Besides, you are not in a position to judge what breaks the bank for other people.
My claim that PS was the thing that breaks the bank for other people was a paraphrasing of your own words. Methinks you should consider your own advice.
And I'd suggest you take a good look at how Adobe maintains its marketshare today. They offer student pricing, but guess what, many students still don't have the money for it.
Yeah, a thousand dollars for a computer, five thousand for a car, a thousand for a camera and some lenses, but $285 for a piece of software, yeah, that's what breaks their bank.
I agree with your statement that non-pros shouldn't be excluded from PS, in fact, I had it for many years as an amateur. But during those years, while I hated the price, I realized I was also buying the equivalent of a Humvee, a fairly non-trivial piece of equipment aimed at a particular class of power-user, and that I was paying for features they needed that I didn't want. I didn't like paying it, but I also didn't think that Adobe was somehow wrong or bad for it, it really is a quality product.
That having been said, I do think a lot of people want PS instead of Elements or PSP out of a sense of elitism, "having to have the best." I am not suggesting that's true of any specific person on this thread, but I bet it's pretty common. It's the syndrome that led to my dad buying a $10,000 camera he couldn't figure out how to use. I do not agree with your statement that "Photoshop is the best available tool" without more constraints than you put on it, I suspect for many people Elements or some such really is a better tool for their needs.
As a pro, you know how painful detailed color management is, you've probably suffered with the vagaries of deep blacks in CYMK separations, and maybe have enjoyed the ability to reduce a tiny bit of chromatic aberration from the corners of the image from your $10K digital camera--aberration that wouldn't be visible on an 8x10 print. All of these things really do add to the complexity burden of using Photoshop (even if you don't use them), and, IMHO, for many people, make regular photoshop the software equivalent of buying a Humvee to go to the grocery store.
I bought Photoshop before I was a pro, but I had less limited financial means than most. One practical way of getting PSCS without paying full retail is to take a course in it and to get the student discount for it.
For me, the features that I doubt most amateurs need are things like CYMK and hexachrome color work, the ability to handle raw files from $7K digital cameras, and Pantone color matching. Can you tell me what it is specifically about PS that makes it better for you than PS Elements, PS LE, Paint Shop Pro, or the GIMP? If I knew what you did with it, I might be able to suggest a good workaround.
Long answer:
Actually, most fine art nature photography is done with computers in the loop now. The problem really begins with the non-linearity of the chemical print-making process. Slide film captures color and vibrancy from scenes far better than print film, unfortunately, traditional chemical methods for making prints result in very increased contrast.
Now some people do a lot of post-processing in the darkroom to fix this. For anything but strict documentary photoraphy this has always been the case, I urge you to read some of the more technical books by Ansel Adams as an example.
However, this particular problem can be solved with technology, and it's pretty damn cool technology, too. Scan the slide with a drum scanner (a device which rotates the slide with a single light source and a single PMT reading the slide, it takes forever but you can pull enormous info out of a slide. Create the final print using the same chemistry (controlled temperature, reagents, etc.) and paper but instead of optically enlarging through the print, use computer controlled lasers. (I am not making this up.) The effect of the laser on the paper can be calibrated, and so reproducable prints with more normal contrast can be made. I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader.
Those Ansel Adams books will also describe a lot of dodging and burning. I do some of that. I don't move mountains or cigarette butts, because that's my ethic of nature photography, but I do believe that some local contrast enhancement such as that done by dodging and burning can produce prints which are subjectively more accurate to "what I saw" than the film process otherwise allows. More detail could follow here, but I think you get the idea.
This technology also applies to 4-color printing. I do my own color separations for my notecards. I give the printing house digital represntations of the C, M, Y and K plates they should create for those cards, and
they send me the results. It's a wonderful thing.
The computer can also be used to correct for deficiencies of technology. For example, even the best lenses, with good enough sensors or scanning, can show chromatic aberration. This is an artifact where red light (say) is imaged onto the film or sensor differently than green or blue. Oddly enough, computers can help fix this distortion, although it's quite minor in prints less than about 24x16".
Well that's good, now I don't feel so bad about pirating it. I'm not a professional, so it's not marketed to me, and they don't expect me to pay for it anyway.
I'm not a trucker, trucks aren't marketed to me, so I can steal a big rig?
For one, Photoshop is the Microsoft of image editing. It is what they teach in school if you take any graphics editing
If you're in school, you don't pay $650 for PSCS, since there are large student discounts (or were.)
and its formats are what you need if you have to send unfinished works to other image experts.
