I broke away from Adobe, and here's why

It's been almost 15 years since I started using the Lightroom and Photoshop plan from Adobe. I was violently thrust into Adobe hands when Apple decided to shutdown Aperture, it's pro photo editing and digital asset management (DAM) tool.

Apple's Aperture was an all in one solution for photographers that I sorely miss to this day. It was simple, fast, Apple-like and just worked. It's replacement, Apple Photos, while porting a lot of its features over, was too simplified and design for the general public. I needed something more robust for insanely growing photography library.

Enter Adobe with the new Lightroom. It wasn't as good as Aperture back then, but it had a commitment from Adobe to continuously grow and be actively developed. I bought in. I've been using Photoshop since my university days, and its the standard photo editing app. Mind you, I never got to pro level proficiency with Photoshop to really do major edits on any of my photography. I never did portraiture or any type of photography that needed deep retouching and editing. I was an events photographer who loved street photography.

 

I rode the Lightroom wave, and was really excited when they announced the iPad version, I was very excited about a mobile workflow and editing with the newly released Apple Pencil. It was a rocky start, but it got to a point where I was primarily working on my photos on the iPad and I loved it.

Overtime things started to get bloated. The monthly costs rose, and I had issues with the Creative Cloud syncing. I wasn't able to download older archived photos in their original raw format, just their DNG versions. The iPad app got clunkier, and I rarely used Photoshop.

I was also shooting less. I had a lot of time on my hands in the pandemic years to walk around desolate streets taking photos of the effects of lock downs. And when the COVID settled down and we went back to the office, I focused all my energy on work. I had little time to shoot and edit my work.

 

Inflation started to hit, and as everyone does, I started to revaluate my subscriptions. Lots of apps and services made the cut, but I kept Lightroom because I had so much content in the Creative Cloud Drive. I kept promising myself to get back in the saddle and get out there, but that didn't really happen.

 

So many technology shifts happened since I first started using Adobe, and the company has been notorious for awkward terms, pricing changes and vendor lock-in. The biggest change that made me rethink my subscription was their latest fiasco of using user content in stored in the Creative Cloud to train their AI.

 

While most of my photography was concerts, events and street photography, I did have a few photoshoots with models with sensitive material. Something my subjects would definitely not want training an AI. Besides, all my work is my work. I don't want any of it training an AI, or my style being knocked off. I've had my work stolen before and it was not a good feeling. Nothing feels worse than seeing a shot you took used somewhere without your permission.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the new AI features built in to all the tools out there. It's been a great boost to my productivity and in a lot of cases empowered me to do more. But I just cant have all my creative work taken automatically, without my consent, or forced consent, to train an AI with sensitive content, especially without compensation.

 

I've read that a lot of photographers and digital artists have and digital artists have had the same concerns and have decided to break away too.

 

I started looking at options. I reviewed my my cancellation terms with Adobe. There were rumblings of them making it harder to leave, but I've been there for about 15 years, so I could cancel at anytime. I had a very hard time downloading and archiving my work from Creative Cloud. I was able to download as much as I could in the original RAW format, but a lot had errors downloading. Almost 15,000 thousand out of the 130,000 didn't make it down. And they were wedding photos. I was able to get them as DNG's but thats not the same.

 

With them backed up, and I started to look for alternatives. I know i'm not shooting as much with my FujiFilm X100T as much. I pretty much whip it out when travelling. I needed something I can work on the go with. iPhone, iPad and Mac all synced with changes. Something powerful on all platforms with the really advanced work done on either the iPad or Mac. I didn't want to pay for another storage platform as I have Apple One with 2 Terabytes of cloud storage on iCloud, and about 24Gb of local offline storage. I also didn't want to pay for a subscription. Whatever I got had to be a pay for the app/software once. I don't mind upgrades, but subscriptions add up.

 

I went through a period of evaluating a slew of apps, but listing out my needs separated the wheat from the chaff. I tried Darkroom, Photomator and Affinity Photo. I skipped CaptureOne in this trial because it was a subscription product. Affinity Photo was too much of a Photoshop replacement than a photo editor and DAM. Darkroom was great but it lacked a few tools and felt a little clunky.

 

I fell in love with Photomator. It integrated deeply in to the apple ecosystem and Apple Photos library. It had apps for iPhone, iPad and the Mac. It could handle local storage and integrated deeply with the Apple File System (AFS) in a non-destructive way that didn't take up a lot of storage for no reason. Best of all, it was a one time purchase, and it's actively developed with a clear roadmap I'm excited about.

 

The iPad app was great to use, felt very familiar and had all the tools. The learning curve wasn't very steep and was quick to pickup, with amazing tutorials online. The Apple Pencil support is awesome.

 

While it doesn't have all the features of Adobe Lightroom, especially some of the newer ones, they were things I could live without, and are on the roadmap. Pixelmator, the company the develops Photomator also has a photoshop equivalent called, SURPRISE, Pixelmator Pro, which is pretty good. Since I do light work in Photoshop, Pixelmator does everything I need and more. And its UI is streamlined with Photomator.

 

Both Photomator and Pixelmator Pro are a one time purchase. Looking back at 15 years of Adobe subscriptions, it tally's up to $4,500 in comparison to $150 for both those apps. $4,500 over 15 years really isn't a lot if you think about it, but it's something. I also feel much better with my content on iCloud with Apple's privacy stance, and local storage.

 

This change has gotten me a excited about shooting again. Nothing like a new toy and app to get you think about what to do with it. I've been travelling a lot more lately and want to get my creative side ignited again, and this is the perfect opportunity to see what I can do with my new toys.