Before we even went live with Grant Swinbourne on The Camera Life Podcast a few weeks ago, he dropped something into the pre-show chat that got the conversation going immediately.
He'd quit Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. After years of use. And he wasn't going back.
Grant is an Australian landscape, seascape and cityscape photographer, and the host of the Landscape Photography World podcast, where he's now recorded 245 interviews. He knows his software. So when someone with that background makes a deliberate switch, it's worth asking why.
We spent the better part of two hours talking it through on The Camera Life Podcast (EP164). Here's what came out of it.
Adobe nearly doubled the price. And the value just wasn't there.
The trigger was straightforward. Grant's Adobe subscription jumped from around $15 a month to about $24 Australian. Not catastrophic on its own, but when he actually looked at what that extra money was paying for, the answer was mostly AI features he had no interest in using.
AI noise reduction, AI selection tools, AI spot removal. Genuinely useful for some people. Not for Grant.
"The biggest reason was the doubling in subscription costs or almost doubling. I think it went from around about 15 Aussie dollars a month to about 24 Aussie dollars a month. And I was kind of like, seriously?"
He also made a sharper observation that resonated with a few people in the live chat. Adobe knows switching is painful, and he thinks they're counting on it. His words: "I think they're relying on that innate difficulty in moving away to retain their customer base."
So he went looking for an alternative instead of staying out of habit.
He landed on Affinity Photo. And it's free.
After looking at Capture One (solid, but more of a Lightroom replacement than a Photoshop one), GIMP (too arcane for his liking), and a few others, Grant landed on Affinity Photo, available at no cost through Canva. No subscription. One-off purchase if you want the paid tier, but the free version covers everything he needs.
The transition was smoother than he expected, for one simple reason.
"All of the adjustment layers are named exactly the same as they are in Photoshop. So the familiarity and the shift was a no brainer."
He still runs his NIK software plugins through Affinity. Still does luminosity masking, tonal masking, all of it. The astrophotography stacking tool is a bonus he wasn't expecting. The one thing missing is some of the AI automation, but given how meticulous he is about getting things right in the field, he finds he needs it less than he thought.
His advice to anyone considering the switch: "If you're sick and tired of Adobe and the subscription model, take a good look around because there are alternatives. The question is, what are you prepared to pay and what compromises you're prepared to make."
He was quick to point out he's not pushing Affinity on anyone. It works for his workflow. Whether it suits yours depends on how you work.
You don't need Lightroom to manage 12 terabytes of images.
One of the questions that came in from the live chat was about the Lightroom catalogue. It's the thing that keeps a lot of people stuck, because once you've built a catalogue with years of edits attached to it, leaving feels impossible.
Grant's perspective is a useful one, though he acknowledges it won't suit everyone. He's never used Lightroom's cataloguing at all. His system is Windows folders, organised by location and date. Twelve terabytes of images, all findable in seconds.
"I know where I've been, I know when I've been there. If I'm looking for a specific location in 2022, I can go straight to that folder and get what I need."
If you're already deep in a Lightroom catalogue, this probably won't solve your problem. But if you've been building one out of habit rather than necessity, it might be worth asking whether you actually need it.
Retiring at 57 changed what he photographs. And how it feels.
Grant retired from a 30-year IT career in 2021, at 57. He'd already started the podcast. He was already selling prints. The leap wasn't as dramatic as it might look from the outside, but the effect on his photography was real.
"There's a lot more, for me anyway, a lot more emotional component to my imagery now than there was probably before I retired."
He's more intentional now. He's working on a long-term texture project, three or four years in, exploring rock and water textures through landscape and drone photography. He's thinking about building a body of work rather than collecting images. Photography has shifted from being stress relief after a big week at work to being the whole point.
Not everyone can walk away from a career at 57. Grant was careful to say that the financial cushion matters, and that getting good tax and superannuation advice before making that call is worth doing properly. But for him, with the groundwork already laid, it wasn't a hard decision.
After 245 interviews, here's what the best landscape photographers have in common.
This was one of the most interesting parts of the conversation. Grant has interviewed 245 landscape photographers on his podcast. That's a lot of data points.
The most consistent pattern he's seen: photographers who start with landscapes almost always begin by chasing the biggest, most dramatic scenes they can find. The grand vistas, the famous spots, the wide-angle everything. Over time, the best of them make a shift. They go smaller. More intimate. More personal.
"A lot of photographers I've spoken to start out with that broader view. You know, I want to go to the biggest vistas I can find. And then they work their way down to, okay, I'm gonna take a patch of stone, or a piece of creek that is a foot and a half wide."
Part of it is avoiding the over-photographed. It's genuinely hard to find a fresh angle at a location that thousands of photographers visit every year. But it's also about artistic growth. When you stop trying to document what's in front of you and start asking what you actually want to say, the work changes.
The one quality Grant keeps seeing in the photographers who make that shift: they're all trying to make something that's theirs. Unique not because they found a location nobody else has been to, but because they approached it differently.
"When you make it your own, that's when it's become art. It is really what makes it art: the fact that you have made it your own, and it's something that nobody else is actually doing or thinking about doing."
Print your work. Seriously.
Grant prints a personal photo book every year. A mix of family shots, phone snaps and portfolio work. Not to sell. Just to have a physical object in his hands that contains the year.
"I don't think a lot of photography is done until it's in hard copy, personally."
He also makes test prints on his home printer before anything goes to a lab. It's part of his process. For photographers who don't own a printer, his suggestion was simple: go to Kmart or Big W, stick a USB in the machine, and print an 8x10. A few dollars. It changes how you see your own work.
Seeing an image at full size on paper is not the same as watching it scroll past on a screen. Most of us know this, and most of us don't do anything about it.
The full conversation is worth your time.
There's a lot more in EP164 that didn't make it into this article. Grant's photography origin story (his father's naval slides, a pinhole camera at age 10, a darkroom at high school). The three times saltwater killed his Canon 6D Mark II. His upcoming trip to Borneo. An extended conversation about whether Instagram is worth it anymore for serious photographers.
You can find it on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Grant's own podcast, Landscape Photography World, is at grantswinburnephotography.com.
