The Subscription Software Scam

Might as well make my first Blog on here a bit of a soapbox stand, but I am me and you will figure that out if you follow me for any length of time.

Do you subscribe to a major software producer for the pleasure of using their product? How do you like it that you are basically renting software, with feature, access and use no longer at your control. If their computers shut down tomorrow you have NO ACCESS. If their cloud storage fails, you have NO ACCESS. There was a time you bought the software and had control over it. You had folders with media in them, and had one, if not two backups. And now, most write to the cloud first and maybe your computer second if you are lucky or set it up that way. Software producers like Adobe claims it makes their upgrade cycle easier. What it makes is raising prices far easier, as it comes down to pay us, or sorry, and by the way that includes all things stored in their cloud. I for one, used to by the Creative Suite Collection, and stopped at the 5.5 upgrade. After that came CSC.

There is one drawback to having the hard-copy of the software if the manufacturers quite issuing updates for compatibility. New Nikons native RAW format cannot be read by ANY of the v5.5 software and Adobe just neglected to issue an update, instead updated the engine in their image converter. If they can do that for that ONE piece of software, why not Bridge, LR, PS or any of the 5.5 software. So for well over one and going on two years, Adobe has not updated their engine to accommodate the NEW RAW format. Interestingly enough, Topaz, Photomatix, One1, Corel, none of these seems to have a problem handling the new Nikon RAW format (D5500 - 14bit or D650, 750, 850), just Adobe.

Well after using Photoshop since before they added layers, and Lightroom since v3, is time to take my basic image editing to One1. Half my Nikons can be read natively and half cannot and it is a hassle with archiving and naming, additional folders for pre/post conversion, that I am not willing to pay $600/year for. Is just easier to bid Adobe adieu.