- Always up-to-date versions of Lightroom and Photoshop (no need to pay more to upgrade to Lightroom’s next major upgrade when it comes out!)
- Syncing to Lightroom mobile for the iPad and iPhone (and Android sometime this year)
- 2 GB of cloud storage
- A Behance.net pro account
Update/Clarification: You will not lose the Develop work you have done prior to your subscription expiring. If it does expire you will be locked out of doing additional Develop work, but you can create output that has your edits, you can reset your photo to undo your edits, you can refine them with the Quick Develop panel, and you can save them to XMP so that they are available in other programs that read this information (such as Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw.)
This is also the case if you get a free 30-day trial of Lightroom!
Adobe clearly has confidence that their Creative Cloud offering and Lightroom’s Develop editing tools are compelling enough that you will continue to subscribe.
Note that if instead of a subscription you have or purchase the perpetual-license stand-alone version rather than the Creative Cloud subscription you will continue to have access to all modules in the Lightroom version you purchased. Adobe has stated that they will continue to offer these perpetual-license stand-alone versions “indefinitely”.
Are you saying that Adobe is no longer going to offer stand alone versions of LR after this 5.5 issue?
No, Doug, Adobe has said they will continue to offer both the stand-alone and CC versions.
Anyone wanting to revert to an earlier perpetual-licensed version of Lightroom, eg 4.4, will have difficulties because the 5.5 catalogue is not backward compatible, unless I’ve missed something :-(
That is true, David.
I asked the question on Adobe”s CC forum regarding loosing the develop module if you choose not to renew subscription and they said that is false. You retain use of all the modules. So now I am so confused. I recently added my cs6 and LR5 to a new laptop and was told because the upgrade to cs6 from cs5 was from a download I had to use CC to install it. In so doing I am now on the trial of CC. Can you help clear this up for me?
I haven’t tried it myself, Jeri, but perhaps you can go into the Develop module and the photo will render, but you can’t continue to develop your photo. Here’s the Adobe blog post.
I have reread your question, Jeri – because you already have CS6 and LR5 as perpetual licenses, you will in fact continue to have access to them indefinitely. Once Lightroom 6 comes out and you get that through the Creative Cloud, if you stop subscribing, portions of that will lock.
I have not heard of needing to use CC to download CS6, so I can’t comment on that.
Laura,
The issue with discontinuing one’s LR subscription and then being denied the corrections you’ve already made is a big “gotcha” I did not know about! Sounds like another good reason to save your metadata changes to the file so you would not lose your work if you went to another raw editor (e.g. ACR in Photoshop or Elements). Thanks for sharing this info!
Kathy Eyster – where do I find out about saving changes to metadata. I plan on continuing my subscription but I also organize my digital scrap booking files and I am told it is best to keep info of keywords, etc. in metadata. Thanks for our post.
Claret, select your photos and do a Cmd/Ctl S. You can also go into Edit (PC) / Lightroom (Mac) > Catalog Settings, and on the Metadata tab check the box to automatically save changes to XMP for work going forward. (Then do a Ctl/Cmd-S to catch Lightroom up on your work thus far.)
This isn’t correct, Kathy. Your changes are preserved, you can reset your photo to undo them, and you can use Quick Develop to make tweaks and apply presets. You can also save the metadata out at any time by doing a Ctl/Cmd-S. You just can’t continue to develop the photo – which is pretty reasonable in my opinion, since in this scenario you’ve decided that Lightroom isn’t worth paying for. ;-)