No one would still be using CS 2 or 3 if Adobe had reasonable prices on new products. I bought Adobe products since the mid 1990s, but I recently switched to Affinity Photo and Designer because Adobe priced me out. Elements wasn't powerful enough for me. I was surprised how good Affinity software is. It does everything I need and is a very reasonable price without a subscription. I may never buy another Adobe product. Adobe is so foolish for giving their competitors an opening. They are giving away their business.
The old non-Flash Photoshop CS3 UI is really nice and familiar to me, so I still willingly use it almost every day. My needs definitely aren't Pro Tier, but it's great for cleaning up my scans: https://i.imgur.com/WWXiUFI.png
It's cheap for professional use, but it's very expensive for amateurs and occasional users.
I was using Lightroom to manage my catalogue of photos. I'd open up Photoshop and Lightroom maybe a dozen times a year. It was nice to have them available but they were effectively costing me $20 each use. When Adobe products were an upfront payment I could choose to buy a product and keep it through multiple release cycles, which would reduce my cost.
Adobe have switched their revenue driver from improving the product and introducing new must-have features to making churn painful. In fact when I tried to cancel my ~4 year old subscription they decided charged me a penalty fee because it wasn't done immediately before my account's anniversary. Their incentives are now strongly misaligned with building a good customer experience.
I bought Lightroom 3 times (1/3/5?) and used it a bunch, but not professionally. I've got tons of old images in it, from that era, I open it a couple of times a year to find stuff. I've moved on, I don't do DSLR/RAW images anymore.
This version doesn't run on Catalina, and the only upgrade that would keep the develop settings is O(10)/mo. So I'm looking for something that can do the cataloging, and something that can do the processing should I ever do that again.
I have 0 hope that anything will take the develop settings in lightroom and use/improve them, but that would be perfect. (I've got one image in particular that's just at the edge of acceptable quality on LR3 that got dramatically better on LR5)
If using Fuji or Sony, there is Capture One Express, which is a basic RAW transformer, catalogue and the ability to do some basic editing. For a hobbyist it's pretty good - and free!
I switched from Lightroom subscriptionware to Capture One payment with one included update. Catalogue with 90k pictures, performance might be a tad slower than LR on my iMac 2017 but so far I am happy with the software when it comes to workflow of importing new photos.
Will never go back to Adobe's ransomware/subscriptions again. Just a happy amateur and in periods it could pass weeks/months between starting up the software.
Although, I do miss photoshop a bit but Gimp does the job "good enough" for me.
I switched to Exposure X5. It's super fast compared to Lightroom and handles large catalogues with ease. Editing is not nearly as nice and it has some weird quirks around UI. I also liked Capture One.
I think if you're a pro, the $600 is not a huge deal, but it's far from free. $0.30/hr assumes that you're using their products 2000 hours a year, or 40 hours per week. I'd expect that someone like a photographer might use it 1-2 hours per work day, which ends up being $2-3 per hour.
For someone like me that has occasion to use something like Photoshop or Illustrator 3-6 hours per year, the $100-$200 per hour is quite pricey.
$600 a year is cheap for professional full-time use. But if you use it professionally and full-time, then you're going to want the latest stable version anyway. The people using CS2 and 3 are not that target audience. They are the people for whom $600 is a lot of money and who will not give their money to Adobe ever again after this.
> $600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud).
Step out of your high pay bubble. That's a ton of money for the majority of the population. It's fine for corporate professional use but completely inaccessible to most people.
