Adobe CC-Read the small print.

[N80]

I subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud last year with the LR/PS deal. $10 a month, which is not bad. But I never did warm up to LR and I do not use PS. I purchased an individual Capture One license and now I do not use LR at all.

So, about 5 months ago I went to cancel my subscription with Adobe only to be told that I'd have to pay a cancellation fee. I asked why and they said it was because the only subscription agreement is with auto-renewal and this was explained in the user agreement. Not cool, but shame on me for being naive and not reading the fine print. Additionally the fine print dictates that you can only cancel a subscription in the month prior to its expiration. Also, not cool. But again, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice shame on you. To make this more palatable they offered to pay for three of the remaining months if I would pay for the last two. I agreed assuming this would end my subscription.

It did not. I went to cancel today, a few weeks too late mind you, and they say I will have to pay the $55 cancellation fee which is 50% of the remaining subscription. When I asked why I was told that even though they had modified the agreement (when they gave me 3 free months) that the original agreement was still binding. A supervisor confirmed this and their unwillingness to waive the cancellation fee. I asked if I could just pay the rest of the year's subscription and have them cancel it for good. They said no.

The ONLY way I can cancel is to do it between mid September and mid October of next year. They said emails are sent ahead of time. I did not receive one this last time.

I think this is unacceptable and quite frankly creepy for a company the size of Adobe to behave this way. Not being able to opt out of auto renewal is bad enough. Only being able to cancel without penalty in a 30 day period is worse. Not allowing someone to cancel without penalty a week after that time period expired is simply pathetic.

It reminds me of the CD clubs of the 1980s but even with those you could "cancel at any time".

I cancelled the automatic payment to Adobe on my PayPal account. I do not know what the result of this will be.

I won't spend any more time talking bad about Adobe, but I hope others will read this and understand how Adobe behaves in terms of these subscriptions. Buyer beware.

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

Thanks for that, George.
This gives yet another reason that I am happy to have stuck with the perpetual versions of PS and LR.
The way Adobe has been behaving lately makes it all the more likely that I will jump ship eventually, once there is good enough competition to do so.

[N80]

Capture One is worth looking at. They sell a perpetual license as well as a subscription. I do not know the details of the subscription (it might be just as bad). CO is not as full featured as LR. It certainly is not PS. But the interface is a joy to use and it is amazingly configurable. It is still 'young' software in that Phase One has just recently positioned it as a LR competitor. I think its catalog features are a bit lagging as well as some print features. However, it seems to be evolving fast and PO is very receptive to feature requests.

But, the license is expensive. $300. Still, I very much prefer a simple one time payment over the schemes and traps that Adobe has put in place. Its not just that I'm cheap (because I am a little bit) it s just that I don't like being treated in a sneaky fashion.

I also despise the subscription model for software and hope that it goes away soon though I suspect it will not. I think the younger generation of software users have no memory or knowledge of being tied to a mainframe or the PC revolution of the early 1980s. Some enterprising genius will 'invent' perpetual software licenses again in 5-10 years and make a bundle with his 'new' idea.

[Chris_Brown]

Affinity Photo is your friend.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

[ned]

I just cancelled Creative cloud for Photoline and Imatch as my DAM system. Also reinstalled CS6 until I'm up to speed with Photoline. Was never a power user anyway.

Sent from my SM-P600 using Tapatalk

[Rhossydd]

It is still 'young' software

Hardly, it predates LR by four years.

Its has less peripheral functionality, but it's core is solid and it's workflow has been tailored to it's principle market of tethered studio shooting. 

[Rob C]

Affinity Photo is your friend.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

The link doesn't tell you anything at all about what the system can do for photographers. Strikes me as an invitation to buy a product, sight unseen.

Rob

[Rhossydd]

The link doesn't tell you anything at all about what the system can do for photographers.

You could just click through the menu options and find out about it.
The OP's point is that there are good products out there that don't need subscriptions.