Actually, you'd send a TIFF or a JPG if you're sending electronically, but that would be rare in practice, more likely you'd send slides or prints. This is SOP with gallery submissions, working with art consultants, submissions to magazines and contests. No Photoshop required on that level. (Photoshop is very valuable, but not for that reason, in my experience.)
That out of the way--I find it hard to feel guiltly about priating music/software when I don't wish to allow them any rights, including their *right to exist*--when, in fact, I see their very existence as a tyranny on my person and as a barrier to true social progress.
You probably feel the same way about my products, too. Pity, because I work my ass off producing them.
I think I hear it differently than you do, I disagree. I see Photoshop as a program very much aimed at a very real group of people who spend and make significant amounts of money doing graphics, photography or other art. There are other programs, such as Photoshop LE, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, and the GIMP which serve different markets with more or less success, all at lower prices, some free, or free bundled with hardware. But suggesting that a program that feeatures built-in support for the raw file format of a $7,000 camera isn't marketed at someone who complains about a $600 price tag isn't elitist, it's simply obvious. Me, I have that $7K camera, I need that feature, and $600 is absolutely a reasonable amount to pay for the overall functionality, for me.
It'd be cool to have a Humvee, too, and I could use some of its special functionality here and there, but it's too expensive for what I would use it for. I don't think they should stop making them just because of that, though, nor do I think the price is necessarily wrong for people who have different uses for it than I do.
However, I disagree with a lot of the rest. Adobe makes a nice business with both their $99 product and their $600 product. The idea that they would do financially better to lower their prices seems unlikely to me, the $99 product is a great product.
As far as Russian professionals, I'm sure there's a lot of stolen camera equipment marketed there too, after all, a Canon 1Ds costs $7000 and who can afford that? Still, both Canon and Adobe make a nice business with their tools, the idea that they'd do better to lower their prices in both cases seems to lack rationality.
Perhaps their not supposed to have professionals.
Most professionals (in any country) in the art business actually work for companies, which are even more likely to be able to afford tools like the 1Ds and Photoshop CS.
I think I hear it differently than you do, I disagree. I see Photoshop as a program very much aimed at a very real group of people who spend and make significant amounts of money doing graphics, photography or other art. There are other programs, such as Photoshop LE, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, and the GIMP which serve different markets with more or less success, all at lower prices, some free, or free bundled with hardware. But suggesting that a program that feeatures built-in support for the raw file format of a $7,000 camera isn't marketed at someone who complains about a $600 price tag isn't elitist, it's simply obvious. Me, I have
that $7K camera, I need that feature, and $600
is absolutely a reasonable amount to pay for the overall functionality, for me.
It'd be cool to have a Humvee, too, and I could use some of its special functionality here and there, but it's too expensive for what I would use it for. I don't think they should stop making them just because of that, though, nor do I think the price is necessarily wrong for people who have different uses for it than I do.
This whole $600 diatribe on this thread, with regard to the anti-counterfitting measures, is nonsense anyhow. The same measures are almost certainly in Photoshop Elements. The idea that the cost of the anti-counterfitting software is substantial is shown to be false by that fact alone.
How are you going to aquire experience and practice, if you're unable to use the necessary tools?
I'd suggest looking at Adobe's student pricing, if you're serious about learning.
I'm just going to get Paint Shop Pro instead. What is Adobe thinking? I want to buy Photoshop, but I'm not stupid.
What are you going to use it for? If you're just going to use it for some web images, light inkjet printing duties, that sort of thing, I'd agree there's no reason to buy it. Of course, Adobe Photoshop Elements at $99 would be even cheaper,
if that works for you.
For me, a lot of the weird esoteric stuff that Photoshop does, stuff you may not even know PS does, is something I use everyday in my business. Better color management. Raw file import from high-end DSLRs. Adjustment layers (which are important for workflow.) You're right, if you don't need this stuff, you can do a lot better than PS. That doesn't mean that Adobe is wrong, it just means that you want a different product.
I seriously doubt that all these people paid for it. It seems to me Adobe would be wise to charge for like $40 for Photoshop and vastly broaden the base of paying customers.
Actually, most Photoshop owners I know, myself included did pay for it. Adobe offers special pricing (or used to) for students, a lot of folks get started out that way. A lot of the owners of PSCS I know of are businesses, it's just not worth breaking the law to get a good product that does its job.
It's weird, but PS is the piece of software I mind paying for least. It's amazingly stable, it continues to provide significant new features and functionality in every release, and it's very well-suited for my work.
So you don't think Adobe had to pay for that (and passed it onto customers)?
