Cant afford Adobe, I'm done.

[JoeyZerv]

Thank you Adobe. 

After many years of supporting your products since photoshop 7 days even the introduction of lightroom, I think it's time for me to move on to another software. The recent price increases especially in the recent months has push me enough to find alternatives to the Adobe Create Suite. 

Yes your products are great, but prices does not justify it enough for creatives or hobbiest. 

It's time to cancel my subscription. 
Thank you again for your wonderful products. 

[kglad]

in the future, to find the best place to post your message, use the list here, https://community.adobe.com/

p.s. i don't think the adobe website, and forums in particular, are easy to navigate, so don't spend a lot of time searching that forum list. do your best and we'll move the post (like this one has already been moved) if it helps you get responses.

<"moved from using the community">

[Chuck Uebele]

That's a hard call. There are so many programs that now require a subscription that I don't bother with learning or getting new things, as I just wouldn't use them enough to justify the cost. I still have an old version of Microsoft office 2010 that works, so that's good. I can justify upgrading to their subscription version. Used to love Filemaker, for database, but it's now a subscription, so I stopped using that. So many others. They all add up to too much to spend on software. Got to be very selective, now.

[jane-e]

I still have an old version of Microsoft office 2010 that works

By @Chuck Uebele

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/CFQ7TTC0PQVJ

Office Home 2024

Microsoft Corporation

• One-time purchase for 1 PC or Mac
• Classic 2024 desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote
• Access to support resources
• Compatible with Windows 11, Windows 10, or macOS*
• For non-commercial use
• Works with Microsoft Teams

Note that it can be installed on one computer.

FileMaker Pro: https://store.claris.com/individuals

Jane

[Nancy OShea]

I spend more than this per month on coffee.

FREE Acrobat Reader -- view, comment, print & sign PDF.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/acrobat/pdf-reader.html

Creative Cloud Photography Plan ($10/month). Includes the following:

• Photoshop CC and Photoshop on iPad
• Camera Raw
• Lightroom on desktop, mobile and the web
• Lightroom Classic
• Portfolio website + hosting
• Adobe Express (free starter plan)
• Bridge
• 20 GB cloud storage (upgradable to 1 TB).
• Free upgrades for paid subscribers

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html

[Warren Heaton]

@JoeyZerv 

Hi, Joey.  Are you aware of the annual Photography Plan (Photoshop and Lightroom) that's billed at $10/month?  It also includes Adobe Fonts.

 If you are not seeing it when you check the options to subscribe online, start a chat or call.  

[Joel360435857lnf]

Thank you for your response. I am aware of the different plans.

However, I don't just use Photoshop and Lightroom. I also use Indesign, Illustrator, Premiere, and others.

• Affinity
• Luminar
• DaVinci 

Have been pretty good alternatives. 

Thank you for your responses. 

[kglad]

good luck!

[jefubbudu]

Congratulations!

[Warren Heaton]

@Joel360435857lnf 

For personal projects with low to no budget, those are each good options.

[jefubbudu]

I wouldn't even say for people with budgets! Resolve has world class color tools, uses GPU better than premiere, and has a mini-nuke in the form of davinci fusion. is free for light use and as a perpetual licsense for all releases is less than 1.5 years of a single adobe software, it's definitely positioned as a premiere killer.
affinity is also looking similarly nice, and a 6 month full fat trial is brutal.
both are taking the "2007 adobe" school of gaining market share- be accessible for the new generation, and free for long enough that they'll begin using it professionally.

with competition like this and an aging media suite, I don't think adobe can seriously set rates as high as this and keep their userbase. Some people might say AI will save adobe, but AI in an obsolete software is looking pretty unappealing.

[Warren Heaton]

@jefubbudu 

Competition is important and I'm glad that there are other options.

For what I do (broadcast motion graphics), it's not just Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Media Encoder, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Adobe InDesign that would need to be replaced, but also Avid Media Composer, Avid ProTools, and Maxon Cinema4D.  There would also need to be full support for Maxon Red Giant, BorisFX Continuum Complete, BorisFX Sapphire, and BorisFX Mocha Pro among other third-party plugins for After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and Media Composer.

