but I haven't tried them, though I recently found an older CD it might be fun to test). In that same period, Macs have switched from PowerPC to Intel, recently dropped support for 32 bit applications, and are now changing to the ARM architecture. I don't think even CS6 works under Catalina, leaving CC as the only option for PS on an up to date Mac.

Edited March 1, 2021 by Anbaric

[andybarton]

3 minutes ago, Anbaric said:

I don't think even CS6 works under Catalina, leaving CC as the only option for PS on an up to date Mac.

Definitely doesn't work on Big Sur

[Anbaric]

2 minutes ago, andybarton said:

Definitely doesn't work on Big Sur

I think it's because 32-bit support was dropped from Catalina onwards. 64-bit CS6 still has some 32-bit components.

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[roydonian]

1 hour ago, jaapv said:

In my experience Windows is just as bad in this respect.

If jaapv is right, I must have been lucky with Windows - I'm currently creating a fresh software installation for my computer, and the only stuff from the post Windows 3 era that I couldn't get to install were one 32 bit program that relied on a 16bit installer, and several product-activated products for which an activation service was no longer available. In most cases, the latter products were rarely used, so it's not worthwhile to have my 'support technician' spend the time needed to bypass the product activation. The problem with the 16bit installer was eventually solved by using a utility that analysed the 16bit  code, worked out what it was meant to do, then created the equivalent instal routine in 32bit code.

Edited March 1, 2021 by roydonian