Adobe heralds subscription-only future for Photoshop and Creative Suite

Adobe should add the following pricing sheme:

REALLY cheap price for hobbyist using the software only a couple of days a month (and not having to pay during longer breaks/holidays).

Then EVERYBODY would be happy:
- Hobbyists: cheap, if you don't do much or take breaks from using it.
- Large companies: expensive but always the newest stuff
- Adobe: No incentive for pirating, popularity, money

Seems pretty obvious to me. What about you? What about Adobe?

I think outrage is proportional to the amount of the subscription fee. With Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium you can install all (seven) Microsoft Office applications on up to five computers, for a total subscription fee of $9.99/month or $99.99/year.

Adobe is offering a single app one year subscription for $9.99 if renewed by July 31, 2013. They are taking their marketing cues from the broadband companies and offering sweet one year deals. Thereafter, the price will be anywhere from $19.99 to $49.99 depending on the app(s) you desire.

OR, you can just say no.

Adobe has already abandoned loyal users in the past by forcing them to upgrade to get the latest ACR and current camera/lens support for new products.

OR, you can use third party RAW editors.

Just say no to Adobe and don't believe for one moment without them you will never be able to edit your work in a sophisticated manner again.

I have to add my vote to those who want to use Photoshop without having to be tethered to the cloud.

I have to vote a thumbs down on this decision by Adobe.

Seriously, there is not much to upgrade anyway.

The engineering software I use for work requires an annual $1,500 maintenance fee. While I dislike the recurring fee, I must use this specific software for my work. Plus, the updates are regular and substantial. Also, if I ever stop subscribing, my software will still continue to function indefinitely. Just without access to updates.

Photoshop on the other hand is just one program in a crowd of competent and competitive programs. Photoshop CS6 will be my last purchase from Adobe, and that purchase was solely for the ACR updates. Even with the intro discount, the new cloud pricing scheme will cost me far more on a yearly basis, while reducing my capabilities. Since I live in a rural area with slow internet and also work in areas with no internet, cloud computing is not a viable option.

Also vote here: http://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model

Headline should have read "Adobe heralds end of Photoshop as we know it"

VOTE WITH YOUR MONEY...

don´t buy adobe products... there are plenty of other products out there.

NUKE for example is a fantastic video app.

the Creative Cloud graphic look like the mothership from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"

apt!

I wonder where the "evangelists" stand on this? There are lots of people who make part or all of their living explaining Adobe's user-friendly/missing manual features.

Fine if you live somewhere with a good internet connection. At home I would consider cloud based services, I have a reliable 60mb connection. When I am at a friends house in the English countryside, where the interconnection is very slow about 1.5mb download and 100k upload, it would not be a viable way to work due to time taken to upload an image. Adobe how will you support CS users with slow internet connections?

Our issue with all this isn't so much the regular need for web connectivity; it's the possibility of taking away the option of running a previous version. Our experience has been that the latest release isn't always the greatest, and we don't deploy software we've not first tested -- meaning we don't update when the vendor releases a new version, we update when we know the new version works OK in our environment.

Do Adobe want the latest version running on all their subscribers' machines? If so, it's not that kind of party. We'll find another solution.

A significant and major issue in all of this is the loss of trust in Adobe. What if they suddenly move Lightroom to the monthly payment model only and Elements and other remaining software. I am afraid that this high handed autocratic money grabbing approach has totally alienated me and I have lost all trust in Adobe. Their assurances are worth nothing as just a few months ago they announced an upgrade regime where prices varied according to the product one was upgrading from, and now, quite arbitrarily and without notice, they have closed this door.

Once bitten, twice shy. I hope that competitors will quickly see the opportunity and fill these obvious gaps as there are many millions of users who simply cannot afford to, or will not, pay $600 plus tax, plus obvious future price increases per year.

This sounds very familiar. I bought a programming suite from Microsoft in 2005. MS decided to change to a subscription model. Typical MS bullying and greed. All they had to do is change some DLL's and depricate parts of the language going forward and my code was possibly obsoleted and incompatible with future operating systems. The subscriptions were up to $2600.00 a year. Yes the developers howled!!! But it did no good. I never bought another MS developer tool or a Windows PC. It sent me to APPLE (they deliver their entire sotftware development suite for free, XCODE).

Well look at the profitability of MS and APPLE over the last 8 yrs and you can guess that this is a big mistake for ADOBE, plus their horrid EULA.

