When I retired and decided to celebrate by taking a world cruise, I wanted to share pictures and video with friends and family during the 4 1/2-month cruise. I started this blog, but I also needed a laptop computer powerful enough to process these pictures and video, and the software to do that processing.

At the time I bought the Adobe software suite. Rather that selling you their software, Adobe leases it to you – either monthly or yearly. Due to how Adobe packages their software, you need the full suite to get access to their photography (Photoshop and Lightroom) and video (Premiere) software. That made sense in 2019, but I’ve never spent more than 10 weeks cruising in a year ever since, and the price of the “full suite” has slowly grown to $60/month ($720/year). Because I’ve never used more than four of their almost 30 software tools, in 2023 I decided the rent was not worth it and bought the Photoshop and Premiere “elements” – which are stand-alone, buy-once reduced-capability versions.

I used these during my Antarctic trip, and I was not satisfied. I can replicate most of what I did with the full version of the software, but my workflow was greatly impacted. In addition, I was having issues dealing with the white snow/ice landscape combined with the white/light blue of the sky. Many of my landscape pictures did not meet my (admittedly low) standards.

Now that I’m back home, I’ve re-enabled my Adobe rent, but this time only for the photography batch, which is only $20/month. I’ll keep the Premiere Elements package for video editing, as that is a low priority for me during my trips.

In addition, my friend Doug hated my Antarctica pictures so much wanted to help and bought me a series of classes and Photoshop add-ons from William Patino which are very well put together. I’ve already learned a bunch and will re-do many of my photos when I put together a “best of” of the trip. Thanks, Doug!