Adobe Creative Cloud no longer offers most older Lightroom and Photoshop versions

Affinity may be able to replace Photoshop, but nothing replaces Lightroom. There are programs which are good and do maybe 70% of what Lr does but none do it all.
Yet.

For real. The cloud editing has been such a Time saver lately and every other program I've tried feels gimmicky or overly complicated

I have very happily replaced Lightroom with Phase One Capture one. Nothing I used Lightroom for is missing in Capture One and I'm very pleased to be free of Adobe. I have not found a single downside with Capture One. Quite enjoy the interface. I still use my ancient Photoshop CS6 license for a few things, but I don't anticipate ever opening Lightroom again. Affinity seems fine for much of the things I've used CS6 for, mostly just use PS CS6 because I've got years of familiarity with it.

I'd never buy a camera that had to connect to the internet and that required monthly payments or it would stop working, no way I'm going to buy software for my photo work flow that works that way. Adobe even makes me update the CC app periodically or my supposedly permanent CS6 license stops working. So I'll be moving away from Photoshop entirely at some point. I need software I can count on as much as I do my cameras. Adobe simply does not understand this.

I have a nine year old Mac Pro and plan on staying with OS 10.14. As long as I can continue to use the version on my computer I'm good, otherwise it will be time to say goodbye to Adobe. I'm 69 years old in poor health due to Parkinson's. I'd rather spend my limited financial resources on camera equipment then replace a computer that still meets my needs.

Everyday I went back to it this year when my work stopped supplying the cloud. I must admit I really miss..... nope nothing it's great.

@String Image editor is no more a cutting edge piece of tech that should take so much time. PS is heavily bloated for what it does.

PS still behave like old sluggish and bloated program on a new system. In fact PS7 was much faster on a contemporary PC.

If you haven't, try Affinity Photo (it does most of what PS does and then some more) to see how snappy a 2019 image editor feels like.

@ saiko - Affinity may work fine for you and that great. LR/PS works perfectly for me and its not in the least bit slow. It's rather funny that all these programs are "better" that PS but yet 27 years later, they are still trying to match PS.

It's not funny. It's the power of monopoly combined with a high barrier to entry for competitors.

mrkalntms : Couldn't be said better!! not only that, Adobe bought and killed many of its competitor products. Also, they ruined the entire software industry horrible fake cloud - aka ransomware.

Your entire comment is just a bumbling straw man in the shape of a corporate shill.

@ - mrkalntms - Well done! In typical DPR style lets just resort to personal insults!

I called your comment a bumbling straw man in the shape of a corporate shill, not you, but now you've got me wondering.

@String "Onshape is absolutely nothing new; that model has been in existence for years" - yes, Pong existed since 1972 - what's the point in using PS4 and Xbox One today - nothing new!

You seem to be quite knowledgeable, esp. about Adobe. Could you explain us what's 'Cloud' about the Adobe Creative Cloud?

Check ADBE stock prices and open a 5Y chart. You will be surprised.

Adobe is doing just fine, raking in billions. Many Adobe users however are feeling more and more frustrated. Of course they still give Adobe their monthly extortion, I mean subscription payments. But eventually Adobe's stockholder rather than customer focused business model will come back and bite them. Maybe not this year or next. But excess hubris and greed always have consequences eventually.

Excately. Even today I consider the "cloud" as the most risky solution for programs and especially for the preservation of documents (photos). No one, except Adobe, is in control of programs or documents.

And at the rate Adobe is going, you can expect that to increase.

@David: Did you realize that you are comparing world peace to some ransomware?!

@ keepreal - Wow, okay sure. Ya know DOS 5 worked pretty good to, still using that? And since you are still using CS2, how would you even know "It may be a little but not enough to continue the chase"?
I certainly love when other people tell everyone else where/when to spend their money.

Are you daft? I tried them all out when you could download them and do so.

I certainly love when people think they know what others have and have not done.

The thing is, under a perpetual licence you had the option of staying on the old versions of OS and an app - a lot of organizations stayed with XP long after support had stopped. If you run lots of critical apps, upgrading everything every time can be expensive from a testing PoV.

@ String - Windows 7 support ends in 2020.

I think most Win 7 holdouts will finally move to Win 10 over the next 12 months, myself included, although I'll likely be dual booting for a few years.

Windows 7 support did not end in 2015. It's got support until sometime in 2020, but yes, the writing is on the wall. Win7 had a great run, one of the classic Windows versions, but can't be supported forever.

Photography, like others is an expensive hobby. So if you save $10 a month it will only take 16.66 years to save up for a new $2000 lens. I'm pretty sure there will be a few $1000 to $6000 bodies released in that time period as well.