While I would happily use Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve and Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for personal projects, there's a lot I would miss from the Adobe Creative Suite.  Things that come to mind with Resolve right away are kerning (character spacing), batch encoding in the background, and auto-transcription in the background.  With Photo and Designer, right off the bat, I'd miss having all of Adobe Fonts licensed for use.

An area where Resolve, Photo, and Designer stand out are with their iPad equivalents.  For those of us who work on our iPads, that's important.  I'm just not sure how important that is to the broad base of desktop and laptop users.

From a career standpoint, anyone pursuing film and video editing or graphic design should keep an eye on what employers in their area are looking for.  Their local community college probably provides access to Light Cast for detailed data about this.  For example, in Los Angeles, the top hard skills for film and video editors are Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, and Adobe Photoshop and the top hard skills for graphic designers are Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

I'm not sure how easily any of this can or will change.  Of course, there was a time that Flame and Inferno, Combustion, or Shake would have been the hard skills for motion design and composting, or Freehand the hard skill for illustration, or Quark Xpress the hard skill for page layout.

[jefubbudu]

part of the reason I'm so torn up about After Effects being less responsive and performant, or at least not keeping up with modern needs, is because it excels at one thing that nod-based editors don't:
being able to load up a clip, and make a lazy mask, or track a freeze frame of a window in the background to hide the person inside, or throw on a quick muzzle flash for a frame. it is uniquely good at one-off effects and indie use, where setting up a nuke script wouldn't make sense,
which is why I think they should really re-focus on provding value, performance, and usability on low end to average desktops and laptops, not small addons and heavy, lackluster 3D which takes a larger team than they have to reasonably support.

[kglad]

@jefubbudu 

if you're seeing performance problems consider a hardware issue.

[jefubbudu]

no, it's not a distinct perfomance issue. it's that the simple things After effects does takes upwards of 10 minutes to render, while the same thing takes 30 seconds for resolve or nuke. it's that after effects is best at quick, small fixes and adjustments, but is so bulky and slow that all the benefits of its fantastic workflow are wasted by its processing limitations.
not to mention how few effects are 32 bit or 16 bit where they need to be, or how few use GPU.

an AE-Lite would be great, basically just photoshop for video- basic layers, transforms, keyframes, tracking, masking, effects, precomps, blending, and keying is really all that's needed from it 95% of the time, and where AE shines. something like that which could run on a chromebook would be killer, and I know it can be done, because blender does all that and runs on a raspberry pi. (but it can't match the workflow because it's primarily a 3D software)

[kglad]

those lengthy waits are usually hardware eg, graphics card) issues, but i'm not an after effects expert.  post in th ae forum, if you want to fix that.

[jefubbudu]

I have been, since uservoice in 2016. I've checked with other users, and we've all found the same thing.
graphics cards do not significantly affect performance one way or the other as long as they're not crashing things.
after effects cannot display a 4K video at full speed without effects on most systems.
after effects rendering is slow and inefficient, and the software as a whole scales poorly with high core count CPU's where other software does not.
many of the modules (mograph, 3D, C4D integration, rotobrush, text, puppet tool, etc) are totally useless for many users, probably take more time then they're worth to develop, and would be more at home and more streamlined in a proper animation software, not compositing.
that's all.

[kglad]

you're probably correct.  but i still think you should check with the ae experts.  you have nothing to lose by doing so.

[jefubbudu]

last time I did, I eventually got adobe support, and they had me installing every version of visual studio from 2003 onward, and studio GPU drivers, and so on, and nothing helped, and they eventually came to the conclusion that my computer was running it as expected, and indeed, my benchmark scores were competitive. but that's the issue. my 5 year old midtier desktop with a RAM upgrade  and new cooler was almost trading blows with workstations in AE.

[kglad]

ok