Not signifcantly, no. Look at the size of the devloper list for Photoshop, do some multiplication. Or look at the feature list changes for each revision, and estimate the increaed R&D cost given that. Then divide by number of units sold,... it just isn't that signficant.
Not for my work it doesn't. I want to like the GIMP, I really do. But it's nowhere near the color management and workflow features that I need. Now that I'm switching from drum-scanned film to images taken with a digital SLR (Canon 1Ds, 11MP), Photoshop CS's raw camera support is a need, not a want, Canon's own software for RAW conversion is useless.
What you say may very well be true for you. I want to like the GIMP, I don't like paying $600 when I don't have to. But, month after month, I keep on finding that for my business Photoshop is worth every penny.
Maybe if they didn't spend R&D time and money on useless features, their products would be more affordable."
That would be negligible compared to the rest of the product. Given that Photoshop Elements can be had pretty cheaply, I really don't see the point of this snarkiness.
You cannot be prosecuted more than once in the United states for a single crime, period, no matter how many jurisdictions you entered/exited in doing that crime.
Ahhh, but the same action can be seen as more than one crime, and each of those crimes can be prosecuted. If I were driving drunk with a child in my car, I could be cited for DUI and reckless endangerment. If it's illegal to send spam through a server in California by CA law, and through a Virginia server in VA law, I believe it would in fact be possible to prosecute both.
They cared because the computer involved had enough information to carry out identity theft on many, many folks, they were probably investigating this as a potential large-scale identity theft case, not just a computer theft.
They say the number of folks involved was "a small percentage... of Wells Fargo's 22 million customers." One percent would be 220,000 people. I don't know if it was even one percent, but I do know someone (not myself) who got a letter from Wells Fargo about the incident, I thin this was a very big loss of private data.
I wonder how much the last two parts are compared to the first steps.
I tried to get some numbers, but ran into some ambiguities in your question, and some difficulty getting matching numbers from the same source (because in part of standard accounting practices, which tend to lump advertising in with marketing and other costs.)
It looks like the answer depends a lot on what you mean by advertising. Most drug company advertising, from the reports I've found, is directed towards doctors. (This is most advertising by dollars spent.) That advertising includes the efforts the companies make to educate doctors about new pharmaceuticals, which involves drug salesman literally visiting doctors offices, presenting new material, answering questions, and so on. Without that level of advertising, it's pretty unlikely you'd get a new drug used in this country.
If you exclude that, then while there's still a lot of money spent on advertising, it's much less than the research and development costs. One source I found listed US$3e9 for total direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs, a number only slightly higher than Merck's R&D figure for 2002. Note that the latter figure does not include the administrative costs of filling out FDA paperwork, that goes in a separate column.
Since I focused on a big pharma company I'm also seeing a smaller relative number for research than I would for the whole industry, a lot of research is done in small companies that then sell themselves to big pharma if they get a hit, in order for their products to hit the market. From the point of view of Merck's financials, they'd be buying the research, but that wouldn't end up listed as research.
One final note: when you try and figure out the cost of creating a useful drug, it's important to not exclude the costs of all the research you had to give up on. Most drugs fail. The numbers I remember hearing (but you can check my facts) seemed to imply that US$1e9 was a good starting figure.
Slashdot Mirror
My claim that PS was the thing that breaks the bank for other people was a paraphrasing of your own words. Methinks you should consider your own advice.
Yeah, a thousand dollars for a computer, five thousand for a car, a thousand for a camera and some lenses, but $285 for a piece of software, yeah, that's what breaks their bank.
That having been said, I do think a lot of people want PS instead of Elements or PSP out of a sense of elitism, "having to have the best." I am not suggesting that's true of any specific person on this thread, but I bet it's pretty common. It's the syndrome that led to my dad buying a $10,000 camera he couldn't figure out how to use. I do not agree with your statement that "Photoshop is the best available tool" without more constraints than you put on it, I suspect for many people Elements or some such really is a better tool for their needs. As a pro, you know how painful detailed color management is, you've probably suffered with the vagaries of deep blacks in CYMK separations, and maybe have enjoyed the ability to reduce a tiny bit of chromatic aberration from the corners of the image from your $10K digital camera--aberration that wouldn't be visible on an 8x10 print. All of these things really do add to the complexity burden of using Photoshop (even if you don't use them), and, IMHO, for many people, make regular photoshop the software equivalent of buying a Humvee to go to the grocery store.
For me, the features that I doubt most amateurs need are things like CYMK and hexachrome color work, the ability to handle raw files from $7K digital cameras, and Pantone color matching. Can you tell me what it is specifically about PS that makes it better for you than PS Elements, PS LE, Paint Shop Pro, or the GIMP? If I knew what you did with it, I might be able to suggest a good workaround.