MS's subscription model was contributory to the shift to APPLE software development (APP Store) and huge profits. Software sells computers. Not the other way around.

I will not be using ADOBE Photoshop. It's too easy to live without it.
Just my 2 cents.

Gary

Adobe has just created a new verb: That picture looks like it's been "Gimped".

Here's the rub for all of you arguing there's value in this,you don't get to stop paying once you've reached a certain dollar value. You just keep on paying for the latest and greatest, whether you need it, want it, or can afford it. That's great if you are a business with unlimited income, but for the home user, it's often unsustainable. And when you stop paying, you get nothing to show for what you've paid in!

The thing is that most people don't need most new features, hence have no reason to upgrade. Once they reach near saturation point in the market that is willing to pay not pirate, it is really hard to generate more revenue.

So what do you do if your bonus is on the line?
Punish your users!
Yay!

Seems like the start of a downward spiral.

of course the real reason for the cloud is that photoshop is one of the most pirated programs in history. I've located illegal copies of every release since PS3, which I found in Hong Kong in the early 90's.

I can see what an ingenious idea this is... very smart Adobe! You're scaring everybody with this Cloud apocalypse so that people will begin to think maybe purchasing CS6 is last PS version they'll ever use, thus skyrocketing the sales of CS6! That's quite brilliant... I'm taking notes.

congratulations are in order for Abobe's competitors!!!
holy cow!!! are the competitors going to be able to count the cash that is going to be coming in?

And, for the record, I've been using Photoshop since version 3, and was with Aldus Pagemaker before Adobe bought them and transformed it into InDesign...and yes, Illustrator sucks...

Maybe this will work out for Adobe, but it won't get my continued patronage. I have never upgraded every 18 months because the updates aren't typically significant for the work I do, so a subscription actually will cost me MORE money than an outright purchase amortized over 24-36 months. I'll replace InDesign with QuarkXPress (thank goodness they managed to persevere) or whatever the best option is at the time I need new capabilities. Photoshop? Hardly use it anymore, but there are enough image editing programs out there to handle what I do use it for. Illustrator has always sucked (too bad Adobe bought Macromedia to kill Freehand, which was a far superior illustration software). And if Lightroom goes down the same road at some point, I've got Aperture and Capture One Pro. The integration of the Creative Suite has been convenient and mostly efficient this last decade, but its not so great that I'll have this subscription service forced down my throat. Cya, Adobe!!

This totally sucks...so, you're going to charge me while I learn to USE the software as well? This is going to backfire on them BIGTIME...

I have been using Adobe Photoshop for many years as a standalone. I update each time a new version is issued. I will not be forced to subscribe to software and services I do not need in order to get the latest version of Photoshop. I will use CS6 until competing software comes along that better meets my needs, I will not subscribe to Photoshop CC. I currently also use LRoom 4, but may switch back to Aperture, simply because I do not want to continue to do business with Adobe.

No desire to be politically correct here - I live in the 3rd world, where both the 'cloud' and even electricity are less than reliable. Is Adobe so smug and US centric that they're going to ignore most of the rest of the world?

This is also a problem for digital archivists- which is to say its a problem for ALL OF US.

You have a project created in in ( Photoshop as it appeared at 11:37am EST on June 17, 2013 )

Now its 2037, after Adobe is bought by Novell, via an astonishing turnaround by CEO Bob Flynn, is now the leader in everything IT, and the re branded WordPerfect Creative Sweet-O-Rama-Cloudy-Cloud-Cloud 2037 Edition PhotoShop How the heck will you open any of your projects?

It really does not matter as to what the user wants, adobe and Microsoft will be shoving this cloud thing up our butts no matter if we like it or not. What I do not like is that there are times in the field that I need to do Photo Shop and do not have an Internet connection. In this case PS will be useless for me.

There is no choice as they are not asking!

Bye bye Adobe. I guess CS6 is the end of the road for me and will use it until it can no longer serve my needs. Until then, hopefully there will be other options available for one-off purchase solutions by other companies.

I don't use the CS enough professionally to warrant subscribing monthly. I might use ID and Acrobat Pro many times a year and IL a few times a year. Photoshop is the most-used. But, unless I need something special, I use PS less and less because LR can handle photo tweaking well enough.

SO...

They can count me (other others like me, probably) out of their future.

You can't convince me the restructuring is nothing more than a way to increase profits. And as far as pirating goes, I would imagine there's no way to stop that anyway, so, please, quit with the BS excuses.

