Subscribe or buy your photo editing software - Which is best?

Subscribe or buy? Should we own our software outright, or are you happy to lease it for a monthly fee?

Hi, my name is Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this is Coffee Break Photography.

Whenever I record a video or write a blog about an Adobe topic, I can almost guarantee that I’ll get comments which have nothing to do with the subject I’m talking about. Invariably, people will tell me that Adobe is being greedy or that they don’t want to pay a licence for editing software because it’s rubbish. I’ve heard these same concerns since 2012 when Adobe introduced the Creative Cloud subscription model. Rather than reply to each comment individually, I think I’ll put my head above the parapet this week and say why I don’t believe the Adobe Photography Plan is a bad deal at all! If you disagree after watching, please feel free to add a comment, but spend the time telling me why and not just repeating the same comments that would have gone on in every other Adobe-related video.

Let’s start with the accusation that Adobe is being greedy. To do that, we need to go back in time. [Do wobble effect]

It’s 2012, and Adobe has just launched its last purchase option for Adobe Photoshop – CS6. The purchase price for the full version, CS6 Extended, is £794. Let’s be honest: how many people who weren’t professional photographers saw this price and thought, “I’m not paying that much”? Off they went to Pirate Bay or some other highly illegal website and spent two or three days downloading a massive file with a serial number generator. You could also buy Lightroom Version 4 for £99, or if you already had Version 3, you could pay an upgrade fee of £60. Alternatively, off you went to Pirate Bay again and downloaded it as well!

In 2012, Adobe wasn’t making that much money, thanks to the theft of their software, which was taking place every day. We have to be honest: if you were downloading illegal versions, we were committing theft – who was being greedy then?

Also, in 2012, Adobe launched the Creative Cloud subscription model, and by 2013, they announced that the purchase option would no longer be offered. “Wait a second”, said everyone at the time. “This is just a way that Adobe will force us to buy the software we’ve been stealing for years.” Well, actually, nobody said that; what they said was Adobe will get everyone to move us to the subscription model, and then they’ll hike the prices. They also said Adobe is stealing our pictures; once they are in Lightroom, Adobe owns our photography. Additionally, others said that once we pay the subscription, we’ll not see any improvements to the slow and bloated software.

Well, let’s go back to 2024. [Do wobble effect]

The cost for the Adobe Photography Plan in 2013 was £9.98 per month. Let’s think about that for a second; instead of paying £893 for Photoshop and Lightroom, you could get the full versions of both software for less than £10. It would take nearly seven and a half years to pay the price of the purchased software. But, of course, the cost would increase over that time…. No, it won’t – you still pay £9.98 a month for the plan. I think that we are getting a bargain rather than being ripped off. If we use the Office for National Statistics inflation rates, we should be paying £14.33 a month!

I’m releasing this video just before Black Friday. There has been a deal to buy a twelve-month subscription at a heavily discounted price each year. The last time, it was just over £70, just over £6 a month. I can’t guarantee that the same deal will be offered this year, but if it is, and the subscription model convinces you, then now is a great time to save money. You can see the deal here if it’s on offer. I have an affiliate deal with Amazon, so I might get a few extra pennies from them if you take this offer up, but trust me, it’s not enough for me to recommend a product I don’t believe in!

While I think Adobe hasn’t shown greed in its pricing structure, I have to admit that it has had a massively positive effect on the company's profitability. In 2013, Adobe made around 290 million dollars annually; the latest info shows it has increased its annual profits to 5.36 billion dollars. As you can see, the stock price on the NASDAQ was pretty flat and not too impressive from 1988 until 2013. Once the subscription model kicks in, the stock price increases hugely. Adobe is now one of the largest software companies in the world and has considerable resources to update and maintain the software as a result. In all honesty, Adobe's stock price has only increased in line with other high-performing companies, such as Amazon.

So, have all these profits resulted in improvements in the software? I think it’s hard to argue that the last few years have seen some impressive additions to the functionality across its product range.

Between 2007 and 2012, the improvements to Lightroom from version 1 to version 4 weren’t that impressive. It started as an easier-to-use front end for Adobe Camera RAW. By version 4, we had access to adjustment brushes, basic noise reduction, vignettes, graduated filters, and the various modules at the top of the screen.

Since then, each release has seen improvements in both functionality and performance. If you haven’t used Lightroom for a few years, try the 28-day free trial, and you might be surprised. I probably do around 95% of my editing in Lightroom, and only now and again do I need to dip into Photoshop to do specific tasks such as adding text or using the frankly amazing new Remove tool – I’ll add a link below to see how impressive this functionality is.

Hopefully, I have added an alternative view to Adobe so far, but I know I will be challenged that some people want to own the software rather than lease it. Well, first of all, you have never owned the software. You have always been purchasing a licence to use the software, in most cases for perpetuity. The only problem with this is that the perpetual licence doesn’t guarantee maintaining the software forever. If the operating systems or hardware improvements break the software, then you don’t have any comeback and are left without access to anything to edit your photos. You still can buy Photoshop CS6 on eBay if you really want to, but it more than likely won’t work. While CS6 was a 64-bit application, the installer was a 32-bit one that can’t run on most PCs and Macs being used today. If you have a 12-year-old machine, you might be lucky, but you’ll also be waiting half a day for today’s 50mb photos to be processed on a machine that old!

