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Adobe Creative Suite Going Subscription-Only
First time accepted submitter JDG1980 writes "According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called 'Creative Cloud' service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). Can Adobe complete the switch to subscription-only, or will the backlash be too great? Will this finally spur the creation of a real competitor to Photoshop?"
For this to work Adobe will have to 'break' older versions with patches.
Adobe beat Microsoft to it... Adobe Rent for $50 per month.
Microsoft said they would be doing this years ago (after people found ways to avoid paying MS Tax).
I wonder how much Microsoft Rent will be for Windows & Office.
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Corporate suicide Microsoft style, only they are not nearly as entrenched.
Adobe underestimates how much it benefits from piracy. If poor college students can't cut their teeth on the full Adobe suite, they're likely to learn how to use something else. When those students go out and get jobs, they're more likely to use what they're used to than drop a bundle on Adobe software they've never used before.
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I doubt it'll spur competition, because everyone will just stick with CS6.
I'm not a multi media production expert, but CS6 seems to be pretty feature complete, and if you ever wanted to go further than that, there is always Processing or max/msp, and third party plugins for After Effects, Premeire, and Photoshop.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
My guess is this is a move to combat widespread piracy among home users. The benefit to home user's pirating your software is that people get to know your product, and then want to use it at work. That's one of the big reasons why MS has turned a blind eye to small time home piracy. Those home users aren't going to pay a $200+ license (or a $50/month subscription) so allowing them to pirate doesn't equate to a lost sale, it encourages companies to stick with a product their workforce is familiar with, and it ultimately get the vendor sales through those companies.
Basically I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot, but not in the way the summary implies. The companies who buy adobe products probably aren't going to baulk at the switch (and in fact a subscription makes things easier on start-ups since they don't have the overhead of a much more expensive license). It's going to hurt them because there will likely be less people familiar with their product in/entering the workforce. They can offset that somewhat by giving it away/giving heavy discounts to education sectors, but at the end of the day if the person can't fire it up on their home computer free/cheap it's going to make a difference.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
The really interesting part of this seems to be that Adobe gets to keep all the money from the licensing. Previously, if you wanted a license, you'd go to some reseller, and they'd get part of the money, as would a distributor, and maybe ever a couple other companies along the way. This is basically a game changer. Adobe believes (and it's probably true) that it's popular enough that they don't need resellers and other people pushing their products, and that they can do good enough business just selling direct to the end user. As much as I like the idea of subscription software, I do like the idea of the middle man being cut out, since most of the time they offer very little value to the end customer, and can only really make prices higher, or at the very best, bleed out money from the process would have been better served going back to the people creating the product. It's the equivalent of music labels selling directly to end users without going through the music stores (be they online or physical stores/records)
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We need to have version control for some plugins we use. If there are no controls to prevent new versions from being loaded then it will be imposible to version control
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The main one From Apple itself is Aperture. It's not really a photoshop competitor exactly, but where it does become one is the range of plugins that support it now - pretty much most of the powerful image editing tools have Aperture plugins, so I can do fairly advanced editing in Aperture without ever touching Photoshop.
Aperture is competitive with Adobe's Lightroom, not Photoshop. Neither program supports even basic features like layers, which are necessary for many types of graphical manipulation work. Instead, they're meant as the first step of the workflow for raw image files that have just been taken off the camera.
This pricing seemed off. Sure enough, TFA:
So if you want Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. etc., the suite will be $50/mo. If you only want Photoshop, it's $10/mo. Furthermore, if you really only need software for a month, you can rent the suite for $75.
I can't say I'm a big fan of subscription only (even MS is keeping some purchase options for Office), but pricing like this does create some winners (besides Adobe). Short term projects, for example, may benefit from being able to purchase what was a $2500 package for only a month or two at $75/month. The losers, of course, are those that purchase upgrades infrequently and use their software for years.
Frankly, I'm tempted by $10/mo for Illustrator. The retail box of CS6 is $540, and I have no product from which to upgrade. So for the cost of the boxed version (with its potential resale or upgrade value factored in), I get 4 1/2 years of use of the latest version. One key difference is I can easily drop it after 1 year (and $120), if I don't need it any more. Still, I understand how abandoning box sales will make some people unhappy.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes
No, not to professionals.
GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes.
GIMP isn't even competitive with Photoshop CS2 (you know, the one Adobe has available for free downloading on their website...) It's a joke. Still no support for 16-bit per channel after all these years. (And before someone says that you can't see the difference, that's not the point at all – you need 16 bpc to avoid getting banding and other artifacts after repeated transforms. The final output can be 8 bpc, but editing/processing needs to be done at a higher depth for solid results. And even a $499 DSLR can shoot 14 bpc these days.)
