Anyone who has been on my course in Ashton or was at the presentation I made to Cork Camera Club this year will know that I’ve held out with Lightroom 6 for a long time (is it 10 years?). It was the last version you could own without the subscription and frankly it worked fine for me and it did everything I needed it to do. I was lucky that my main cameras RAW files (D850 and D500) were supported and when I bought the Z6 I had a work around via DNG files that was OK since it wasn’t my main camera.
But I always said that my next PC or camera upgrade would necessitate subscription to the latest version and I was only really holding off to be frugal.
Today the Adobe removed the lowest subscription plan in favour of the better cloud plan (which I don’t use). So yesterday I signed up while I could and will be learning what’s new in Lightroom and Photoshop for the next few weeks. I’m sure that every now and then those features will be useful. And it will be nice to edit the Z6 RAW files directly. I was getting used to GIMP though and not sure if I’ll bother to get that proficient with PS 2025.
Just to prove a point though, I edited a short series of images taken in Mytleville and Poll Gorm over New Year using Darktable and GIMP on my Raspberry Pi 5. It wasn’t completely painless – considering I’ve never used Darktable and the Pi isn’t that powerful – but it certainly presents a viable, free alternative.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!