Will Adobe dethrone EA as shittiest company on the planet?

[GaijinPunch]

I'd say they're trying!

[Specineff]

Heard of that just last night. This goes beyond shooting yourself in the foot. It's more like purposefully putting your foot under the blast of an orbital laser cannon.

Leave the cloud stuff to Google. How are they going to keep people from sticking to the last physical versions and get them to switch to their rental option?

[Friendly]

Some companies are trying really hard to take away our right to own things.

Good thing there are always alternatives. First that come to mind in this case: Gimp (yay, free) and Paint Shop Pro (much cheaper than Photoshop).

[rapoon]

Some companies are trying really hard to take away our right to own things.

was thinking the same thing. is this the pill we're being forced to swallow for 10+ years of pirating?
the "convenience" of the server farms..errr cloud is a ploy to freely hand over all our shit and details about our shit.
renting software in 2013. good luck with that Adobe.

[brentsg]

I read one analysis that it's actually cheaper this new way, assuming you keep your software relatively up to date.

[Ganelon]

This might be an alright business move. Adobe probably calculated that the number of business users that needed Adobe products consistently paying monthly would outweigh the declining total purchases from elsewhere. It sounds bad for individual consumers but consider: CS6 has way more features than most people will likely need for years to come. Would people who don't really "need" Photoshop buy the newest version or pay less for CS6? 10 years down the line when the software has really changed, Adobe could reconsider their sales strategy with no harm done.

The only question is why Adobe would take such a drastic move when the company at its healthiest state in years. This consumer-unfriendly approach also seems as if it'll invite hackers to try and crack whatever is controlling the monthly subscriptions locally. It's also an open invite for an upstart developer to take over the low-end graphics editing software market but Adobe likely doesn't care, especially with GIMP available and all the rampant piracy.

[Moniker]

With businesses and universities likely being their biggest userbase (I don't know if this is actually true), it makes a lot of sense. A lot less hassle keeping up-to-date and consistent across all hardware. In fact I think a service model in general makes good sense for large institutions. For your rogue artist/photographer/dev/whatever, yeah it kinda sucks.

Edit: Oh, Ganelon said pretty much the same thing. lrn2read, Moniker.

[Ed Oscuro]

I agree this is actually probably a sensible move for both Adobe and the consumer. It's a lot less grating, in my mind, to pay a subscription (especially if it comes out to less) and keep up to date at the same time, than to pay out a huge lump sum all at once and then be stuck wondering how long you want to keep using obsolete software or trying to figure out if Adobe's few new features really are worth the price.

I also agree wholeheartedly with the general view that the online-only, no-personal-ownership trend is worrying and I don't think society realizes how big a problem this can become. On the other hand I don't see it changing. I think that people in the future might say that the 'teens of the 21st century were the beginning of a new dark ages because many records of daily life (at least on the internet side) will be missing for the future. On the other hand, I don't see this changing much. People attack copyright on the one hand, but you can also attack personal ownership of items on the same grounds.

IMO, if there's something Adobe deserves to catch shit over, it's their terrible design of Flash in all its incarnations, complete with inappropriate hooks into system functions; their rolling out of weird and unexciting new runtime environments like Adobe FX or whatever it's called, further fragmenting the marketplace out of force of habit; and being sneaky about where to download software updates and being sneaky about bundling (or not) unwanted software for profit along with it, and making it hard to find downloads that do not have that software.

However I don't think they're nearly near the worst software tech company out there, let alone worst company in the realms.

As far as individual photographers, they should probably be over putting their money into an open source box so they can run Darktable (I guess; last I checked they still didn't have a Windows binary). GIMP still isn't perfect but it's better than thought, and the UI is probably just different from the Photoshop style, not necessarily worse. Aside from fancy trickery like the "healing brush" I think that pretty much everything you would normally use, as a photographer, within Photoshop is done just as well in a free/libre open source program (and probably with less system resources used). Personally, I can get away with photographing anything I like without using anything more complicated than white balance correction and cropping (maybe saturation adjustment if it's called for, but I like not to mess with that), which doesn't take me out of the bundled camera software (like the mostly very good Digital Photo Professional from Canon).

[Skykid]

Totally get the reasoning (stop pirating our shit, let's rinse businesses) but oh, that pricing. $50 a month? That's a business price point only imo, 2 years for the home user to curve his images will be incredibly expensive.

[Specineff]

^^^ Especially when the alternatives may be cheaper and just as effective.

[GaijinPunch]

Good thing there are always alternatives. First that come to mind in this case: Gimp (yay, free) and Paint Shop Pro (much cheaper than Photoshop).