[francois]

The link doesn't tell you anything at all about what the system can do for photographers. Strikes me as an invitation to buy a product, sight unseen.

Rob

Rob,
Scroll down and there's a link to download a free trial for Mac. The Beta version for Windows is also available and for this one, no need to scroll at the bottom of the page.

[kers]

I am also no fan of Adobes subscription model...
and if you want to use more than only photoshop and Lightroom it is plain expensive...
It is not an option anymore to infrequently use those programs because of that - as i did and maybe many with me...
My idea is they loose ground because of this.

Has anybody used 'Pixelmator'?
it is 30 euro mac only on the app store...

[Robert Roaldi]

Thanks very much for this info.

I have a quibble with only one thing you said. You stated that you found the license fee of $300 for Capture One expensive. I don't use it, but I don't find this expensive at all. Considering what we pay for bodies and lenses, and the rest, $300 for software that you will use for years is a bargain. I do not agree with the notion we have (the collective we) that all software should be inexpensive or free.

[kers]

Software ( firmware) is indeed often more expensive than the hardware to make.
But ones made it is easy to copy and sell with little cost.

[Robert Roaldi]

Software ( firmware) is indeed often more expensive than the hardware to make.
But ones made it is easy to copy and sell with little cost.

Quite so. I enjoy irony and get a kick out of the fact that many photographers want cheap or free software but then bemoan the rise of microstocks. I guess it's normal human behaviour though. We tend to think that what we do is important but downplay the value of the work of others. My real estate agent brother-in-law has no trouble justifying his commission rates on expensive homes, which imo do not reflect his level of effort in selling them, especially when the value of those homes is primarily determined by factors outside of his or the sellers' control. Yet at the same time he balks at the price of real estate photography, insisting that he wants to maintain a high level of professionalism while shooting bad pics of the houses with a point&shoot that he doesn't know how to use. (I may out of touch, he might be using his smartphone these days.) But this is off-topic and I apologize for that.

[N80]

Hardly, it predates LR by four years.

Its has less peripheral functionality, but it's core is solid and it's workflow has been tailored to it's principle market of tethered studio shooting.

Technically you are correct. However, it started as software primarily for use with Phase One equipment. Only very recently has it set out to compete with LR. The demise of Aperture seemed to have jump started this direction for CO. The relative 'newness' to this approach is apparent in it s DAM weaknesses. This does not trouble me at all and again, they are constantly improving and even make significant feature changes during incremental upgrades, which is refreshing.

[Rhossydd]

Technically you are correct. However, it started as software primarily for use with Phase One equipment.

It was very quickly opened up to most cameras. I first started using version one in 2003, four years before LR1 was released.

It might also be worth pointing out that over the years their upgrade policy has been pretty enlightened. It's not been an expensive program to keep up with over the years.

[N80]

I have a quibble with only one thing you said. You stated that you found the license fee of $300 for Capture One expensive. I don't use it, but I don't find this expensive at all. Considering what we pay for bodies and lenses, and the rest, $300 for software that you will use for years is a bargain. I do not agree with the notion we have (the collective we) that all software should be inexpensive or free.

Well, first off, "expensive" is in the eyes of the beholder. So it is a very relative notion.

Second, I agree with you completely even though my Scottish heritage is evident in my personality when it comes to money. Some would say I am a 'tight wad'. Nevertheless, I gladly paid the $300 for CO. So far I am well pleased with the program and find being out from under any subscriptions to be liberating. I feel this $300 is well spent as I now enjoy post processing whereas it felt like a chore in LR.

Third, I referred to it as "expensive" because many people view it that way compared to $10 a month ($120 a year) for a LR+PS subscription. But, even this is a little misguided if you do not need PS. If you do not use PS, the CC subscription is basically for LR alone. In three years it will cost you $360. Three years (or 10 years) of a CO personal license will cost you $300. It will cost you $400 if you upgrade once during that three years. So very comparable. Now, if PS is important to your workflow the CC subscription is a greater value.