If you can't afford $10 a month for your favorite hobby perhaps choosing a better financial planner might have been a different path. Maybe skip a few bottles of wine a month or skip one night going out to dinner. Dinner might cover 3 to 4 months. I do realize that there are some that may be in financial dire straits and I sympathize but I can't see that being a huge majority.

I'm not saying you should use Adobe products as there are very good alternatives. The $10 a month thing is is just far too lame. If you just don't like subscription or opposed to that business model than great. I 'm just saying.

@zeee, I rather pay one price for a app/program instead of monthly fee.

Zee

In 4 years renting CC you pay the equivalent of a gold rated Fuji XT 30 camera. In addition Fuji provides a free version of Capture One for Fuji and Sony users.
And 4 years is about the life cycle of this camera.

I think Adobe lost track bundling PS with LR. Most would be happy with LR only, no cloud and the $40 one time buy affinity for occasional pixel shifting.

It's not the cost of CC I mind, it's the loss of control. I want to leave my laptop alone for 6 months, jump on a plane, open the laptop anywhere in the world and have it open my images. With Lightroom I'd likely open my laptop to do my work and be faced with a message saying I had to connect to the internet to open CC.

I'd never put up with that in a camera, why should I put up with that from my image software??? When I buy a license I want it to work in perpetuity.

Capture One works beautifully, don't miss Lightroom at all.

I don't need to upgrade this year. Everything works fine. I will wait and see - something that you can't do with Adobe anymore.

It is very unlikely that this is related to Oracle.
The versions of Java used by Adobe for older products have all been free for commercial use, and of course, still are. Oracle didn't and couldn't change that.

Much more likely, it is related to Adobe experimenting with ways to better milk their CC business model. Like droping the 20GB photography plan at the same time they are doing this. They don't want their CC subscribers to look back at CS6 ...

I also read it as there is something that Adobe is no longer licensing or perhaps they've found a potential patent issue. Instead of paying or resolving the licensing issue, Adobe has decided to basically revoke people's license to the older versions.

I've been slowly planning my exit since I feel it is only a matter of time before Adobe does something that will not work for me. Maybe it will be increasing the price, maybe it will be discontinuing Classic, maybe it will be making Classic no longer work with LR CC for syncing Smart Previews, maybe it will be making the cloud more mandatory. The problem I see with the subscription is that you don't have much choice except to go along with whatever changes Adobe decides to make.

I use Affinity for what little PS needs I have. I'm thinking of using Apple Photos w/ iCloud Photo Library + Luminar Flex for my LR needs. That would still allow me to work on multiple devices which is something I like about CC.

@ Alexander Raemer - Its been 7 years and I'm still paying the same as I did then. So yes, I'm sure you will eventually be right. I'm going to predict that the sun will blow up... eventually I'll be right as well.

The cost of my photography plan has never increased in the years I’ve subscribed, and I get LR mobile (and upcoming PS mobile) as added software I which didn’t cost me more to start using.

Anyone who thinks a business does anything that isn’t motivated by what’s best for them is naive. That’s their job. However, it’s also up to them to ensure whatever they do doesn’t cost them customers. Unlike government mistakes, businesses suffer when they blunder. Adobe hasn’t seemed to have gotten there yet, but the longer they behave as though they’re an indispensable monopoly, the more numerous and better competitors will become.

Is this a coupon you can share sir? 50% off C1 might well be tempting..

C1 is great, has some unique tools that really speed up work like colour masking, and the easiest way to handle inconsistent skin

To haul
It's just a click through. The email says

Exclusive 4-day offer for select new customers
You have been selected for a 50% offer on a Capture One Pro 12 license or subscription. 
Click the button below to claim your exclusive code. Offer expires 13 May, 2019.

*Offer includes 50 % off perpetual license bundles with Styles, annual prepaid and annual monthly subscription packages. 

You might want to give their customer service a call.

just spill the beans on that software, there are many lightroom competitors but Photoshop with its brushes collection is a different beast and Affinity is good but slow.

Photoshop is still king in the photography department but who knows for how long. But their politics has started to bite them back in other departments. I can tell you people are abandoning Premiere in droves and jumping to Davinci Resolve and they ain't going back. When a Davinci appears in photography it will be another checkmate for them. They went for the quick profits annoying deeply customers. This has always a price in the long run......you will see who talks about Adobe in 5 years......

@panko - MMmm. raisins... btw: I left adobe and haven't looked back... like a ton of other folks. Can do everything I possibly need to do in C1 and Zoner....

They are raisin prices? Is there a shortage? My Raisin Bran hasn't gone up. Please show me where Adobe has raised the price for any product.

Adobe didn’t raise the price.

CS6 is fine.

We use C1Pro for images and Resolve (paid) for video.
Better and significantly cheaper long term.

