Adobe Creative Cloud is my longest-standing software subscription.

For years I’ve used Lightroom and Photoshop to edit photographs, put videos together, and build my online portfolio of visual creative work.

However that was always on student plans, where the price was very heavily reduced. Just the other day they said my subscription price was to be upped to almost 3 times the original price.

And although I love creative work, I’m not getting paid for it. Fortunately, a while ago, I realised that paying for Adobe wasn’t going to be sustainable. I’ve been making preparations since then and today I thought I’d just tell you about what I’m going to be using now instead…

  1. Capcut - I know it’s owned by the same company that built TikTok, but it’s a great video editor. I can add captions, move pretty seamlessly from my (cocaine) phone to desktop and it’s fast.

  2. Photomator + Luminar Neo - Apple’s own photo editor for desktop, and Luminar’s retouching and colour-correcting app. Photomator’s free, and I have the latter on a Setapp subscription. They’re both very capable, but I’ll be honest, I don’t think they’ll stand up to Lightroom overall. But I’m quite new to them both, so we will see…

  3. Affinity - The company that made the original competitors to Adobe’s suite of tools was acquired by Canva, and recently they released an all-in-one editor that will do everything that I used Photoshop for, for free.

  4. Proton Drive - I didn’t use Adobe’s cloud storage extensively, and mainly for good reason, as I knew that a subscription with them wasn’t going to remain sustainable. Proton Drive gives me 1TB with my business suite subscription, and it does the job very well.

  5. Hugo - now that AI has made it easy to code websites even without experience, I’ve been using Hugo + Netlify as a framework and as a host for tstowphoto.com. It does everything that Adobe Portfolio did, more simply and quickly.

Overall, I’m going to be happy to get all of the gigantic softwares Adobe provides off of my computer. I’ll free up working memory and storage space, and I don’t think I’ll experience much of a decrease in utility whilst using the above tools.

However, it’s another new experiment, and I’ll see how it goes. Shall report back at some point.