Long answer: Actually, most fine art nature photography is done with computers in the loop now. The problem really begins with the non-linearity of the chemical print-making process. Slide film captures color and vibrancy from scenes far better than print film, unfortunately, traditional chemical methods for making prints result in very increased contrast.
Now some people do a lot of post-processing in the darkroom to fix this. For anything but strict documentary photoraphy this has always been the case, I urge you to read some of the more technical books by Ansel Adams as an example.
However, this particular problem can be solved with technology, and it's pretty damn cool technology, too. Scan the slide with a drum scanner (a device which rotates the slide with a single light source and a single PMT reading the slide, it takes forever but you can pull enormous info out of a slide. Create the final print using the same chemistry (controlled temperature, reagents, etc.) and paper but instead of optically enlarging through the print, use computer controlled lasers. (I am not making this up.) The effect of the laser on the paper can be calibrated, and so reproducable prints with more normal contrast can be made. I'll leave the math as an exercise to the reader.
Those Ansel Adams books will also describe a lot of dodging and burning. I do some of that. I don't move mountains or cigarette butts, because that's my ethic of nature photography, but I do believe that some local contrast enhancement such as that done by dodging and burning can produce prints which are subjectively more accurate to "what I saw" than the film process otherwise allows. More detail could follow here, but I think you get the idea.
This technology also applies to 4-color printing. I do my own color separations for my notecards. I give the printing house digital represntations of the C, M, Y and K plates they should create for those cards, and they send me the results. It's a wonderful thing.
The computer can also be used to correct for deficiencies of technology. For example, even the best lenses, with good enough sensors or scanning, can show chromatic aberration. This is an artifact where red light (say) is imaged onto the film or sensor differently than green or blue. Oddly enough, computers can help fix this distortion, although it's quite minor in prints less than about 24x16".
I'm not a trucker, trucks aren't marketed to me, so I can steal a big rig?
Ones-complement--now that is old-fashioned. :)
If you're in school, you don't pay $650 for PSCS, since there are large student discounts (or were.)
and its formats are what you need if you have to send unfinished works to other image experts.
Actually, you'd send a TIFF or a JPG if you're sending electronically, but that would be rare in practice, more likely you'd send slides or prints. This is SOP with gallery submissions, working with art consultants, submissions to magazines and contests. No Photoshop required on that level. (Photoshop is very valuable, but not for that reason, in my experience.)
You probably feel the same way about my products, too. Pity, because I work my ass off producing them.
(I said this elsewhere, but it belongs here too.)
I think I hear it differently than you do, I disagree. I see Photoshop as a program very much aimed at a very real group of people who spend and make significant amounts of money doing graphics, photography or other art. There are other programs, such as Photoshop LE, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, and the GIMP which serve different markets with more or less success, all at lower prices, some free, or free bundled with hardware. But suggesting that a program that feeatures built-in support for the raw file format of a $7,000 camera isn't marketed at someone who complains about a $600 price tag isn't elitist, it's simply obvious. Me, I have that $7K camera, I need that feature, and $600 is absolutely a reasonable amount to pay for the overall functionality, for me.
It'd be cool to have a Humvee, too, and I could use some of its special functionality here and there, but it's too expensive for what I would use it for. I don't think they should stop making them just because of that, though, nor do I think the price is necessarily wrong for people who have different uses for it than I do.
Thank you! I'd rather have an old-fashioned complement than a mod point, any day.
However, I disagree with a lot of the rest. Adobe makes a nice business with both their $99 product and their $600 product. The idea that they would do financially better to lower their prices seems unlikely to me, the $99 product is a great product.
As far as Russian professionals, I'm sure there's a lot of stolen camera equipment marketed there too, after all, a Canon 1Ds costs $7000 and who can afford that? Still, both Canon and Adobe make a nice business with their tools, the idea that they'd do better to lower their prices in both cases seems to lack rationality.
Perhaps their not supposed to have professionals.
Most professionals (in any country) in the art business actually work for companies, which are even more likely to be able to afford tools like the 1Ds and Photoshop CS.
I think I hear it differently than you do, I disagree. I see Photoshop as a program very much aimed at a very real group of people who spend and make significant amounts of money doing graphics, photography or other art. There are other programs, such as Photoshop LE, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, and the GIMP which serve different markets with more or less success, all at lower prices, some free, or free bundled with hardware. But suggesting that a program that feeatures built-in support for the raw file format of a $7,000 camera isn't marketed at someone who complains about a $600 price tag isn't elitist, it's simply obvious. Me, I have that $7K camera, I need that feature, and $600 is absolutely a reasonable amount to pay for the overall functionality, for me.
