The photographic world is up in arms right now because Adobe announced that they are ending the “Creative Suite” line of products and moving everything, with a few exceptions, to the “Creative Cloud.” This means that you will no longer be able to buy programs like Photoshop, but will have to subscribe to the software. I have seen tons of tweets, G+ posts and Facebook updates about people talking about alternatives to Photoshop and how the idea of “subscribing” to software doesn’t sit well with them. Truth be told, I was not such a huge fan of the model when it was first introduced some time ago, but the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense to me.
I currently use Lightroom for 100% of the images I create. For my conventional photography I use Photoshop about 10% of the time, but for my IR work I use Photoshop 100% of the time. I also use an older version of Premier Elements for some of my time lapse videos. When you factor in the cost of upgrading Lightroom and Photoshop when new versions come out, the Creative Cloud might not make much sense, but when you factor in the ability to now use Premier Pro, that changes the game for me. I think it would for a lot of people, but I sort of question if it is actually a matter of cost that has a lot of photographers upset about all of this?
It is probably no secret, but Photoshop is one of the most pirated pieces of software out there. One of the reasons for this is that Adobe charges, IMO, way to much for it. It seems to me that one of the reasons for Adobe to make this bold of a move is to actually crack down on the number of “illegal” copies of Photoshop, and other Creative Suite products that are floating around out there, and if that is indeed the reason, it is hard for me to fault them for that. I have always found it very ironic that certain photographers will get upset if one of their copyright is violated for an image that was processed with pirated software.
As I said, the Creative Cloud makes sense for me, and I have been planning on subscribing anyway, but who knows what the future holds. In a perfect world Adobe will come up with some sort of “ala carte” pricing module where you can select 2 or 3 products of your choice, but as I said, that would be in a perfect world.
