Apple Aperture — Options?

I’m currently still using Aperture. It’s a good program but I feel it’s only a matter of time till I upgrade to the next OS and it won’t work anymore. That’s kind of how Apple works. So the question is should I be looking to convert over to something else and if so, what? I’m not fond of the subscription model that Adobe has adopted. As I have an old version of Photoshop, I suspect eventually I’ll have the same problem with that.

 

Any advice?

I used to use Aperture exclusively. I still don’t think there’s anything quite as good. LR has some serious annoyances, like playing poorly with cloud services aside from Adobe’s own and filling hard drives with local caches of video files (a bug that’s been around for years that they don’t fix). Capture One is great but expensive. On1 is nice, they’re developing it quickly and its sidecar system if great if you move between computers but it still feels slow.

Who makes Capture One? I'm not THAT sophisticated a user, but I want more than the Photos app on my Mac. I have some photoshop skill and really mostly do exposure variation, some sharpening, levels, saturation changes, etc. Aperture is pretty easy to use but I failed to recon with Apple wanting to keep maintaining it. I tried Lightroom before deciding on Aperture but I liked that better. Now I don't think Lightroom is subscription yet, but I kind of don't want to take the risk now. I'd almost rather a poorer solution than an Adobe solution. Ironic really when I think of all the Photoshops I bought over the years till they wanted to charge me a yearly subscription (and other Adobe stuff too).

 

And trying to convert over to anything is going to be a pretty complicated thing. I expect to lose all my modifications to images (the non destructive ones).

Just watched a 3 men and an elephant video on YouTube. The guy has an arresting voice but I sometimes have a problem parsing the acronyms. Anyway, he said he was trying to convert to Capture One because he didn’t like the subscription model for Adobe either. Now I’d feel differently if it was my choice to buy or subscribe. But being forced kind of goes against the grain. It would be different if the price was low, but it’s not.

 

I guess I’ll investigate Capture One and run Aperture into the ground in the meantime. See this is why monopolies are bad. Adobe doesn’t quite have a monopoly, but it seems the next best thing and I suspect they wouldn’t be doing it if they had real competition.