The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.
I think this is a great opportunity for the Open Source Community to showcase what really can be done with apps like The GIMP. There is admittedly work to be done for vector apps, but they are coming along.... Other than using Photoshop specific filters, there really isn't anything Photoshop can do that I can't do in GIMP... Why pay Adobe for their overpriced bloatware?
No. The FOSS community simply realizes that most of the so-called Photoshop users here are just degenerate pirates. They will happily use a pirated copy of something rather than seeing out a true alternative. The license really is quite irrelevant.
There is this single minded brand fixation that makes you wonder if they're all just too cheap to buy Apple products. The mentality is comparable.
Real professionals will probably just bite the bullet. They are already paying for the product anyways.
It will be interesting to see what the pirates and posers do.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Yea, it isn't a professional grade graphics tool unless you paid an obscene amount of money for it. That is why every graphic designer I know uses Photoshop on a mac while chugging starbucks.
yeah.
why dont the mechanics just drive the racecars, too ?
Right. Us photographers and artists are just going to drop into C# and just code our little brains out. Hell, the vast majority of Creative Suite users can't even using the scripting engine much less have a concept on how to code an implementation of CMYK, 16 bit layers or the dozen other things that GIMP is missing.
Professional graphics designers aren't expecting someone to code this for free - who do you think pays for Adobe products? Most people believe there is a market for another Photoshop clone to exist outside the Adobe fence, but nobody has managed to come up with it yet. Not an easy job - dropping tens of thousands of dollars out to make a product that has to be priced below Adobe but have the majority of the functionality. It took Adobe a long, long time to get Creative Suite where it is. Yes, there is a lot of fluff, but the core is awfully robust.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Uhm no. Customers are idiots. Witness what the videogames industry has manged to get out of videogamers.
The videogame industry mostly sells to teenage boys. You can get away with a lot more when you're selling an entertainment product to kids than when you're selling a business product to other businesses.
Businesses will dismiss it as the cost of doing business. $50 is a tiny fraction of what a graphic designer costs them every year.
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The graphic designers are just to lazy to do it themselves, instead they demand that you do it for them for free.
There are so many problems with your argument, but I'll just go with this one: The graphic designers aren't demanding that the Gimp devs implement those things. They are just not using the Gimp, and sometimes saying why they aren't using the Gimp.
It's equally as ridiculous to expect graphic designers to go and implement stuff in the Gimp just so that it brings it up to par with tools that already exist. If people do, that's great! But even for people who already know how to program, time is money... and there's basically no way that the time spent implementing those features will provide enough benefit to the implementer to make it worthwhile vs buying a copy of Photoshop.
I own Photoshop CS6, legally. I will not even consider using Photoshop on a subscription basis because although I am using it for things that I will eventually make money on, I already do not make enough money to justify buying a Photoshop upgrade for $250 every five or six years (three versions) as I currently do. I will never in my life make enough money off of Photoshop to justify spending $240 every year (which is the absolute minimum cost of subscriptions for a single product). And if Lightroom goes the same way, they're gone, too. I prefer Lightroom to Aperture, but not enough to be forced into such an overpriced subscription model.
But it's not just the cost. Even if Adobe rented it to me for $20 a year instead of $20 a month, I still would not consider it. Here's why: I regularly work on projects that span many, many years. One of my projects is well over a decade old, and still in progress. With a purchase, I can still use a copy of Photoshop from ten years ago on an old machine, if I have to. Adobe could go out of business tomorrow, and there's no problem.
With a subscription-based app, if Adobe goes away, my copy of the app stops working. Immediately. Given how badly Adobe has screwed up Flash and Acrobat, I truly do not trust Adobe to still be in business in ten years when the last of the major PDF patents start to expire. Therefore, I cannot trust any DRM scheme in which Adobe ceasing to exist can cause me to suddenly and permanently lose access to everything I'm working on.
And even if Adobe is still around in a decade, there's the problem of Adobe's willingness to continue support. In five years, they could decide that OS X support costs too much, and they could become Windows-only or iOS-only, and I'd be SOL. They could decide that they'll only support each version of the app up until the new version comes out, at which point I'm then forced to do a very painful migration experience three times as often as I currently do. And so on. It just isn't worth it.