The difference is, feature sets aside, I like working in CO and did not like working in LR. This is a hobby for me; why use a tool I don't enjoy?

And finally, I find Adobe's subscription plan to be predatory in its policies and the way they handle them. I've been an Adobe customer for 20 years and find it a bit sad to leave them in that regard. But I'm done with them. How a company treats its customers is very important to me and I think it says a lot about who a company is. I've related my experience above. On the contrary, Phase One is extremely pleasant to deal with and very cooperative and helpful.

Edit: I got CO for $260 on sale.

[N80]

It was very quickly opened up to most cameras. I first started using version one in 2003, four years before LR1 was released.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say. I get that it has been around. But even Phase One admits that it is relatively nascent as full featured DAM/editing suite compared to LR and Aperture and it remains that way now. I'm not knocking it. I love it. But CO still lags LR in a number of ways. At present almost none of those ways are important to me.

[RPark]

As mentioned in a recent post, I'd love to find an alternative to LR/PS. It's nothing to do with the products themselves (when they function properly) so much as the execrable way Adobe treats its customers (in my experience). Dealing with them, indeed, feels like some kind of Third World huckster cartel. Trying to get support via the ridiculous "chat" (the only option available to "legacy" software owners) confirms that one is dealing with a manipulative and capricious organization.

I've tried Capture Pro, and I liked it a lot ... except it lacked certain features/integrations that I rely on for my present workflow, which for the time being includes Photoshop.

I resolved the issue reported at the link above by reverting to the previous Mac OS with, I might add, support above and beyond from Apple techs. However, the Adobe products are still subject to random crashes and strange behaviour.

Hopefully, there will soon be competition for a company that doesn't care about ... in fact, holds its customers in contempt.

[Ken Bennett]

I have a quibble with only one thing you said. You stated that you found the license fee of $300 for Capture One expensive.

Agreed.

Back in 2002 or so, I got a couple of the then-new Canon 1D bodies. I had been shooting with a pair of D30 bodies, and the files were great but the shooting experience left a LOT to be desired. So a 4-megapixel 8-fps camera that could actually autofocus was just what I needed.

But the files were truly difficult, especially using the early Camera Raw plugin to process the raw files. Based on some glowing reviews here, I downloaded a trial version of Capture 1, and the raw conversions were impressive, especially in keeping neutral tones neutral (and not a blobby mess of magenta and green).

Man, I hated the idea of spending $500 for a single raw processing application, and vented about it to my wife. She asked how much I had spent on the 1D bodies. Um, $11,000. Then she pointed out that the C1 was less than 5% of the camera cost, and made the cameras infinitely better. D'oh. I ordered it the next day.

I have since switched to Lightroom for the simplified workflow and the DAM features, but I was very happy with C1 while I used it, and it was well worth the cost.

That said, I had the same issue with Adobe trying to cancel my full CC subscription at work -- once it rolls over, I'm stuck for another year. Grrrr.

[N80]

Hopefully, there will soon be competition for a company that doesn't care about ... in fact, holds its customers in contempt.

That is exactly how I felt. Even the chat app was horrible and difficult to use. I think the competition is there. I think all of the features of LR and PS can be found elsewhere. But it takes time to assess them and integrate them. And sometimes the expense of the alternatives can be huge (Imageprint comes to mind).

I think a lot of people are unwilling to step away from the comfort of LR. I was always put off by the price of CO. It was a lot more than LR or Aperture licenses. But, it has been worth it.

It is also INCREDIBLY daunting to change from one format/workflow/catalog to another. This process has been miserable. I have observed two things: 1. Once the move is done, its done. You just have to go about it thoughtfully and plan accordingly. 2. Aspects of workflow that I once thought were indispensable often are not. Doing something differently can seem harder at first. But it usually isn't; it's only different. This was very true in CO. On the other hand, CO is so customizable you can get pretty close to LR or Aperture very easily.