The subscription model is far from brilliant. In chasing the large/corporate users, It penalizes those smaller users.

In the days of Creative Suites, I could choose which variant I wanted, and not pay for those applications I'd never use. The perpetual licence also meant that I could skip an upgrade if I felt that there were no benefits in the release. I'd usually upgrade the Production Bundle every couple of years. Now, with the subscription model, if I want the same capability as the Production Bundle, the costs have quadrupled - because where I would spent about £350 every two years, I am now forced to pay £670 every year.

And to say that there are loads of alternatives for me - Excuse me! I've been using Adobe products since 1990 and don't wish to be pushed out through corporate greed, although it may ultimately come to that .

From my perspective, it never seemed like subscriptions was for "chasing the large/corporate users". Around here, pros bought updates to Photoshop etc. as an expected business expense.
However, there were dozens of camera clubbers I knew who liked to brag they had the latest version of CS6, and how great its features were. When I asked how they could afford it, they always blushed and said something like "well, my computer guy put it on my laptop for me".
It seemed to me a large percentage of Photoshop users never paid for legitimate copies. Subscriptions changed that quite a bit.
Now the skinflints brag about how their budget software is "just as good".

I know people who bragged with a smile about their computer guy putting CS6 on their machines.

@onepointfour Yep. One of the reasons for the subscription model was it allowed Adobe to charge a lower price. Yes that's right it's a lower price despite all the online wailing to the contrary by the mathematically challenged.

Think about a person who never paid for PS or LR before. A pirate or new customer (potential pirate) $600 for PS? $300 for LR? or $10 a month for both. By lowering the cost of entry to less than most people spend per month on soda and snacks they eliminated the primary reason more people pirated PS than paid for it. The extreme cost of entry. If you always kept your PS and/or Lr up to date your cost didn't really do up much if at all and the people who were pirating now can afford to buy and a large chunk of them did judging by Adobe's adaption numbers. The only losers are the non profitable customers who didn't' update PS or Lr regularly and were still on like CS4 or earlier yet still expected full support. Customers Adobe has no problem losing.

However older version are not anymore (?) Available for download if you need them..

No. Adobe used to make most of their older software and their updates available to download. That's all vanished.

So if you haven't got archives or the original media, you're stuffed if you need a re-install.

Just because it isn't the latest version doesn't suddenly make great products like PS CS4, LR6, PP CS5 etc stop working. They remain important productive software for many of us.

And every 6 months ON1 brings out an "All New Version" that only costs $63.99... if you hurry and upgrade now. Or you can subscribe for the low low price of $129.99/yr and get all your updates for FREE! Oh and lets see... it doesn't even support 2 monitors, the raw conversion leaves a lot to be desired, its slow as molasses and feels like its been in beta for years. Sorry but when you combine LR/PS, ON1 doesn't even come close.

Why would anyone send a letter? All you have to do is go into your account and press the cancel button. Did you give them a "what for" in the letter? :)

You never owned the software. You owned a license to use it. Adobe changed its licenses from perpetual to time-limited.

Pokesfan, I read the text and studied the table. Versions 4, 5, and 6 are explicitly singled out even though they predate the release of the actual Creative Cloud product which started at 7.

Read Adobe's letter for yourself and study the table and tell me how you interpret it:

http://m2-page.mail.adobe.com/nl/jsp/m.jsp?c=%40bu56wWjGFWqNiWf5s2%2FMxbmAnO0io4xAEJR0%2BIX%2FxyM%3D

But you're right. The great thing about Lightroom 5, which is the only Adobe product I still use, is that it has no copy protection, doesn’t need to be authorized in order to run, is unaware of the cloud, and doesn’t talk to Adobe’s servers, so they can never shut it off remotely. It should keep working pretty much forever. BOO F'N HOO, SHANTANU!

And, luckily, I switched to Windows a year and a half ago, after using Macs for almost 30 years, so I don't have to worry about the macOS 10.15 time bomb.

lightroom 6 is 64 bit on window, they have 32bit also. window been 64bit for a long time now..

Leo, the macOS has been 64-bit since...gee, since Snow Leopard maybe? A long time. But it has continued to support 32-bit apps all this time. That's what's changing after Mojave. All 32-bit support is being dropped then.

Uh, $10 a month is NOT a lot of money, -nor is $20, -you probably spend more in a month on coffee. It's actually not a lot of money for two otherwise expensive (if you could still buy perpetual licenses) pieces of software, -PS & LR, that are some pretty sophisticated tools. And at $10, or $20/month you're always able to get the latest update and be current.

Arthur, for me it was less about the money than the high-handed diktat: pay or die. The sneaky "Oh that was just a trial balloon." No explanation, no easing into the change...no awareness of customer relations. Luckily there are options.

