Adobe heralds subscription-only future for Photoshop and Creative Suite

Yes, STILL available...

You know even though I love GIMP its been a hard switch from using PS 7 from 2002 which is still more then enough to process my photos.

Corel will probably get the numbers from the 2013 Adobe exedus.

QuarterToDoom

I don't doubt you. Switching any software is hard, because we're used to using certain things. At first you only see what you can't do, because you're looking for it. What you don't see is what you CAN do, because you don't know what to look for.

I primarily use gimp, and I'm kind of stupid when I use Photoshop. I can figure out how to get things done in Photoshop, but I don't know where everything is. Trust me, coming from the other side, Photoshop seems very counterintuitive. It's just what we're used to.

Same thing when I switched from Windows to Linux in 2001 for reasons of stability in the OS. Using Linux was hard for me for a couple of years. But you find things out. Now Linux is faster and easier for me in every way than using Windows. You have to put your time in.

You're right! The Telecom axed the flatrate for internet broadband and you must pay extra for the increase usage from now on. The announcement came a couple of days ago.

It would appear that you've not read my comment. I said

"I see a time when you won't even have a computer in your house, you'll have a dummy terminal and everything will be up on a cloud..."

BY the way this is already happening in the corporate world. We dumped all of the desktop/laptops for Citrix workstations. COming to a home near you sooner than you think.

Yes, looks like it

But I'll need to pay LOTS of money. I am using CS2 now and I am happy with it. With the subscription I'll be paying and paying and paying. I was going to upgrade to CS7... But that won't happen of course...

If I am not mistaken GIMP opens PS file format. So in case you stop renting PS you still can continue using your files with GIMP. Anybody if there is a SW which opens Premiere projects ?

No thank you, Adobe! (And I go back to the Photoshop 2.0 days!) Cloud administration isn't foolproof, either. Last year a storm knocked off Amazon and other major Internet retailers and cloud-services providers! Imagine being on a deadline and having no recourse? I also feel that this is not an environmentally sound practice. That is because you are taking a product that should run locally and turning the customer's own equipment into a terminal, with a giant server farm now an add-on necessity. Server farms are proliferating in cold/cool-weather regions of the world — giant complexes larger than a football field. The massive heat outflow requires constant environmental controls (hydroelectric among other forms). Adding a server farm into the mix for the sake of facilitating software over the Internet invites another $middleman$ to the table to boot. I don't want to be stripped of local control, dependent on a working cloud, a working Internet connection and others' security measures!

But remember this - when you upgrade your camera body you get marked improvement in performance and experience. The technology curve for camera bodies/sensors/processing engines is still quite steep, whereas it mostly leveled out a few years back for image post processing software.

When I stopped paying for my camera, it still recorded images. It's not a "cloud" camera where it evaporates into thin air the instant I stop paying for it.

Adobe "upgrades" don't justify the costs for most of us, read through the comments to see the pattern of clients skipping several releases. The ACR plug-in is probably the best hook they have to get more "fish" and even that is starting to wear thin.

Marques, you're making up a hypothetical silly user who spends silly money on silly camera upgrades, but hypothetically complains about the CC pricing. In order to ... what? Convince us that "most" of the people complaining are doing the thing you made up?

Yes, I'm sure "that guy" exists who replaces his DSLR every version and today is complaining about the CC price. But that's not most of us. My 30D still works just fine, and I'm still using it just fine. With my 17-55 lens and 580EX, that's about $3,000 in hardware that's worked great for ~5 years and will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

In that same time, under the new plan, I'd have spent the same amount on CC, and I'd still have to be paying or the software I'd spent $3000 on would stop working, whereas my actual Adobe purchases in that time have been less than $1000. That's a real, not hypothetical, example.

To Marques: The difference is - you own your camera bodies no matter how many upgrades you go through. You own NOTHING no matter how long you RENT from Adobe.

LOL having to continually buy film and pay for development is a subscription in a way too.

Explain, please. That has NEVER happened to me. If you save in a format like jpeg for example, you can choose the level of quality from 1-100%, just as in Photoshop. Absolutely, positively, zero difference.

Please post the exact instructions for how you save a file that comes out poorer quality than Photoshop.

