I’ve been using Adobe software in one form or another for 25 years. I started learning it at university, edited photos in Photoshop 5.5 for newspapers, then used InDesign for magazine layouts when it took over from QuarkXpress in the hearts of many publishing companies. I’ve paid for Adobe software myself, as a freelancer, with a Creative Cloud subscription as and when I need it.
But now I find myself looking for alternatives. Why? Because my favoured way of subscribing was to buy a prepaid code for a year’s worth of the Photography Plan: Photoshop and Lightroom, plus 20GB of cloud storage I barely touched. And now Adobe has ended that plan, and I’ll need to pay three times as much for the same thing but with 1TB of cloud storage instead – the 20GB plan I bought in October 2024 was £82, a 1TB replacement will be as much as £249. This is deeply annoying. (See other photo editing software alternatives here.)
(Image credit: Adobe)
I don’t particularly object to Adobe’s subscription pricing, as it means I don’t have to fork out a lot of money at once and the apps get constant updates. We’re not talking about huge amounts of money here, and you pay less this way than with a monthly subscription, especially if you can get a Black Friday discount (though other Creative Cloud discounts happen).
There's nothing I like more than to cheap out. The pre-paid code felt like a good deal, and (gripes about Lightroom performance on Windows aside) it got me the two apps I like to use for photo editing. Once you’ve got into the groove of how software works, changing over to something new can be a wrench – it took me months to stop trying to use Quark keyboard shortcuts in InDesign, and even switching from Windows to a Mac can cause problems with muscle memory.
I'm trying really hard to use Affinity instead (Image credit: Serif)
Sometimes you have to bite the bullet, however. So here’s what I’m doing. I already own the whole Affinity suite of creative apps (one of the best graphic design software options), which comes with a pretty good image editing tool and an excellent layout app which will run on my iPad Pro too. And to this I’m adding ON1 Photo Raw, a Lightroom-alike for organisation and raw processing which importantly comes with a denoising tool that can trade blows with Adobe’s. After all, it’s much easier to remove noise in post production than it is to deal with motion blur.
And I’m going to try, really hard, to use them instead of Lightroom and Photoshop whenever I can. Eventually, I reckon, I’ll be used to their shortcuts and workflows, and I’ll be able to just not buy another Adobe pre-paid code. It’s a bold plan and I’m not certain of its success - I’ll still need to subscribe to InDesign for projects that require it - but that terabyte of cloud storage space has pushed me over the edge.
Ian Evenden has been a journalist for over 20 years, starting in the days of QuarkXpress 4 and Photoshop 5. He now mainly works in Creative Cloud and Google Docs, but can always find a use for a powerful laptop or two. When not sweating over page layout or photo editing, you can find him peering at the stars or growing vegetables.
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