8 Steps for Quitting Adobe, and the 2 Features That Are Hardest to Replace

If you've opened a Lightroom catalog nearly every day for a decade, canceling your Adobe subscription can feel like moving out of a house you've lived in for years. More people are weighing that move now. Rising plan prices, a 2024 federal lawsuit over Adobe's cancellation practices, and a growing stack of generative AI tools in Photoshop and Lightroom have all added to the pressure.

Breaking a habit that old works better with a plan than with a burst of frustration. With his last Adobe subscription about two weeks from expiring, Omar Gonzalez, a portrait and event photographer in the New York and New Jersey area, lays out the eight steps he used to leave Adobe after decades as a paying customer. He used to pay $79 per Lightroom upgrade, and by his count he has spent more than $1,000 since moving to the subscription. His first step was a hard cancel date. A year earlier, he canceled his monthly plan and bought a single one-year subscription, which gave him a fixed day when the software would simply stop working. Quitting on impulse, he warns, leaves you overwhelmed by a new program all at once, while a deadline gives you months to learn it as the old software keeps working.

The second step looks like dating. You keep using Lightroom and Photoshop while you try other editors on the side, and you see what fits. For Gonzalez, that turned out to be Capture One. To replace Photoshop, he started learning Affinity on the side, though lately he has been using PhotoCraft, a free Photoshop-style editor he plans to cover in a separate video.

The third step is reminding yourself why you're doing this. He put up a sticky note with his reasons: decades of loyalty with no long-term perks, software that was often buggy and crashed, and a baseball game where the whole ballpark seemed covered in Adobe signs. The fourth was realizing that the alternatives can do the job, though your mileage will vary if you use the whole suite. Capture One did almost everything he relied on Lightroom for, with two exceptions, and he finds its color and sharpness better than Lightroom's. He paid for it himself, and the video isn't sponsored. Capture One still sells a license you can own outright alongside its subscription. The step he didn't see coming was how much he'd enjoy learning again. He took Capture One's classes, watched its live streams, and found that editing felt exciting in a way it hadn't for years. If your workflow feels stale, that may be the most useful part of the whole process.

He calls the sixth step "the revolution is here." He sees people starting to use AI to push back against the AI being forced on them, though he admits the ethics of that are still cloudy for him. The seventh is to act as if Adobe never existed, because people adapt when something is gone. When he cut all his subscription services, library DVDs and more reading filled the gap.

The field of alternatives looks very different from 2017, when Adobe announced that Lightroom 6 would be its last standalone version. Canva bought Serif in 2024 and, in late 2025, relaunched Affinity as a single free app that combines what used to be Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher. DxO PhotoLab and ON1 Photo RAW still sell licenses you can own outright. Darktable and RawTherapee are free and open source. With that many options, your Lightroom catalog is often a bigger obstacle than the money. Years of edits, keywords, ratings, and collections live inside its database, and Capture One can import a Lightroom catalog, though some adjustments won't translate exactly.

His eighth step is patience, because even with a smooth switch, there are two things he'll miss, and the first one changes how he shoots. He admits he'd gotten lazy about leaving light stands in the frame, knowing generative AI in Photoshop would erase them in seconds. Without it, he's going back to fixing problems on location. That means repositioning to get a stop sign out of the shot, zooming in slightly to crop out a stand leg, and doing any remaining cleanup the slower, pixel-based way he used before AI fill existed. It takes more time, and he hopes the alternatives will catch up.

The second, which he'll miss most, is client delivery. From Lightroom, he used a SmugMug publish service, so any change he made reached the client's gallery with one click. Capture One has a publishing plug-in, but it doesn't publish to the proper folders and hasn't been working for him, so he now exports JPEGs and imports them as an extra step. Since he doesn't import a whole gallery at once, his galleries grow over the course of a week, which he calls a hassle that has tested his patience more than anything else.

If you can write software, he has a request at the end of the video: build a SmugMug publish service for Capture One.