Originally posted by gatorguy Thanks for the input Rob. My thoughts on the subscription route are once committed I'd be pretty much stuck. Without an active license there can be issues accessing your own content if I've understood user comments correctly. I have an active Adobe CS6 license so ready access to Photoshop should I need it for some specific task. My interest in LR was as a non-destructive editing container and organizing library. Currently there's almost no difference between the subscription and standalone versions so feature-wise it doesn't look like I'll be missing out and LR6 standalone was available to me at a slight discount, about 14 months worth of subscription payments. On top of that Adobe has been darn slow at making any major upgrades to LR since they began the subscription program as far as I can tell.
I've been pretty happy with many of the Nik plugins and combined LR and the supposedly better (and faster) RAW batch processing and noise reduction of OpticsPro Elite11 it seems like a good choice, but that's why I asked here. My total expense will come to about $290 one-time, or 29 months of subscription payments if I had opted for CC. But it should give me better results than CC alone shouldn't it? Is there another way of integrating OpticsPro and maybe Nik with a different cataloging program and avoid LR altogether?
Actually, using Lr for free after a subscription ends is pretty sweet. You only lose Develop and Map modules; all the organizational stuff is still there. I think even Quick Develop. Probably not new RAW converters though. And your files aren't ever inaccessible; Lr uses a database to store metadata edits and adjustments, but you can write metadata to files, so all your keywording, captions, geolocation, etc is always there. In short, there is no way you'd lose access to your own content.
With the standalone you lose Photoshop. And Lr has been making upgrades; they have added Pentax pixel shift support, perspective and haze tools that are a match for what DxO has, HDR merging in Lr, synching raw to mobile devices via Lr Mobile, etc.
I also have Optics Pro, and they upgrade pretty regularly, but no pixel shift support for Pentax. So in that sense they're behind Lr. And I'd say paid upgrades seem to come within say 18 months, so in that 29 mo window you might have to pay another $70 or so if you wanna stay current.
But it's really Ps that makes the CC plan an excellent deal.
In any case, as I said try the trial and just keep using it free and see how far that takes you. Free is nice.