Why limit your use and enjoyment of a product out of fear of an uncertain future?
It's been nearly 10 years since Adobe released Creative Cloud. They haven't gone bankrupt. The products haven't become junk ware. If Adobe were to disappear from the face of the Earth tomorrow, I'd have gotten a decade of use from multiple great products.
I'd still have all my photos. They'd still be organized by year, date, and shoot on my hard drive. Adobe has no control over that. Would I agonize over having lost the processing done to the photos in my catalog? Maybe. For about 5 minutes.
I'd subscribe to or buy whichever product I consider to be the best option and move forward. I'd keep doing photography and use the new product to process the subjects from those images. If there's an archived photo I decide to print, license, or sell, I'd process it. Life goes on.
For those who worry about such things, LrC does offer the option of saving all processing & editing to XMP files; one for each image. Personally, that's a step, time, and additional drive space I don't need. But it's there for those who want it.
For me, the whole point of Lightroom is to do everything in one place and not create derivative files. That's its entire reason to exist.
Yes, if you're getting something new each month (like a magazine, newspaper, or "fruit of the month" club). With software, you aren't. You already have it.
Exactly, and this is the great advantage of purchasing instead of renting - you can choose to pay for an upgrade, or not. For example, the new version of my car came out this year. I like it less than my model so I'm choosing to keep what I have, pay nothing, and not upgrade. If Adobe produces an "upgrade" I don't like or want, I have no choice but to pay for it anyway.
I'll give a specific reason I hate the rental model of software - Lightroom.
Lightroom 6.14 has a lot of what I need, but it's missing a feature I'd use on almost every image. I can round-trip to use that (I have external software that has the functionality) but that's slow, painful, and creates derivative file that use up space and need to be cataloged, so I do it only very rarely. My images suffer as a result.
I've been asking for that functionality since version 3. They haven't provided it. None of what they have provided since 6.14 would help me very much, but I would have paid them 6 years * $120 per year = $720 for nothing I would use. $720 wasted. I'd gladly pay for an upgrade if it included the feature I need, and I've done that in the past many times, but paying continuously and getting nothing is frustrating and so I don't do it.
I'd make a different photo. This scenario is a common occurrence in the wildlife photography I do. If the available light is so low that freezing the action will only result in an image having unacceptably poor quality, I pivot and make a different photo. I'd drag the shutter and target the goal of making a photo with exaggerated motion blur but the subject's head and face still sharp. I may only get one or two keepers from 100 shots...but one is all I need.
Having made the painful shift to darktable and worked out how to use it I now recognise it as a better product. LR is only of use for my older work, much of which still remains to be edited. No way am I going to subscribe to a product that requires me to subscribe to it for the rest of my life to guarantee I still have access to any edits. The mere thought of the coercion involved in this model turns my stomach.
Prior to embracing LR, I had a ridiculous workflow that at one point was a pipeline involving 13 separate software products between raw and picture hanging on the wall.
LR changed everything and taught me that one product really can do everything. Since then I have lost any interest in exporting files to tifs and jpgs, I want them to stay raw from start to finish.
I think if I was still outputting a finished image to a universal format like jpg, I wouldn't be so bothered, the raw edits would be a means to an end, the end being the jpg which could be tweaked in any product should LR suddenly vanish from the planet. However, a raw only workflow means your edits can only really be managed in the one product, and if that product is denied you, you're back to having a back catalogue of unedited raws.
I have no intention of re-editing 20,000 raw files from scratch...
As I replied to another poster, I once used a very complex workflow involving many products. That workflow inevitably involved all sorts of interim files swapped between products. Looking through my my pre-LR images, I can find images with 20 duplicates, all with slightly different names. I have no idea now which is the final image. It's important to me to have a neat and tidy back catalogue. I want one image of each image, not 20, not 5, not even 2. The only way to keep things tidy is to use one single editor that takes the image from raw to final edit all within the one file. And that means a powerful raw editor. LR 6.14 does that role very well. For current and future images, darktable has taken over. Out of curiosity, I'm interested in what new versions of LR could do, but not at the price of "edit hostage hell". Adobe can try on whatever customer strategy they want, but not with my files.
To the best of my knowledge, you will not lose access to your edits when your unsubscribe from Lightroom. You will still be able to export and print with all your previous edits applied.
But I can no longer edit those files. All I can do is export them and edit the exported file in another package, creating a duplicate. Not what I call keeping access to my edits.
You have access to files with all your edits intact. If you want to do additional editing, you'll have to use another program. That's sort of basic to a subscription business model. Otherwise, people would subscribe for the shortest period possible and then drop their subscriptions.
When I subscribed to National Geographic, I received a copy each month. When I stopped subscribing, they stopped sending new copies. They didn't kick down my front door and take back the copies I paid for. Adobe subscription is not really a subscription in the traditional sense because it acts retrospectively.
Jim, that would be absolutely fine, if you could export your edit stack commands to another program and they worked fine. But they don't. LR sharpening, colour balance, and many other tools means nothing in other programs or is completely distorted beyond use. Stopping an Adobe subscription gives you one usable option. Export as jpg/tif and lose access to all your individual raw edits.
My idea of a subscription model for software is that, if you stop paying, you stop having the ability to use the software for new work. In other words, the import module should cease functioning. You should retain the right for it to continue to work for stuff you imported and edited while you were a subscriber.
Anything less means you live under the weight of knowing that every image you work on is one more image you will no longer retain rights to the edits you did on once you stop subscribing. That's holding my work (the edits) to ransom. I consider my edits real work I did at my own cost, not Adobe's. Not letting that happen.
If you were a programmer and you rented a compiler, once you stopped subscribing you would expect to lose the right to compile new programs. You wouldn't expect the exe files you made to stop working, nor would you expect to have to export them to another program to decompile them to allow you to continue to work on them. It's holding your work, your edits to ransom. (This is a terrible analogy, sorry, but you can see the point I'm making no matter how garbled).
Sounds exactly like keeping access to your edits to me. No, you can’t make new edits in the Develop module, but you still have full access to all your original edits.
You mean you can export your files as is. At which point what you have is a file with all the edits baked in and no access to the individual edits. Suddenly realise the files are over-sharpened? Tough, you stopped subscribing, no access to adjust sharpening. This is nothing to do with retaining access to edits.
Which means you only have access to your edits as a finalised package. You have no access to individual edits. This means you have no access to your edits. This is not proper behaviour by Adobe.