It'd be cool to have a Humvee, too, and I could use some of its special functionality here and there, but it's too expensive for what I would use it for. I don't think they should stop making them just because of that, though, nor do I think the price is necessarily wrong for people who have different uses for it than I do.
This whole $600 diatribe on this thread, with regard to the anti-counterfitting measures, is nonsense anyhow. The same measures are almost certainly in Photoshop Elements. The idea that the cost of the anti-counterfitting software is substantial is shown to be false by that fact alone.
How are you going to aquire experience and practice, if you're unable to use the necessary tools?
I'd suggest looking at Adobe's student pricing, if you're serious about learning.
Of course, it's not like Photoshop is any dream to learn to use well, but at least it works well for experineced power users.
What are you going to use it for? If you're just going to use it for some web images, light inkjet printing duties, that sort of thing, I'd agree there's no reason to buy it. Of course, Adobe Photoshop Elements at $99 would be even cheaper, if that works for you.
For me, a lot of the weird esoteric stuff that Photoshop does, stuff you may not even know PS does, is something I use everyday in my business. Better color management. Raw file import from high-end DSLRs. Adjustment layers (which are important for workflow.) You're right, if you don't need this stuff, you can do a lot better than PS. That doesn't mean that Adobe is wrong, it just means that you want a different product.
Actually, most Photoshop owners I know, myself included did pay for it. Adobe offers special pricing (or used to) for students, a lot of folks get started out that way. A lot of the owners of PSCS I know of are businesses, it's just not worth breaking the law to get a good product that does its job.
It's weird, but PS is the piece of software I mind paying for least. It's amazingly stable, it continues to provide significant new features and functionality in every release, and it's very well-suited for my work.
Gimp at least has those features, have you considered that?
I am a professional photographer. It is obvious to me that Photoshop is worth every penny.
Not signifcantly, no. Look at the size of the devloper list for Photoshop, do some multiplication. Or look at the feature list changes for each revision, and estimate the increaed R&D cost given that. Then divide by number of units sold, ... it just isn't that signficant.
What you say may very well be true for you. I want to like the GIMP, I don't like paying $600 when I don't have to. But, month after month, I keep on finding that for my business Photoshop is worth every penny.
That would be negligible compared to the rest of the product. Given that Photoshop Elements can be had pretty cheaply, I really don't see the point of this snarkiness.
Ahhh, but the same action can be seen as more than one crime, and each of those crimes can be prosecuted. If I were driving drunk with a child in my car, I could be cited for DUI and reckless endangerment. If it's illegal to send spam through a server in California by CA law, and through a Virginia server in VA law, I believe it would in fact be possible to prosecute both.
But then, IANAL.
They cared because the computer involved had enough information to carry out identity theft on many, many folks, they were probably investigating this as a potential large-scale identity theft case, not just a computer theft.
They say the number of folks involved was "a small percentage ... of Wells Fargo's 22 million customers." One percent would be 220,000 people. I don't know if it was even one percent, but I do know someone (not myself) who got a letter from Wells Fargo about the incident, I thin this was a very big loss of private data.
I tried to get some numbers, but ran into some ambiguities in your question, and some difficulty getting matching numbers from the same source (because in part of standard accounting practices, which tend to lump advertising in with marketing and other costs.)
It looks like the answer depends a lot on what you mean by advertising. Most drug company advertising, from the reports I've found, is directed towards doctors. (This is most advertising by dollars spent.) That advertising includes the efforts the companies make to educate doctors about new pharmaceuticals, which involves drug salesman literally visiting doctors offices, presenting new material, answering questions, and so on. Without that level of advertising, it's pretty unlikely you'd get a new drug used in this country.
If you exclude that, then while there's still a lot of money spent on advertising, it's much less than the research and development costs. One source I found listed US$3e9 for total direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs, a number only slightly higher than Merck's R&D figure for 2002. Note that the latter figure does not include the administrative costs of filling out FDA paperwork, that goes in a separate column.
Since I focused on a big pharma company I'm also seeing a smaller relative number for research than I would for the whole industry, a lot of research is done in small companies that then sell themselves to big pharma if they get a hit, in order for their products to hit the market. From the point of view of Merck's financials, they'd be buying the research, but that wouldn't end up listed as research.
One final note: when you try and figure out the cost of creating a useful drug, it's important to not exclude the costs of all the research you had to give up on. Most drugs fail. The numbers I remember hearing (but you can check my facts) seemed to imply that US$1e9 was a good starting figure.