Adobe sucks. There I said it. That’s all folks. See you Friday…

Just kidding — about that being it. But the truth is, Adobe sucks. As a creative, I hate their terms of service, I hate their pricing model. Their user experience is clunky, bloated, and their generative AI is mid at best.

Meanwhile, they are training their models on your unreleased work and laughing all the way to the bank. They may not come out and blatantly say it, but the terms of service gives them access to do so.

I know that I’m not alone amongst creatives that feel this sentiment — however, the Adobe suite can be a set of golden handcuffs for designers, photographers, and creatives.

For designers, Photoshop and Illustrator are the Pro Tools of their respective industry, but the difference being that up until now there hasn’t been a true competitor that could replace the dynamic duo of graphic softwares. Affinity is getting closer, but still not quite feature-rich enough for heavy design workloads.

But, what do I know? I’m a photographer & a musician, not a graphic designer.

What I do know is that in my world, Lightroom still remains the king. But what if I told you there was another tool that could potentially replace your Adobe photography suite subscription for significantly less money?

No, not Capture One, though I’ve heard great things…

Photomator.

You may have seen this name popping up on social media over the last few months. Photomator is a photo editing application for MacOS that actually made me leave Lightroom and cancel my Adobe subscription almost immediately after trying it out.

Windows users, unfortunately this one is not going to be for you. I’m sorry. But! If you’re on the fence about switching to the dark side, read on 😉

Photomator is fast, intuitive, & expands on what you already expect from MacOS. So much so that Apple recently acquired it (more on that later). To me, it reminds me of the Photos app on MacOS, but with a pro level editing suite attached. The UI is also somewhat reminiscent of the new Lightroom, and provides most of the same features that Lightroom offers, such as subject, sky, background masking, color range masking, all of the adjustment sliders you can ask for, luminance and rgb curves, and more.

Compared to Lightroom, I find my editing workflow increased at least 10x in productivity, just by how responsive it is, and all of this for just 40/year! Yep, that’s right. You heard correctly. 2 months of a photography subscription from Adobe gets you a whole year with

Recently, Photomator & it’s graphic design counterpart, Pixelmator were acquired by Apple. This has left fans a bit uneasy. Apple does not have a great track record when it comes to professional photo apps. They had Aperture, which I’ve never used, but have heard great things from more seasoned photographers than I — but then Apple canned it. It is unclear what Apple intends to do with Photomator, but I have hope.

Apple has seen massive success with Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, and most recently, both of these software suites on iPad (which I do enjoy!). I think that Apple has a unique opportunity to add a truly great photo editing software to the mix of professional software offerings, and finally take on Adobe. The software being native to Apple products, along with Apple’s engineering philosophies will allow them to innovate faster than the bloated monstrosity of a competitor that Adobe is, and potentially see a major shift in

BUT, that is if Apple decides to start focusing on the right things when it comes to software, AI, etc. which is a whole other rant for another day. We all saw the flop that is Apple Intelligence, which kills me to say as an Apple fanboy.

In the meantime, I’m happily using Photomator and not giving my money to Adobe. I have all of the features I need to edit my work, all while keeping my sanity.

Did you make the switch from Adobe products yet? Reply and let me know.

Have a great day, and I’ll see you Friday for the WPR.

Build Stuff. Break Stuff. Have Fun.

Paps.