Changes underway
I’ve unexpectedly been away from my website. A few weeks ago I left my job and with it my state paid for subscription to Adobe. At the same time I returned my work computer, which had become my primary means of developing, managing, and editing my work. Finally, my primary camera for the last eight years began to glitch and it looks like it will not be long before I look at selling my apsc glass.
In 2022 I entered a period of inner chaos. A lifetime of contradictions and willful self-deceit came crashing down and set me on the course I find myself on today. That is an old story for my blog. But photography has played more of a role in this experience than being a creative outlet to explore changes and process things. Photography has been a constant for me. A point of consistency that has been a comfort.
Throughout this period of upheaval and major life changes I somehow thought that my photographic practices, workflows, and routines would somehow stay intact. In hindsight it seems inevitable that these would change as well. Hence my time away from engaging in photography as a creative practice or act.
My love/hate for Adobe
There is a lot of very justified hate for Adobe right now and I’m right there with everyone. At first I defended the idea of making an option for subscription to Photoshop/Lightroom. It made the software accessible to more people and ushered in a new boom era for the field of photography and digital art. While I wouldn’t necessarily say that this has ultimately resulted in disaster, I won’t argue against anyone who says it is.
I have Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), sometimes referred to as Dyspraxia. There are a number of different expressions of this developmental disorder, but part of the way it expresses itself through me is a distinct lack of fine motor control. For someone drawn to and obsessed with visual art, DCD nearly became an insurmountable barrier to developing as an artist. At 39 years old I still struggle to color within the lines and have difficulty controlling the pressure I apply to a surface with paintbrush, pencil, or pastel.
I remember crying with joy and excitement the first time I was able to create something that looked and felt the way I wanted it to and it was thanks to software from Adobe.
The first photo editing software I encountered was Photoshop Elements 2.0 in 2002. Photoshop showed me the power and possibility of “digital art”– a way around my disability. When I began to take photography seriously it was with a 4MP Kodak point and shoot and deliberate distortions and abstractions completed through this software. Eventually I made the switch to “real cameras” (ie. film), but it was those early digital works that brought me to the medium. With the exception of a few dark periods, Photoshop has been one of my primary tools of creative expression.
With the current subscription model, the evermore infuriating role “AI” (LLMs), and the fact that so much creative work is more or less held hostage through Adobe’s approach to handling Camera RAW edits, my goodwill for this company has largely disappeared.
Frustration
My last job periodically included creative work that resulted in my employer providing me a license for the full Adobe Creative Cloud. I was in this job for 11 years. They also provided me with a computer that was returned at my departure. Luckily I got in good habits around backing up files since the start.
I’ve taken on a bit of debt to pay for the computer I’m writing this on, primarily because I needed a machine that I could continue my photography work on. The problem became software. I was already nearing the maximum amount of debt I could comfortably absorb after buying this computer, so the idea of adding a commitment to $20+ a month for the next 12 months to access Photoshop wasn’t something I could stomach.
In the past two weeks I’ve tried Lightroom C & CC, Photoshop Elements CC, Gimp, Darktable, RAWTherapee, ACDsee, CaptureOne, Canva, Photopea, Pixlr, On1, Affinity Photo 1 & 2, Luminar Neo, DXO Photolab, Pixelmator, and several others I can’t remember the name of. I wanted to explore every possible platform I could—watching tutorials and making multiple efforts to edit a number of routine image files. In the end I came away with the realization that no other software is capable of rendering RAW files from a Beyer Sensor like Adobe can and there was nothing I could do in the these other programs to get the same character.
I could complete satisfying-ish results on most of these platforms (within the scope of their abilities), but the non-Adobe options all took 20x longer and were still less satisfying. At first I thought this was just down to familiarity with the software, but despite the fact that Affinity Photo operates almost identically to Photoshop, I was still able to get more satisfying results in a tenth the amount of time in Adobe Lightroom – software I’d never used before and hate the layout of.
So where am I now?
I’m giving money to Adobe for a subscription to Lightroom and I’ll be paying monthly for the next year. I own Affinity Photo 1 and On1 RAW 2025 and am working on getting the best I can out of these. Meanwhile, I’ll work on exporting my entire back catalog to high-resolution TIFFs through Lightroom. I’m not happy with any of the edits I’ve made on any non-Adobe platform I’ve used so far and I’m working on retraining myself on the techniques and approaches I used 15-20 years ago.
I am looking at other changes that may need to be made to my approach, lest I end up like Gary Winogrand—leaving mountains of undeveloped images never to be processed or seen. Afterall, for me the RAW file is not yet a photograph—it is the raw material from which I create one. If I need to shoot fewer frames in order to avoid that kind of fate, I’ll also need to change how I relate to my subjects and my camera, a lot.
I don’t know where I’m going at the moment, but this experience has come with a lot of lessons. Primarily, it has shown me that the way I’ve been going about things is unsustainable and that I can’t continue to rely on resources I can’t control in order to do this work.
I wrote this knowing that I wasn’t going to promote it. The “Adobe Bad” thing has been talked about to death. I suspect that the information in this post is of little value to anyone working in photography at the moment. My main purpose in writing it was to put the exploratory phase of this change to bed. I wanted to leave myself a note for the future that would serve as a reminder not to fall into the traps I have in the past.
If you’ve read this far and saw something that got you to thinking, please let me know. I’m not sure what others get out of a blog like mine. Thanks for reading! -Wynn
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