To make a long story short, CS6 will be the last version of Photoshop that I will use until such time as Adobe gets bought by a company who has more common sense. In the meantime, I look forward to helping the Pixelmator team improve their software so that it will be capable of opening the handful of my existing documents that it cannot yet handle.
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My last Adobe upgrade (CS5) cost me $650 and has served me well for 3 years. CS6 at $50 a month will cost me $3600. I do get a discounted initial rate, but this is only guaranteed for a year. I only hope they get the backlash they deserve, at least from the larger prepress companies. The older pros I know don't like this, but the younger designers don't really know anything else and it allows them to come into the program with less money upfront. I see CS5 being viable for a long time.
Not use GIMP, obviously. If a pirated product is better than the FOSS "true alternative", then don't expect much use out of said alternative.
Which is the one thing that the FOSS community refuses to admit. When you put everything on a level playing field -- pirated copies of Windows, Photoshop and Microsoft Office cost exactly the same as Linux, GIMP and Open Office -- people overwhelming choose the pirated versions of commercial products.
I don't want to 'rent' software.
I'd heard that Adobe had just recently stopped selling their products on CD/DVD's and only had downloadable. I don't really like that as that I really prefer to keep physical install media, but I can live without if need be.
But, renting software, is unacceptable to me.
What happens after awhile if for some reason, I can't or don't wish to connect said computer to the internet to check in? I just go dark and that's acceptable?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It seems there's a lot of confusion as to what the Adobe Creative Cloud is. I currently subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud at the $50 per month rate. Here's what I get...
Adobe CS6 Master Collection
-- Everything, not just Photoshop
-- Usually around $2600 when purchased as a standalone program
-- At $50 per month, I could only upgrade every 4 1/3 years
-- But I get continuous updates
-- I can install ACC on two computers
-- One can be OSX and the other Windows
-- You can't do this with purchased apps
-- Apps are installed locally
-- Don't have to be online to use apps
-- Unless you're past the current expiration of your subscription
-- Data files are stored locally
-- Don't have to use cloud storage
Subscription options:
-- $20/month - One Application, No Commitment
-- $20/month - All Applications, Annual Commitment, Students and Teachers (K-12 and College)
-- $50/month - All Applications, Annual Commitment (What I have)
-- $75/month - All Applications, No Commitment
So, while you may still have some qualms about a subscription model, remember not to spread FUD or inaccurate information.
I void warranties.
That's the problem. I own Photoshop and use it at least three or four times per month. I need Photoshop because I have to work with all my existing Photoshop files that no other application can open because of the layer effects. I depend on 16-bit-per-channel color to minimize distortion when adjusting the color of photographs as part of complex, multi-layered artwork. I depend on CMYK output because the content I'm producing will eventually go to a print shop that requires CMYK source material. None of the competitors can replace Photoshop at those tasks. Therefore, in spite of the fact that I'm not using it "professionally" by your standards, it is a tool that I cannot readily do without. I'm certain that I am not alone in that regard.
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When GIMP finally has a single-window UI
It has. And fortunately you can disable that. Seriously, single-window sucks so bad only a Windows user (ie, without proper window management) could want it.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I've been in the design industry going back to Photoshop 5. This well before there was such a thing as Creative Suite, before Adobe bought Macromedia and before Quark made such a mess of their desktop publishing application that everyone switched to InDesign.
Adobe has a complete monopoly on the design industry. In the US I've never come across a designer that doesn't use Adobe products. Using anything else is a surefire way to be ostracized and struggle to find a job. Overseas, where Adobe software tends to be more expensive, and design culture isn't as entrenched in a particular mindset as it is in the US, you sometimes saw other software used. But it was rare and most who couldn't afford Creative Suite just pirated it. Often, the best case was that they'd get a single license and then crack it for use on multiple machines.
In the US, the design industry has screwed itself. They've collectively deemed that Adobe software is The One Way (tm) to do design. You're not a real designer if you work any other way. Making things worse is that like a pack of suckers, they'd rush out to upgrade the instant the next version was released. Adobe's model of preventing backwards compatibility meant that if you resisted upgrading within a few months you'd find yourself receiving design files you can't open. Flash, for example, went from plenty of options when saving in the Macromedia days to allowing you to save back a single version. Whether or not your files feature new functionality is irrelevant.
So the end result is that you're dragged along on the upgrade cycle whether you like it or not. But the most frustrating bit here is that the vast majority of designers never touch what new functionality Adobe has introduced. But then most of that functionality has very limited utility for most people. And while there have been some valuable updates through the years there have been core issues that have yet to be addressed. One is how the UI amongst the various apps is inconsistent despite Creative Suite now having been around for at least 10 years. One of the more ridiculous issues is how most apps in the package, including Acrobat, lack support for retina display.