Can you please show me where the price hikes are?

Microsoft, Apple and other - at some point all - have to retire support for prior versions of their software. Or they clearly say we don’t guarantee it will work.

It really has to happen at some point.

Retiring support for an older version is one thing and NOT the same as ending availability.

All manufactures should make available their older versions. I often need to find an older version because the latest version does not work well with my hardware or OS, or because they put in a new feature I do not like (such as tracking/telemetry).

The problem is customers who don't need it for the reasons you do will expect support for it because it's still available. I got the email a few minutes ago - the email makes it sound like Adobe was licensing a component of the system from a third party and is no longer doing so. The terms of their license agreement, it sounds, like requires them to do this. So it may be out of their hands.

That possibility isn't that far off, Mark. In conjunction with the authorities, it could be determined that certain older models of vehicles are no longer "safe" or can't communicate with intelligent traffic control systems and are shut off.

@brycesteiner if you own a perpetual license, none of this applies to you. Read it again.

@sirhawkeye64, try Affinity Photo. I've switched from LR & PS to C1 & Affinity Photo. Won't ever look back.

I was basing it on if they went to $20 per month, which I'm sure will happen sooner than later. They know that big studios won't care, and that will pay for whatever loss they incur from the enthusiast community.

How does the spot removal and layers (if any) in Affinity compare? Those are the two biggest features that I'm looking for (as LR's spot removal isn't all that great, and I haven't tried C1 yet), and I do want to have layer support (yes I know C1 can do up to 20 adjustment layers or something).

For me, I don't use LR that much, and mostly rely on PS these days, so finding a suitable photo editor is important to me, one that can do those things mentioned above.

@sirhawkeye64,

My workflow is different from yours. I get most of my editing done with C1. I use Affinity Photo pretty much only for spot removal (or object removal) if necessary.

Spot removal is done with Affinity Photo's Inpainting Brush Tool. Results are as good as PS's Spot Healing Brush Tool. But when I need to remove a larger object from a picture, it somehow takes a bit longer than PS on my machine. Maybe Affinity Photo's not optimized for AMD Ryzen CPU, which I have.

I personally don't do layers much with Affinity Photo. So, I hope someone can chime in on how he/she feels about Affinity Photo's Layers.

Same comment I had - hopefully they can find a way to justify a $10 plan, preferably PS (and a $10 LR plan too). $20 is too much for me to justify.

2013: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!"
2014: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!"
2015: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!"
2016: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!"
2017: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!"
2018: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!"
2019: "They'll increase the price as soon as you subscribe!!

Sir, the $10 20GB PS+LR plan is still $10. Why would you only want PS for $15.

Source of your information junk

They charge $20 for 1TB Cloud plan. The 20GB Cloud plan is still $10.

I can see it possibly affecting people that want to stay on an older operating system or run plugins that are no longer supported. If you're hoping to stay with a version of MacOS that supports OpenGL or 32-bit apps this could cause you some problems in the near future.

I’m just trying to understand who needs more than one version on their computer? Like I completely understand needing to roll back to previous more stable version, I’ve done that, but multiple versions running alongside??

Many schools still have testing that uses terms, tools, and controls that go back several versions and until the state approved testing agency updates all of their stuff to at least the 2018 versions the schools still need the old ones there alongside new versions for other classes.

@Horshack

You surprise me Horshack - you're a bright guy.

In case you can think of a reason I've given one higher up the thread.

@RubberDials, The reason you posted sounds reasonable. I'm just not sure how much an issue that is in practice. I wouldn't expect the differences between most versions to be dramatic enough to invalidate or even materially complicate teaching of any particular version. And for versions jumps that do have dramatic changes in interface or functionality I would expect the teacher would want to update the coursework anyway to reflect those changes to keep their lessons up to date.

The problem we are witnessing here is an utter lack of reading comprehension skills in the DPR masses. People see the words "Adobe" in a headline and they go nuts. But if they were to READ the press release by Adobe, they would learn that you would have to be 1. A CC subscriber and 2. Wanting to download a version 2 versions back.
I mean, who does that? Is Photoshop CC v18 so dang good that people wish they could still download it?

Nah, just a bunch of bleating by people who never bother to read.

Sometime last year, I had to downgrade THREE versions of PS back, because of an Adobe introduced bug (which they never even acknowledged as fixed few months afterwards) in saving DNG previews inside ACR. Without the downgrade, I would not be able to work with DNGs (since I rely on seeing the edited DNG previews in other software). There you have it, I can't think of any more valid reason...

Hey, Apparently you can like your own post. I just clicked on it by accident lol but I'll never do it.

I just did it on my previous post for fun. Never again.