The only question I have now will be to watch and see if someone else will step in and take away part of their base.

Of course my CS6 would be fine for quite a long time, though without the new features. I would need to upgrade when I buy a new camera in future, one where CS6 does not support the RAW format.

If you own CS3 or a more recent version, it's $10 per month for Photoshop CC.

Use the dropdown menu at https://creative.adobe.com/plans?plan=single
and select Requires CS3+ Purchase. (This means you own CS3 or a newer version of CS)

Then, it is $10 per month not $20.

I am not thrilled to pay $10 per month ... although in the long run it may be cheaper than paying $700 for each new version of CS every couple of years.
--

And we will be locked out our expensive plug-ins....this is a terrible situation.

the thing is, no other software will do ALL the things photoshop can do. But, lets not forget that 99 percent of people out there doesn't even use even half the features of photoshop.

Other alternatives would work well for most people.

Just one more reason to stay far away from Adobe products (except - perhaps - the free ones). And as far as LR goes, it's only a question of 'when', not 'whether' Adobe does the same with it.

With Lr4, Adobe set down their price, attracting amateur users like me. I invested quite a bit of work in importing, sorting, polishing all my pictures into the Lr database. This, I did on trust, that Adobe would support this platform, under conditions comparable to those previously offered.

This trust is now broken, and I feel I have been roundly cheated. Lr was a great product, but the future will be Darktable, Aftershot or Aperture. Adobe produces many more brilliant software tools for other applications, I vow never again to put a cent into them either.

Hard to believe they would do such a tragic mistake!

So why exactly would I want to convert my RAW files into DNGs?
Way too dangerous, folks.

I feel bad for 3rd party software/vendors that piggyback of the creative suite. This has to impact them negatively as well. I hope the companies that create action sets or filters start supporting other photo editing software such as GIMP or Corel. Looking up Gimp tutorials now :) Last purchase for Adobe products for me!

One word: GIMP -- http://www.gimp.org/
Ok, maybe one more: CinePaint -- http://www.cinepaint.org/
Both are fully free and work very well.

The MOST stupidest idea there is!
I pay for my CSx, I like it the way it is.
Too bad I have spent the time to learn it and like.
And also unfortunate for me, I have far too many plug-ins I like.
I will NEVER go to cloud crap for ANY app, from ANYone!
ADOBE - YOU SUCK FOR THIS !!
This is EXTORTION !!

Adobe thinks that if you are a professional you 'need' Photoshop to do your job. That is a big mistake. As a professional you can work on any piece of software that has the basics, as like a painter can still make a great painting with a different brush. If you have talent you can work on anything and are not depended on anything else besides your talent. Sure, we are used to work with product A, now we have to get used to product B, so what? You need to be a complete imbecile if you ever going to pay for their cloud option. Serious, who is going to do that???

This is what happens when everyone is using pirated copies.

Persistence pays.

Okay. I caved. Then they caved. (For those interested). I still had Photoshop vers 5, and panicked about being left behind, because all upgrades (except the cloud) disappeared from Adobe website. So I contacted Adobe via their website chat. I insisted I wanted to upgrade to vers 6. First they told me "we don't have real software anymore", but I insisted. I mentioned EBay and cheap. And after some time the rep caved and gave me the download link for a vers 6 upgrade.

Of course I had to buy it through my Canadian bank acct, as it would have cost me double if I used by Australian bank account (go figure). I purchased from downunder. (another example of how they rip us off. The Au$ is worth heaps more than the Ca$)

So I caved, but now I am set up for some time to come. I have an investment in plugins, which will work for some years in CS6. No cloud BS for me in the foreseeable future!

So hang in there, & talk to Adobe. They've reversed their upgrade travesty before.

I recently bought a copy of CS6 with a view to skip the next version but consider future version's depending on what features are offered. I'm not a professional and I can't afford or justify constant upgrade's.

Disappointed in Adobe's approach. CC is likely to be too expensive for me.
Whilst this is not an immediate problem for me I hope Adobe listens to the negative feedback and restores customer choice.

If not I'll be forced to look elsewhere for my software in the future.

I just checked the pricing,
Single app $19.99 or if in UK £17.58 a month.
Existing CS customers $29.99 or £27.34 if in the UK.

The price differential between the US / UK is massive !!!!

Pretty soon we'll be back to the mainframe model, all our software will be in the cloud and we will have something like "dumb" terminals as an interface.

This is progress?