Knock Microsoft and Office all you want, but they've always been good about updates, their UI is consistent across all apps, and they supported retina early on. On top of that, you can still work effectively with an old version of Office. And most important of all, they don't have a monopoly on any industry.
Still no support for 16-bit per channel after all these years.
Isn't that implemented by the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), partially implemented in GIMP 2.6 with a migration path that should end with GIMP 2.10 (the next version) fully utilizing it? 2.10 has been specifically noted as supporting 16 (and 32!) bits per color channel. That link, from a year ago, even has a screen shot. Still, 2.10 doesn't have a release schedule, and despite that the developers are committed to "shorter development cycles," it looks more like it's still a ways out (2.9, the dev pre-release, is still several months out at the earliest). Still, it's heartening to know they're on the right path (and that they've gotten around the design flaws that preiviously made this kind of feature impossible to implement).
The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.
Again, GEGL comes to the rescue. The whole point of it is to make it a library so it can be used from GIMP or any other utility. It represents that ground-up rewrite you so desperately plea for.
Regarding a professional-grade tool ... Free Software never really offers that. You can get close, and sometimes you get lucky, but for the most part, there is no free ride. Generally, the best you can hope for is a commercial closed-source application that works well in an otherwise Free Software environment. It's icing on the cake when the vendor of such software offers a Free version of it (e.g. Codeweavers and Crossover vs WINE).
There's always "more" work needed, and for high-end items like the Photoshop features missing from GIMP, there's rarely enough community-driven (read: volunteer) time and energy to make it happen. It's worth noting when a major feature is missing, as car mechanics tend not to be racecar drivers (as mentioned elsewhere in the comments), but it's not worth complaining unless you're rolling up your sleeves and/or putting up a bounty to make developers' time easier to allocate.
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Or how about this one.. Somebody with lots of $$$ (or lots of backers with $$$$) decides to get with the GIMP crew and fund them to develop/add to GIMP the features/tools that make professional users of Photoshop stick with Photoshop, even though GIMP has, what? 80% of the features of Photoshop?? These somebodies who perhaps are fed up with Adobe and its bullshit antics, and wants to give them a comeupance???? It would be fun to watch...
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1. 16bpc (and 32bpc) (native, pending for GIMP 2.9+)
2. CMYK (Plugin, supporting GIMP 2.4+)
3. Single-window mode for GUI (native, GIMP 2.7.3+)
You only used one out of three, you guys are putting less effort into this as the years go by. Guess Gimp has been winning for a while now :)
Now who's not putting in enough effort? ;-)
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I was a buying Adobe Creative suite and updating for a while, but their business model is now simply too predatory for my tastes. I'll wait for others now with an incentive to build similar, but much cheaper software. I and I suspect most users don't use more than 20-30% of the functionality in the suite as it is. Why pay to rent something you are not going to use?
The real problem with renting software is essentially that you are locked in. Once you stop paying, your software "goes away". They have zero incentive to let you stay using older versions, so expect once they lock in the market, the window to upgrade before you are shut out will grow shorter, while the price to rent grows larger. You can see this already in their price increases over the past few years. This year it will be $600/yr, the next $700 and so on. Count on it.
Looks as if Adobe is giving other software vendors a real incentive to displace them in all but the high end niche of the market.
Yea, it isn't a professional grade graphics tool unless you paid an obscene amount of money for it.
Obscene? $49.99 per month? Most people pay twice that per month for Cable.
If you're a graphic designer you can get by with just the creative suite for all of your software needs. That works out to about 31 cents per hour for Adobe software. You're probably charging your client $50-$100 per hour. So that means the software which enables your entire business to run is as little as 0.3%-0.6% of your billable rate.
Credit card servicing fees are 2.5% of a retail business' overhead. So to all the whining I just yawn. Does Creative Suite offer 31 cents an hour in value? Of course. The reason you won't see any backlash is because Creative Suite is ridiculously cheap even on subscription. @ $2.5 per day, it only has to save you $2.5/$75hr * 60 = 2 minutes of productivity per day. Using photoshop probably saves me 2 *hours* of productivity per day over gimp. It definitely saves me 2 minutes. So I could stop paying Adobe and lose 2 hours of productivity per day... or I could pay Adobe the equivalent of 2 minutes of productivity.
Using GIMP is incredibly expensive. It costs way more than $49.99 a month in lost productivity.