Hi All,
We’ve had a charity pricing for Adobe Creative Cloud for the past 10 years. Sadly, the price increase this year for us makes it untenable. Realisitically we only need Audition, Lightroom, Acrobat and Permiere Pro. The other apps are already covered by Affinity and Pixelmator Pro.
Any ideas? I’d prefer one-off licences to subscriptions.
EDIT:
We don’t need cloud storage.
Switch to Davinci Resolve (free) instead of Premiere Pro.
Depending on how much video editing you do, switching to anything will take a bit of learning curve, but for the last few years, Resolve has been the Internet (and YouTube’s) darling for switching away from paid video editors.
(Respectfully recommended by someone that is staying with Premiere Pro, but would probably only consider Resolve and nothing else, if I had to change.)
Could Logic. or even Garage band be a substitute for Audition.
Which parts of Lightroom do you use?
If you rely on the Library module, it’s a hard road finding something as flexible. Windows users I know through photography forums prefer iMatch and from what I can see it is plenty powerful. No Mac version, though. XnViewMP might be another option. I didn’t like it but I can see it being fine for lots of people.
If you only want the Develop module, I’d suggest you take a look at Photomator. It’s quite capable and has a very good UI, even on iPad. Other than that, there are some other good ‘middle of the road’ paid options like Darkroom (I’m sure there are others that escape me at the moment) and also multiple free options including digiKam and [shudder] Darktable.
If you are looking for a “Mac-assed app”, Photomator is solid and run a mile from Darktable. The latter has an interface that would not fit in at NASA Mission Control because it would be deemed too complicated.
I’ve found Audacity as an adequate replacement for Audition. I normally take a recording top and tail it, remove noise and normalise to -19 lufs. This is actually really easy in Audacity.
I’m looking at ON1 to replace Lightroom. They’re doing a 50% off at the moment and a few Lightroom users have posted that this is the only real worthwhile replacement.
I’ll now look at Davinci Resolve and see if the free version does what I need.
Acrobat is my biggest current issue. The other big names are not cheap!
Thanks folks!
Just be aware that ON1 has a regular paid upgrade cycle (or did when I used it). To stay up-to-date you are likely to be paying each year.
For the PDF you might want to look at PDF Gear. It is a bit clunky, but does a lot.
EDIT the link provided was for the iOS app store - here is their web site
https://www.pdfgear.com. It is available in the Mac App store - sorry for the confusion!
This is the question I would like answered. I don’t do much, if any editing of photos I take, beyond the occasional crop — this is not because I am an amazing photographer but because I was a field researcher for years and years and years and my habit is not to throw any data away. Lightroom libraries were terrific.
When I decided to give up Lightroom, I looked around at various “digital asset management” apps and none of them impressed me. That was some years ago, and I once again find myself wishing for a Lightroom library replacement. Any suggestions are welcome.
Here’s a tip you might not know. If you only want to organise your photos, you can use Lightroom Classic absolutely free. You do need an Adobe account but it needn’t have a plan attached.
Of course, you won’t be able to crop images directly, but there’s always “Show in Finder” for when you want to.
Thank you. I’ve bitten the bullet on ON1 Photo Raw. It cost me about £42 as they’re running a 50% discount. Considering Adobe was £34pm. This is good for me. It gives me a year to evaluate and see if I need to pay for upgrades every year.
@johnlaudun So far I’ve been pretty impressed with ON1. They have lots of videos on how to use their software. It doesn’t import photos so no issues with migration if after a year I’m not happy. One of the big issues for me is being able to sort photos, so being able to navigate in their app to a directory of photos and seing them in grid view is excellent. They have a browse feature which is for organising and edit feature for editing. I can delete (also deletes from hard drive), edit (non destructive, creates a sidecar file), move, rate, flag, etc.
Just trying PDFgear, but cannot export annotations or comments, which is a bit of a bummer really. This is one of the main needs I have for a PDF app to annotate, comment and then export them. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Adobe Bridge is also free. It is a viewer into existing file/folder structure, sort or like a photo-specific finder replacement.
Not sure on how well it does as a DAM, I’ve only used it for a few minutes years ago since I use Lightroom instead.
I hope for your sake ON1 has improved a lot since I last looked at it. It had really compelling features but many were just executed poorly.
Bridge is not as powerful as Lightroom when it comes to metadata, however it can handle more than just photos and videos.
You can use Notability or Good notes for that purpose. Both are good app, personally I use Notability.
You can use Zotero to annotate and highlight and then export complete with the annotations and notes. But as it is designed as an academic tool it may not meet your other needs
I’ve got notability, but didn’t think you can create pdf embedded annotations or highlights. I always thought they were on a notability layer?
I might need to take a look at Zotero. I’ve been trying out Marginnote and Liquidtext. Not sure about them. Liquidtext feels better but has a hefty price tag.
Yes they were on a notability layer, but within the app. You can create and export pdf with annotations, which appears as a part of pdf.
You can replace Permiere Pro with davinci resolve.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Capture One instead of LR. It’s, in my opinion, a much better tool for almost every purpose. although the library isn’t quite as good, the raw editor is far better than LR’s. C1 is used by a lot of pros and I find the colours from both Sony and Canon rigs to be way better in C1. Adobe is far behind in this area.