However, there are alternatives to Adobe that still offer a perpetual license. That is true, and many of them are impressive. But are you really getting the deal you think you are getting?

One of the products I am frequently quoted is Affinity Photo 2. You can buy the perpetual licence for the photo-editing suite for £67.99, or if you throw in Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, you can get all three for just £160. There’s nothing more to pay, and you kind of own the software. It’s pretty good; I published my e-book, Photography Basics, Getting Started with your DSLR, using Affinity Publisher.

However, a couple of things. First, Affinity Photo is just a Photoshop replacement. It doesn’t have any of the catalogue tools that I find extremely useful in organising my photographs, which Lightroom has. Secondly, and this is very important to me as a Canon photographer, Affinity is very slow in adding Lens profiles to its products. Compare and contrast the lenses in Lightroom for the RF system with those in Affinity. It’s night and day – Adobe is on the ball with the latest lenses, whereas Affinity is sadly lacking.

OK, so you aren’t going to buy the latest lenses, so this isn’t going to be a problem. Fair enough, but look at the version number of Affinity. Version 2. It has been a product since 2015, and there are only two versions. The major release in 2022 added a little more functionality, live warping, non-destructive editing and JPEG XL support – but to get this new functionality, you had to buy a new Perpetual licence. It wasn’t much to upgrade, £89 for all three products, but it upset users by just how little was delivered in a major update. Affinity has now been bought by Canva, who promised to retain the perpetual licence model, which will please some people. Well, it will until they introduce annual paid updates, as we see with the next editing software I’ll touch on.

I like DxO software. I love DxO Raw 4, which I use every time I have to shoot with high ISOs. For black-and-white conversions, you cannot beat Silver Efex Pro. I was impressed with the latest release of PhotoLab 8, the Photoshop equivalent program. Again, it won’t do the organisational stuff that Lightroom does. But let’s look at the pricing for PhotoLab 8. A new perpetual licence is £209; if you had the previous version licence, you could upgrade for just £99.

PhotoLab version 1 was introduced in October 2017. Version 2 came out in October 2018, Version 3 in October 2019, and so on. Can you see the trend here? Every year, there is a major upgrade, and you have to pay a new perpetual licence upgrade fee. That fee isn’t a kick in the teeth away from what you are paying for an annual licence from Adobe for the Photography Plan. So, is the Perpetual licence going to cost any cheaper than the recurring licence – not really! If you take advantage of the Black Friday deal, that “greedy” Adobe company will charge you less than a good competitor.

Now, I know that you don’t have to upgrade to the latest software version. That is true, but if you are a professional photographer or even a serious amateur, you will probably want to upgrade due to the time savings we get from the latest functionality. As a working photographer, I would rather be with my camera taking photos than sitting in front of a computer editing them. Wouldn’t you?

Another competitor to Adobe is Capture One. They introduced a dual pricing model in February 2023. You can have the subscription version at £14.99 a month or buy the perpetual licence for £299 instead. But be aware that perpetual licence only gives you the current version and major bug fixes. You will never receive any functionality updates – they only come with the subscription model. If you want those updates, you have to pay another perpetual licence fee of a couple hundred pounds. Maybe it’s not the bargain you thought it was.

Now, I know that someone is going to be watching this video on a self-built Linux machine using an emulator which is running an open-source browser who will tell me, yes, but you can get Dark Table and GIMP for free. And I will say, yes, of course you can.

Let’s have a quick scroll through the Darktable open issues. I think it’s pretty clear that the software is a long way from being stable. These aren’t minor issues. There are operating system lock-ups, significant crashes, and features not working as expected. Again, if you rely on this for a job or are serious about editing, then this isn’t what you’ll want.

The reality is, if you are using a subscription or a perpetual licence model, you’ll end up paying about the same if you want to retain access to the latest developments. If you’re happy that the five-year-old version is still doing what you need, stay on your old software until it finally stops working when you upgrade your operating system or hardware.  Nobody is forcing you to upgrade, but just be aware that you might save some of your time for a few pounds each month.

I’ll leave you with this fun way to think about photography software with a monthly subscription. The subscription model is better for your health! I live in Edinburgh, and a glass of wine isn’t far off ten pounds in one of our excellent city centre bars. A pint of beer is around £6.50. So, if you have one glass of wine or one and a half glasses of beer less every month, you have paid for your subscription, and you are helping your liver at the same time! You can thank me later!

If you’ve enjoyed this video, it would be great if you could like it and share it by clicking on the thumbs-up button below the video. That way, a few more people will get to see it. You can also subscribe to the channel by clicking on this button here. I send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers with news about photography, as well as exclusive offers. Scan this QR code to sign up. My name is Rich Dyson, from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time.