1 yr Adobe subscription for PS & LR from Amazon UK

Totally unsustainable for what is essentially a one-trick pony.
Now, Canva is going to play it cute with Affinity.
By the time these smaller outfits return to reality, it'll be, too late, the cry.
Its going to be a very different software landscape in a year or so.

Ron

ACDSee Ultimate

I've been using ACDSee successfully for many years.
It is like a combination of "Lightroom" and many features of "Photoshop" in one program.
It also has many database features to help keep track of all your thousands of photos.
I find it good and easy to use. It seems to get better with each update.
There's plenty of web tutorials.

They have just released the new version called ACDSee Ultimate 2026

Everyone has their own favourite program and usually doesn't want to change.
It's up to you:
-You can buy it and it and that standalone version belongs to you.
-You can also buy a "Plan" where you get immediate access to each new version as they update it each year.

So, it might be an alternative worth taking a look at ?

I would like to know, do you use the auto masking?

I bought it quite some months ago because it was so much cheaper than some of the others but I found the auto mask creation terrible (like missing clear edges / boundaries by a mile) - I may have needed some more learning / training but I wasn't in a good state of mind about pp software at the time so got my money back...

[edit] I don't mean to poo-poo ACDSee. For all I know it's a great piece of software - just I was frustrated because I had been going through free trials at the time and tense about the $ commitment yet was aghast at the interfaces of many of them. After using FastSone for a long time I was finding the learning curve and UI of some of them (especially Lightroom) counter intuitive.

This is a big disincentive for changing editing software. It takes quite a while to learn a program and to develop your own intuitive workflow. When Adobe took Lightroom to subscription only I switched both editor and operating system to darktable on Ubuntu Linux. Superficially darktable looks similar to Lightroom but it isn't really. It took me several years to develop a comfortable workflow and to tweak and configure both the processing tools and the UI to my taste. I'm very comfortable with it now and appreciate the extra power it has over Lightroom. I certainly wouldn't want to be forced to switch to yet another program...

Auto masking is never 100% perfect in any software!
I have the "Ultimate 2025" version in use, and the Ultimate 2026 is ready to go, I just haven't got round to push the button to install it yet.
in ACDSee Ultimate 2025 the "auto-masking" is better than in previous versions, they have introduced better "AI" to find the edges, you can easily feather them and shift the masks with simple sliders and/or manually use the brush to give that automatically generated mask a bit of a touch up if it needs it.
There is a learning curve, of course, to get good and quick at that :-)
Masking for the sky usually works very well but it works better on some images compared to others; it depends on how "tricky" the image is..
In the new 2026 version it has been apparently improved even more, and there are special selections for masking for example "hair". Haven't tried that yet.
There is an AI select for finding and masking the "subject" which often works quite successfully but not always.
So it fits for me, YMMV ;-)

had a play with it for 5 min then uninstalled it , its not even close to Ps. couldnt even do a common basic action for my portrait retouching.

I tried and tried Darktable but every time I went to edit a pic it unceremoniously crashed... I may revisit it one day.