I don’t think that I woke up one morning and decided to break up with Adobe. I think it was a slow burn situation. I really can’t point to a moment in time that marks the occasion. When I decided to quit drinking, I can remember the exact moment it became clear that I would do so and what happened during the previous few moments. Super clear. But this whole Adobe divorce thing was a little pokier. It crept up on me with a certain lugubriousness.
Adobe makes really great software. I’ve used Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom Classic for years. Probably more than twenty-five, specifically. Photoshop isn’t a verb in our colloquial vernacular because it sucks. However, their software is expensive. Especially for an amateur hack like myself. I could totally justify the cost if I were billing clients and it were a necessary part of my workflow. But that’s not my case.
As part of my day job as a SVP of Domestic Logistics I audit finances. Just kidding. I don’t have a traditional day job and I’m certainly not the senior vice president type. But I do keep an extremely close eye on the ins and outs of our household moneys, and when I started thinking about how much money Adobe has received from me over the years, my fingertips started to ache. You know, from all the calculations I was doing.
That was step one. Step two was to deny my ability to live without Adobe’s software, especially Lightroom. I couldn’t — nay, wouldn’t — fathom it. So I canceled my YouTubeTV subscription. I canceled annual subscriptions to The Athletic and The Atlantic. All in an effort to convince myself that I had just cleared quite a bit of scratch out of our annual subscriptions budget, so of course I could continue paying Adobe their monthly fees.
Until it started to become clear that I couldn’t. It began to make less and less sense to pay someone a monthly fee to use their product. I was fine with Spotify and Netflix. That makes sense. You are basically renting server space from them, sort of. However you want to think about it, there’s no denying they give you access to an enormous amount of media to consume at any given moment, from anywhere you have an internet connection. I’ll pay for that service on a monthly basis.
That leads us to step three. To search out alternatives for everything Adobe charged me for. For me, that was Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and most importantly, Lightroom. It didn’t really take a ton of searching to find a replacement for the trio of design apps. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher were the obvious choice. They offer a fully unlocked 30-day trial during which I got quickly comfortable with most anything I need to do. And their full suite is something like $160. Once. One time. Not annually. Not monthly. It’s a one time payment. I can use the version of their software that I paid for for the rest of my life. Now, sure, I will probably want to upgrade when new versions come out. Probably. Maybe not, though. I can if I want to. It’s my choice. I like that.
Now for the back end of step three. The Lightroom replacement. Much more difficult. Much. After a lot of research and trials of free or inexpensive software like ON1 Raw, Darktable, Digi-something, and another few whose names I can’t remember, I settled on Adobe’s free Bridge software as my digital asset manager (DAM) and Affinity Photo for all of my edits. Is this solution as slick as Lightroom and Photoshop? Nope. Am I happier with it, given that I’m not seeing Adobe’s name pop up in my calendar every month reminding me of the payment? Hell yeah.
I will further offer that my workflow is less fluid than it used to be. I have to work at finding my photos. I mean, I know where they are, but Lightroom was just so fucking good at putting them right in my face, when I wanted them in my face, and keeping them all neat and tidy behind closed doors when I didn’t want them right in my face. Nothing else works as well as Lightroom in that regard. My loss. But not financially. So I have to use my noggin a bit more to find files. Big woop. It’s not that big of a deal. And I have yet to run into a situation where I simply cannot find the file I’m looking for. It just takes a little bit more work. Simply put, it’s a touch less convenient, but not impossible. It works nearly as well.
I feel like what this exercise has illustrated for me is how spoiled I’ve become. And unwilling I am to give up certain conveniences once I’ve experienced their rich glow upon my daily life. However, I am nothing if not adaptable. And adapt I have.
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