EDIT: A jpeg file is a jpeg file, it meets a standard, and can even be opened up in programs like Matlab and Octave, so that the matrix can be examined pixel for pixel. How does Gimp mess this up? Again, is this your experience, are you repeating something you heard, or is this a veiled Adobe plug?

If people started sending in $50 donations to support the development of GIMP instead of spending money on upgrading PS - GIMP would probably become every bit as good as PS in no time.

@ bobbarber
This is my personal experience. I made a comparison some time ago between GIMP and PS CS2. I need images for the web and they need to be optimized in size. I work with photos which are saved in jpeg and with artwork, which I save in PNG8. The workflow in GIMP is by far not as smooth as in PS. E.g. you do not get a preview that when you choose your quality settings how your file will look like. And when working with PNG / GIF ( indexed ) you have no say how many colors you want to use. For many line art 4 ... 16 colors is very sufficient, GIMP seems to always use 256, which bumps up the file size significantly. If you know of a plug in for GIMP that has similar features as "Save for web" for PS, or any other way to have these features in GIMP, I am very interested. Please let me know.
As about JPEG, I am no programmer, but I noticed that there are many different ways to encode your image to JPEG, which result in different quality at same file size.

Hubert, thanks for the explanation.

I am by no means an expert on photo processing software either. It sounds to me what you are describing is more a question of the defaults for the web that Adobe chooses. The same defaults could be chosen in Gimp, but it would take experimentation to find what "save for web" means in Adobe.

Your complaint about not getting a preview with different quality settings in Gimp is valid. That issue doesn't come up with me because I almost always save in highest quality. I save a lot in .xcf, gimp's format, because all of my layers are saved, and I sometimes have a LOT of layers in an image. When I save to poor quality, it's usually for email purposes, so I'm not nitpicking. I just go with 50% for web quality jpegs, and downscale the file.

I suspect that for 99% of the users on these forums, gimp would provide much, much more functionality than they would ever need, though. Paying for Photoshop for those people is like buying a D800 for 4x6 prints.

Hubert,

I'm a Linux user. Gimp DOES have lens correction. I use an elemental filter, which works well enough for me. However, most of the lenses that I use don't need a lot of correction. An example is the Olympus 11-22 f2.8.

There are more sophisticated tools available, for known lens profiles. Gimp itself has a plugin to use the lens profiles, if I'm not mistaken, but that particular plugin is not installed on my computer. The database of lens profiles IS installed on my computer; it came with the distribution, and can be added to just by modifying a text file. Those profiles can also be used with software like Hugin, which I have done, and it works quite well.

So what does the DPR-Staff think about all these negative comments here? What are your thoughts on this CC issue?

Yikes. I did not thought of that. Just wanted to start using Adobe Premiere. I will need to think this over again. You would be able to load the original files with other editors and you would be wise to export your complete project in any standard format anyways, but building a library of clips and edits is now less motivating.

agentul... get a clue what your talking about.

that will work for simple pixel files.
but not complex project files.

Henry,
Your point exposes the worst part of the plan. I jusst posted a similar comment on Adobe's forum.

Once people realize that they are signing up for a perpetual contact that hold their files hostage to Adobe, they will abandon Adobe in droves.

At the very least, I would need to have a perpetual license to the last CC version that I had paid for over some reasonable period. So, for example, I would need to know that once I paid for a version for 18 months, then that version is mine and can be re-installed if needed. Until I have such an assurance, I will stick with my CS6 suite.

BTW. Just dumped my Adobe stock. Did nicely in the past few months. But I am really worried that this will turn off a large number of customers.

Yes, that price is 12 months, EVERY TWELVE MONTHS! Add that up for the 18 months new version cycle. So really, $49 x 18 = $822, and you are forced to essentially buy what amounts to $822 for every new cycle.

@ Henry
Thanks for your information
No thanks for your attitude.

Please note that CC is used as abbreviation for cloud computing, which behaves as the poster expected, sending your data to processing to the SW running on the cloud server and then receiving the manipulated data back. Maybe the reference to the Cloud is misleading from Adobe Marketing ?

well sorry. but spreading nonsense is something i really hate.
if you want to discuss something at least get a clue what your talking about.

that´s my motto.

if you can´t be online a few seconds in 30 days you can call adobe they will help you if you go on a long vacation.

don´t get me wrong im against CC... but for the right reasons!