Neither are true alternatives though, and Adobe knows it. Gimp is great for a free app, but I actually use the features (and plugins) found in PS and not Gimp. But, I own a CS6 license and will be fine with it for years to cum. PSP is probably good for light users. There really is no competitor to Photoshop though.

Totally get the reasoning (stop pirating our shit, let's rinse businesses) but oh, that pricing. $50 a month? That's a business price point only imo, 2 years for the home user to curve his images will be incredibly expensive.

It's not really known whether this will stop piracy, or even curb it. The processing is still done on the client side. The only thing I see differently is more frequent updates = a more frequent need to recrack. All any hacker has to do is get around the authentication method which they're already doing.

I'm sure they indeed have quite a few business and university licenses... not sure what a universities take on this would be. Business can go either way... depends on how they do their books. But there's really very little flexibility in the plan. You either pay $20 for 1 app, or get them all for $50. 2 for $40 is pretty pointless unless you know you'll NEVER touch a 3rd.

Not sure who could claim that this is cheaper. I've kept my Photoshop relatively up to date. Since most upgrades have been every 3 years, at about $200 each (let's just say that for simplicity's sake), I've basically paid $5.55 USD per month to have the latest version of PS alone. Now I get to pay $12 I believe w/ the discount the first year and $20 each year after? Fuck that. I may suck shit at math (or maths, if you're English) but I'm not a total dip shit.

Leave the cloud stuff to Google.

Ironically, they just bought Nik software and made the entire Suite available for $149.99. It was $600 before Nik was bought. I'm going to be just fine with CS6 for... well, I don't want to be presumptuous, but unless they come up with some AWESOME shit (like focus fixing), for the foreseeable future.

[Vexorg]

I've wanted a copy of Photoshop for quite a while now, but have never been able to justify the $600+ cost of buying it for something that I'd use relatively infrequently. On the other hand, a $50 a month subscription might be doable for the occasional project (just as long as it can be done on a month-to-month basis) although it also comes with a lot of stuff I'd never use.

I used to use Paint Shop Pro for this type of thing, but Corel really started screwing things up right around version 9 or so, and version 8 and earlier are kind of a pain to use on Windows 7. In the meantime, Inkscape handles the vector drawing / occasional laser cutter project stuff pretty well, but I don't care much for Gimp, and haven't found a lot of good alternatives on the photo editing.

[Friendly]

Good thing there are always alternatives. First that come to mind in this case: Gimp (yay, free) and Paint Shop Pro (much cheaper than Photoshop).

Neither are true alternatives though, and Adobe knows it. Gimp is great for a free app, but I actually use the features (and plugins) found in PS and not Gimp. But, I own a CS6 license and will be fine with it for years to cum. PSP is probably good for light users. There really is no competitor to Photoshop though.

It sounds like you are "locked-in" after years of using Photoshop and (understandably) would like to avoid the effort of learning how to use new software. GIMP has come a long way (it has a single window mode now) and there are tons of plugins for it. I have been using PaintShop Pro for a long time; it was a conscious choice because I always found Adobe's pricing of Photoshop insane and did NOT want to "warez" it. There's a reason why so many people pirate it: $600 USD. No mainstream software that is used by millions should ever cost that much. The funny part is that if not for piracy, Photoshop would never have become as popular in the first place. For merely $100 USD (or less), you can buy the current Corel PaintShop Pro X5 Ultimate.

BTW, I am fairly certain there is very little you can't do with PaintShop/GIMP that you can do with Photoshop- if you know how. Have you actually tested a more recent version of PaintShop?

Edit: typo

[cools]

Gimp is fine and it's the only one I use nowadays due to the price, but its usability compared to PSP and a lesser extent PS leaves a lot to be desired.

[Ed Oscuro]

There's a reason why so many people pirate it: $600 USD.

That's only a dollar more than FIVE NINETY NINE though!

Yeah the $50/mo. pricing seems really outta whack...no way that's better than paying for retail, if you don't start pining for the neatest new brushes and tools and whatevers that Adobe features - not to mention it took them a long while, and mandatory updates, to really get a grip on GPU acceleration (and I thought their first real stab at it only favored one vendor, nVidia).

It must be tempting for them to release a "consumer" edition which cuts out some of the highest-powered features which still retaining commonly used tools, the ability to buy plugins (I would hope), and GPU acceleration...but then the feature squeeze might start highlighting how little difference there is in capability, besides Adobe's (vendor-locked) integration, between Adobe products and a host of completely free applications, or the reasonable alternatives (Corel Draw and its like have languished in the shadows for years but seem quite accomplished as well).

[t0yrobo]

Beside piracy I think a big part of this is that professional users have less and less reason to upgrade lately IMO. I've been using PS and AI regularly for work/school for awhile now and there are very few significant changes since CS3 that have mattered. Unless they have some seriously useful stuff in store I don't see much reason to leave my copy of CS5 for some subscription model bs anytime soon.

