If any of you are using the Cloud CC Package from Adobe, there is every likelihood that it will soon be doubling from $9.99 a month to $19.99 … or is that just some malicious rumour?!
I shall probably stop with my usage of their CC package - I am not a heavy Lightroom user anyway; and I find Affinity Photo (almost) every bit as good as Photoshop. I have some CDs of CS6 should I need.
I prefer Picasa to Bridge as my DAM: Bridge takes a month of Sundays to provide thumbnails.
What is everybody planning to do in the face of Adobe’s allegedly new and ‘adventurous’ pricing?
Jack, as an experiment and as a New Year resolution, I stopped using Adobe in January to see if I could manage without it. I found several software packages that purported to be challengers to Adobe and two of them I trialled, Luminar 3 and ON1 Photo Raw. I chose ON1 as being best for me. In March I deleted all Adobe products from my system and iPad, and cancelled my subscription.
As Don said, you can store a link to most external editors whereby ON1 will duplicate a file in a similar way to Lightroom and save it back, Nik and Topaz, and even DfX (the Lightroom version). It wouldn’t be hard to simulate an art history brush using layers. I too have Affinity, although I use it mostly for stitching and focus stacking, and I have Aurora HDR. The combination of ON1, Topaz, Aurora and Affinity is enough. There is a big upgrade to ON1 planned for later this month so I guess more functions will be added.
When my annual photographer plan was up for renewal with Adobe this year, it came up as the $19.99 including the increased storage, which I don’t want/need.
However, I logged into my account and was able to renew at my standard $9.99 with the original storage which is works for me.
Just a note about Affinity Photo, while it has macros they are not nearly as powerful as those in Photoshop. For example you can’t call up a Topaz or other effect. For simple things they are ok. One good thing is it has hundreds of undo levels. It also has art brushes which are fairly good but a bit less than Photoshop.
You can use the Topaz plugins with the Affinity Photo Beta if you use their Studio plugin as an intermediate. I do that regularly on my Mac, but can not speak for the Windows version. I have seen some issues with the regular AP release, but not the current Beta. The issue seems to be the required sand-boxing because AP is sold through the Apple Store.
There is also PhotoLine. It is a great little pixel editor and runs just about every plugin and photo app you want since it does not use the Apple sand-boxing restrictions. I found learning it to be a bit challenging but I could do pretty much anything I wanted with it.