I live in China. Internet Connection goes through the great China Firewall. Internet connection is simply not reliable. Sites you can access today maybe blocked for the next 60 days and then come online again, or not. I have a huge library of files which I need frequent access to for my work. If this access is combined with the daily whim of the great china firewall it is simply very upsetting, and as I said before, more than not acceptable. I have this problem already since Adobe switched most documentation to online and online movies, which most of them are blocked here. Very, very upsetting. I guess I will stick with CS6 for a while and sit it out. I just upgraded from CS2 to CS6, so maybe by the time I feel the itch again to upgrade this problem is solved.

@ Kenneth
Americans never can imagine that internet connection is a very different thing in other countries. The lack to understand this reduces their competitive fitness.

The issue is that Adobe, like many others, have hijacked the word "cloud" - the creative cloud is the same adobe products you have access to today, licenses by subscription. Its great to have access to the latest code. Awesome.

The cloud based storage provided by Adobe is pretty much same old stuff, not big enough to do real work over, and, as said already by others, rather pointless for large data objects like video or digital negatives. Uploading ANYTHING to the Adobe cloud service ( or any other service ) over typical highly asymmetric internet services takes forever.

IF you are saying that customers need to spend another $50 / month to beef up their Internet connection to derive any benefit from this feature, that's another $600 / year INCREASE on the TCO.

Its like buying a car for $1 that uses "special" gas costing $20 / gallon.

Less use of the word "Cloud" and more intellectual honesty, clarity in calling it a subscription would set expectations with the customers.

Kenneth,

Very few see any upside. Our screaming falls on deaf ears, adobe lower level sales execs seems tired from the abuse and unable to change the minds of higher ups, who seems to be blissfully operating in a vacuum.

Adobe is also in bed with certain distribution channels who have no vested interest in helping Adobe or Customers, and its very apparent they filter the feedback to maintain the broken pricing models. They insulate Adobe from feeling the pain. Again slowing the inevitable decision that this stinks for many customers.

Your point about physical media is certainly very critical for Asia-Pac and Africa, and for some even here in the US. "Simply drive 600 miles to South Africa to download the latest verion, reinstall, or renew your licenses."

Adobe will certainly wake up eventually and offer a physical media option. ( My suspicion is that may be sooner than later. ) I'm sure the "solution" will be horrific:

-- Bob

Just shoot JPG !!!!!!

You don't HAVE TO buy a new version every one-and-a-half years. I still rely on a rather old version of PS; smaller studios might too. Subscribing means that you will have payed the (current) full price after appr. 2 years and unlike today you don't own your software. If you stop paying the rent, your PS files will become useless overnight...

Useless? So long as I have CS6 nothing is useless.

I see Adobe has unleashed its sock puppets. This is not a good thing to small businesses. Small businesses do not have upgrade every year. They often can do fine with previous version for some good time. So when they have need to upgrade, they could plan their budget accordingly. With subscription they have unavidable expenses. So this is actually much worse.

JUST SHOOT JPG !!!

Do you really think Scott Kelby "pays" for his Adobe products?

Kenneth works for Adobe.

Yes, people who come to photography forums must all be software pirates. I'd imagine most are like me: an enthusiast/amateur/semi-pro (depending on the day of the week and the small opportunities we stumble upon) and we paid for the software at full price and keep up the upgrade payments every generation or every other generation. Believing anyone who doesn't agree with you is either ignorant or a criminal is a very convenient and psychotic view of yourself and the world....or at the very least deeply arrogant. Adobe didn't get my CS6 money because there wasn't anything compelling enough to make me move away from CS5 (paid owner of CS3 and CS, by the way). Now they won't get my CS7 business, either. Enjoy the view from your perch high upon the tower of intellectual and moral superiority.

"...70% of them have an illegal copy of Photoshop and know that they won't be getting CS7 for free..." You are really naive aren't you? :)

and 90% crap....

I load Nikon RAWs into GIMP just fine using the dcraw library in Linux.