I have never been that big a fan of Adobe’s subscription model for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the way the programs break if you stop your subscription. I’ve kept the Adobe Photographers monthly plan with Photoshop and Lightroom since they introduced it a number of years ago. I’ve paid in my $119.88 a year for the last almost 8 years which means I’ve paid just under a thousand dollars.

So they came out with their upgraded software during Adobe Max last month and I went to update the programs only to find that I no longer can update because I’m on an older (but still working) iMac that is not being updated by Apple.

So technically I need to continue to provide Adobe with $10 a month to use their software without ever being able to upgrade because of my machine. If I drop the payment I lose functionality that I’ve paid for for 8 years.

My iMac will be 9 years old at the end of the month. Bought it in November 2011on black Friday. It’s a 27″ and I’ve upgraded the memory to 32 gigs and the drive to a terabyte drive. It still runs well, boots every time, and is not slow. I’m not ready to fork out another $2000 for a newer model just so I can continue to get updates from Adobe.

In all honesty I haven’t used Lightroom for at least a year as Capture One has better processing for my Fujifilm Cameras. And I really only use Photoshop for my workflow to attach Nik 3.0 software to a smart object layer of my image. Not really sure what the best move is.

I do have a small 13 Mac Book Air (which is probably about 2 years away from the same issues) so if I want to do a sky replacement I could do it on that machine but it is small in ways other than the 13″ screen.

Not so sure how much longer I will keep the subscription in that there are other software packages that will do what I need to do without the money hole at the far end.