alt Hacker NewsEvery 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...
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There isn't really a good alternative for After Effects, despite its flaws. There are other motion graphics tools, but they're usually missing enough functionality that you eventually go crawling back to Adobe.
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.
It boggles the mind how many people will go and use an inferior solution to avoid spending the price of 2 coffees a month.
I’ve used their software during my Multimedia studies and continued paying for some of it because it was just very, very good.
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.
Because it's objectively non-expensive, compared to the hardware you want (not need) for photography.
I don’t think it’s that surprising. People will pay for software that has better usability and better functionality.
Hobbyists and professionals have discovered tools like Affinity. Well, the non-subscription version of it anyways.'
I'm not sure how many occasional LR users there were/are. Either it's software someone needs to manage their non-phone photo library plus editing or not. Those type of people are also likely to upgrade every year. So if you compare pricing you need to compare to also upgrading every year. In that case the subscription was pretty close in price.
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.