I'm not a photoshop user (though I have an ancient copy somewhere and an ancient copy of Elements and even LE) but I am a Lightroom user. Lightroom has always been a fascinating product, combining what previously required multiple programs into one with a consistent UI and introducing an end to end non destructive workflow.
Great idea, but it came with one price: if you buy into this approach, you give up all those in-between generations of tiffs you used to have wirth conventional editors. This has always been touted as a strength of LR, a great saving in storage and file management, and rightly so.
But it also brings the "eggs-in-one-basket" syndrome. Lightroom users basically have the original unprocessed raw files plus a database with a record of all the processing done on those raws (and all the keywording and the like). They don't actually have any physical edited files. And there is no reason why they should: the whole ethos of Lightroom is non-destructive editing of the original raw with no need for any work-in-progress RGB renderings. Your edits are simple a sequence of commands stored in a database which are run on the fly whenever you want to render and image into a print (or finished electronic file). This works so smoothly, it makes no sense to use lightroom as though it were photoshop and break this model by keeping "backup" rendered files with all the hassle involved in managing these files.
However, what Adobe have done by introducing this subscription model is break a trust. if you used LR on a large scale you know you are committed to this database driven editing model. You are in trouble if anything happens to LR because all of your work resides as nothing more than a remembered sequence of programming instructions associated with the RAW and only LR can run that program and render the file. LR users need to have faith in Adobe to preserver this model or they risk losing everything. And LR users are now left with the suspicion that Adobe might (probably will) at some point in the future use the same model with LR. And if they do this, it isn't just a case of the cost of software, it's all the hours you have locked up in the stream of commands saved in the LR database. They will prevent you not just from using the software if you cease to subscribe but also they will deny you access to all your past work. Your work, the work you did with your skill and knowledge and labour. If Lightroom went to subscription it becomes ransomware.
Are you prepared to entrust 10000, 50000 or whatever images and all the work that went into this to Adobe's goodwill? Are you going to go on increasing the size of that catalogue knowing what potentially be on the horizon? To my mind, the Photoshop subscription effectively kills the trust in Adobe and that kills Lighroom here and now as a viable product because, painful at it would be to bail at this point, I know that every single extra edit I make is increasing the hold they potentially have over me in the future. This is a real shame because after initial scepticism, I have grown to like Lightroom a lot and have completely abandoned Capture One and Bibble and Picture Window Pro and the DAM product and the sharpening tools and the noise reduction programs and all the other software I had cobbled together into an intricate workflow.
It will be a blow to have to return to that kind of arrangement but to my mind a subscription model for Lightroom is functionally equivalent to losing your LR catalogue to a kidnapper: stop paying forever and you are left with years of unprocessed RAWs and nothing else. I don't want my images to be under the control of a corporation who doesn't care about my images or me, I want them to be under my exclusive control because I do care.
