Last night, I cancelled my Adobe subscription. Lightroom was the last app I had out of the whole Creative Suite, and the hardest to let go of as it basically took care of my whole photography workflow, start to finish. But my yearly contract was coming to an end, and it was sort of now or never not for another year sort of situation, so I decided to bite the bullet even though I didn’t feel completely ready.
Adobe’s move to the subscription model in 2013 was never a favourite among creatives, and things have only gotten worse since. Between constantly increasing subscription charges, sleazy business practices (this year, UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has opened an investigation, and in 2024 Adobe has settled a US Department of Justice lawsuit, paying $75m in fines), many have been unhappy with Adobe for a very long time. And the latest push towards generative AI – over actually improving the tools professional have been asking for – feels like a betrayal from a company who has built it’s fortune on the labour of professional creatives of all shapes and sizes.
I know many photographers would love to move to an alternative (I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of years now) – but once you’re locked into Adobe’s file extensions and asset management catalogues, it feels like you can’t leave – and if you could, the learning curve would eat up a lot of your time. It’s not considered the industry standard for nothing.
Well, it turns out things aren’t as difficult as they seem. Adobe’s near-monopoly isn’t as total as it once was and there are now, in fact, a number of pretty decent alternatives that won’t break your bank – some of them free, some of them with a one-off fee.
Here’s what I ended up with:
For Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator alternative I have now installed Affinity. It has been bought out by Canva last year and is currently free (you have to pay only if you want to use AI features which judging by many online reviews pretty much suck anyway). When corporations offer you free stuff it’s wise to be wary of course, but so far the T&Cs haven’t revealed anything particularly worrying. No doubt that Canva made the move to disrupt the Adobe market domination, and it’s working. You can import portable Creative Suite files and continue editing them. But, I don’t actually need those apps all that often, so the transition wasn’t as painful. If you don’t like the idea of Affinity, there are other alternatives out there too (e.g. Gimp which is open source).
Lightroom though is another matter entirely. I have catalogues going back a decade, and presets and shortcuts to edit them, and using Lightroom is just… easy, because I’d already invested the time into learning how to.
I had a brief flirtation with Photomechanic a few years back, but it never stuck – I often develop as I cull – ahem, select – images (trying to move away from the violent vocabulary in photography is HARD) so separating the two processes didn’t work for me.
Well, turns out, there are, actually, decent alternatives out there. I ended up with two that looked the most appealing: ON1 Photo Raw (one-off fee or subscription) or Darktable (free, open source).
For now, I decided to spend some time with Darktable. It seems overwhelming and alien when you first launch it, but after spending a bit of time with it (and this workflow tutorial which helps you customise it) things don’t seem too bad.
However, it turns out even if you cancel your Lightroom Classic subscription you can, in fact, continue using the Library function – it’s only the Develop and Maps modules that get locked away. So you can keep organising your images, and even develop them with Quick Develop presets, and if you wanted to establish a link with, say, Affinity, for that final crop and Photoshop-like edit, here’s a handy tutorial that will show you how to.
Is the transition going to be seamless? I doubt it.
I’m sure it’ll be annoying and uncomfortable for a while. But as consumers, one of the few levers we still have available to us is withdrawing our cash from unethical companies – be it through boycotting those complicit in Israeli apartheid, or choosing to direct our cash to small, local businesses instead of big corporations. Letting go of convenience is going to cost… the convenience. Duh. But ultimately, I think it’s worth it.