[GaijinPunch]

It sounds like you are "locked-in" after years of using Photoshop and (understandably) would like to avoid the effort of learning how to use new software. GIMP has come a long way (it has a single window mode now) and there are tons of plugins for it.

I've used both. Until quite recently, I used GIMP for everything on my website, as I was on my Linux box 95% of the time. For basic stuff, it's fine, and even does some things better than Photoshop. It's done saving in the background for years, and even back then did it better than PHotoshop does now as a brand new CS6 only feature.

My first Google hit on "GIMP Adjustment Layers" said quite plainly to "not get your hopes up" so that doesn't give me a lot of faith. It could get there, sure, and for some things it's fine. But I don't want to have to unlearn things. It's not like my CS6 copy is going to go bad.

There's a reason why so many people pirate it: $600 USD.

It's pricey (although there are times you can get it for $500). I'll admit, and you're right about piracy. It wouldn't be as popular today had not everyone pirated the shit out of it in the 90's. I'm sure they know that. Their answer to the price tag is Photoshop Elements (which isn't all that great, but it's something).

Main thing I'm worried about this time is them sometime not recognizing my CS6 upgrade, and me having to reinstall.

[dcharlieJP]

I fear that once you are locked in you are locked in - after X many years and you decide you don't want to pay you basically lose everything . It's not like you get to have the version you have paid up for until the cut off point (unless they are going for a radically different cloud model)

[MommysBestGames]

Good thing there are always alternatives. First that come to mind in this case: Gimp (yay, free) and Paint Shop Pro (much cheaper than Photoshop).

You can also get Photoshop CS2 free. Obviously far from the latest PS, but pretty darn nice still.
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/
Edit: It's not actually free, as null1024 points out below. The Adobe page says you must previously own a license before downloading.

[null1024]

Good thing there are always alternatives. First that come to mind in this case: Gimp (yay, free) and Paint Shop Pro (much cheaper than Photoshop).

You can also get Photoshop CS2 free. Obviously far from the latest PS, but pretty darn nice still.
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/

It's not actually free, but that is universally ignored by those who find this page.

[GaijinPunch]

I thought they actually released CS1 "for free" -- IE, no strings attached. Obviously unsupported, but something to get people to like PS.

Honestly, the only feature I have to have is Adjustment Layers. Everything else I'm fine without.

[MommysBestGames]

It's not actually free, but that is universally ignored by those who find this page.

Whoa, didn't actually know that. I went back and found it after you mentioned it.

[Friendly]

My first Google hit on "GIMP Adjustment Layers" said quite plainly to "not get your hopes up" so that doesn't give me a lot of faith.

Right, that's why I also mentioned PaintShop Pro. It has had Adjustment Layers for a long time.

[nasty_wolverine]

My first Google hit on "GIMP Adjustment Layers" said quite plainly to "not get your hopes up" so that doesn't give me a lot of faith.

Right, that's why I also mentioned PaintShop Pro. It has had Adjustment Layers for a long time.

If anybody has tried the latest version, it has come a long way... there are lots of ways to get similar effects, maybe the long way around, but for free and opensource software i think its the best. Gimp and Inkscape is a really good replacement for PS and Illustrator.

[emphatic]

It's not actually free, but that is universally ignored by those who find this page.

Whoa, didn't actually know that. I went back and found it after you mentioned it.

I didn't know this either. Here I was, thinking I was using it legally for free.

[GaijinPunch]

I'm sure both are usable... problem is, some of us already own our licenses.

[t0yrobo]

I haven't used GIMP in a looong time. But last time I tried to use Inkscape it was an absolute nightmare to open pdfs or files from Illustrator. I think Inkscape is actually more proper about it's svg formatting than Illustrator, but that doesn't matter when AI is the standard for everything.

[brentsg]

This thread is getting too long.

The bottom line is no, they will not dethrone EA.

[nasty_wolverine]

I haven't used GIMP in a looong time. But last time I tried to use Inkscape it was an absolute nightmare to open pdfs or files from Illustrator. I think Inkscape is actually more proper about it's svg formatting than Illustrator, but that doesn't matter when AI is the standard for everything.

exactly. adobe screws up its svg format and there is no reference for it, while inkscape keeps it as compliant as it can. i use it quite regularly, so if you dont have import from illustrator its plenty good for a free software.

[system11]

Not even close to EA. The first time they say "we're switching of the photoshop 6 servers so you need to start paying $more to access the photoshop 7 ones" they'll start getting closer. The first time, of many - welcome to your price creep and forced upgrade cycles.