Social media today is full of chatter about Adobe and their business practices. Numerous pundits have posted Youtube videos complaining about Adobe’s latest terms of service which supposedly grant Adobe full rights to any images that have been uploaded to the Adobe cloud. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the hullaballoo. But as I started to think about the implications of the Adobe subscription program, I started to change my mind. In this article I will try to explain my thought process and what actions I have taken to wean myself off the Adobe tool set.
I have been using the Adobe Photography suite, Lightroom and Photoshop, for at least ten years. My entire photo library, including scans from family slides, are loaded into Lightroom. I have depended on Lightroom’s organization tools and non-destructive edits for my photos. I occasionally have used Photoshop when I needed to do some more specific tasks that Lightroom could not handle. I consider myself and expert in Lightroom and a dabbler in Photoshop. Lightroom and Photoshop are both very powerful tools for organizing and editing digital photographs. They represent the standard by which all other products are measured. Photoshop is even used as a verb. When people suspect that an image has been modified they will say “it was photoshopped”.
I was happy to subscribe to Adobe’s monthly subscription plan back then because I could not afford to purchase the rather expensive stand-alone versions. At $9.95 per month, the subscription plan made is possible for me to use those tools, which at the time were the de facto standard for photo editing. The plan also guaranteed that I always had the latest updates from Adobe. I am not a professional photographer, and my photo library is not extensive, and I am very comfortable with the workflow in Lightroom to process my photos. I always shoot in RAW format, so the images need some editing to make them ready for posting or printing.
I can understand why a professional might be concerned with the wording of the Adobe terms of service (TOS). If you have a non-disclosure agreement with your client, you could potentially find yourself in breach of contract due to the very loose wording of the TOS. Even as an amateur, you may not be happy with the idea that Adobe is using your photos for undisclosed purposes without your permission. I, however, do not use the Creative Cloud versions of Lightroom and Photoshop. I use Lightroom Classic, and I have the synchronization options turned off for all my folders. As a result, none of my photos end up in the Adobe Cloud.
But, as I considered my age and my future ability to pay the Adobe subscription fee, which is presently up to $10.58 per month, I began to realize that the subscription plan is no longer sustainable. Sooner or later, I will want to terminate my subscription. When that happens, the organization of my photo library and my local edits will become inaccessible. I would still have access to the RAW files of course, but all the work that I put into editing, tagging, organizing my library would be gone. That fact is what drove me to search for alternatives to the Adobe suite. Fortunately, today there are many suitable candidates.
I’m not one to look at all the possibilities and do a comprehensive pro/con worksheet. I just start with what others have cited as the top recommendations and then look until I find one that fits my purposes. Since I do not want to be tied into a subscription plan, the top priority requirement was software that can be purchased outright. The second priority was functionality, specifically the functionality that I normally utilize. I don’t need to have a one-for-one match of capabilities if the ones that I depend on are provided. Cost is still a consideration but not the driving priority.
First, I looked at photo editing software. My options were GIMP (free open source), Corel PaintShop Pro ($80), Affinity Photo ($34.99), Skylum Luminar ($139) and On1 Photo Raw ($85). I took a quick look at GIMP and, although it has some very powerful features, it just didn’t stack up to the Photoshop standard and its interface was even more confusing to me than Photoshop is. PaintShop Pro seems to be geared more toward graphic artists and not so much for photography. Affinity Photo’s price point is low enough that I felt I should try that first. I was hooked right away. Affinity is a full Photoshop replacement, at least for the features that I generally use. It doesn’t have the latest Regenerative AI features that Adobe is pushing but I’m not sure I want to use those techniques anyway. I think that sky replacement is already pushing the limits of how I want to create my photographic art. I went ahead and bought Affinity, what was there to lose?
Next, I looked for a photo organization program, also known as a Digital Assets Manager or DAM for short. There were two on my list that fit the no subscription requirement. They were Excire Photo (https://excire.com/en/excire-foto/) by a German company called PRC and Capture One (https://www.captureone.com/en) which is a Danish company. Excire Photo lists for $189 and Capture One costs $299. Both are available as a free trial.
I started with Excire. I installed the trial version on my Mac and loaded a portion of my photo library into the software. Excire loaded my photos very quickly. Excire has an AI tagging system that analyzes your photos and creates tags according to what it thinks it sees in each photo. It produced many tags for each photo, about half of them were appropriate. It is easy enough to edit the tags, but it still would have been a daunting task to update every photo according to my tagging scheme. It did not load videos, Excire only handles photos, camera raw, DNG, TIFF, JPG, PNG, etc. It does not load Photoshop files (PSD). Excire supports collections and collections can be organized into folders. But the folders can be only one level deep. The biggest problem, though, is that it does not carry over any of my Lightroom edits. I would have had to re-edit all my photos or export the LR edits to one of the supported formats.
Next, I downloaded and installed the trial version of Capture One. I was sold on the product almost at once when I discovered that it could import my Lightroom catalogs. When I imported from the Lightroom catalog, it built a Capture One catalog that included all my LR edits! It also loaded all my tags and collections. It did not import Smart Collections however, even though Capture One supports an identical feature. The Capture One editor is every bit as robust as the Lightroom editor except for the more recent Generative AI features of Lightroom. I am still exploring Capture One’s capabilities but there are some areas where it exceeds Lightroom functionality. Capture One’s signature capability is the feature that lets you tether your camera to the software and display the results on multiple monitors at once. I have not tried that feature as of this writing.
Capture One does round-trip editing with Affinity Photo. It does, however, convert your RAW or DNG file to TIFF before starting Affinity. But any edits that you made in Capture One are included in the TIFF that is sent to Affinity. You need to use “Edit in …” to include the Capture One edits and create the TIFF file. Later, if you want to edit the TIFF file, you must use “Open in …” to avoid making another copy of the TIFF.
The upshot is that I have replaced Lightroom with Capture One and Photoshop with Affinity Photo. My Adobe subscription was $10.58/month which amounts to $127 per year. Capture One cost me $299. Now the real test will be how long it takes until Capture One comes out with a new version that has features that I want to buy. I might not be saving any money this way but if at any point I decide to stop upgrading the software, at least my photos and edits will still be accessible.