News: Adobe's new upgrade policy...

[Michael Seltzer]

I didn't see anything posted here, though it seems unlikely I'd be the first on the forums to know about this (I'm never the first to know), but Adobe has changed there upgrade policy: starting with CS6 (due out shortly) only owners of CS5 or 5.5 will get upgrade pricing. Everyone else will have to pay full price. So from now on it's either upgrade every time or wait it out long enough to justify the $800 or so it will cost to buy new.

This is part of a disturbing trend (like the .5 upgrades). As someone over at the NAPP forums has pointed out (chuckzwood), I think this is related to the annual cloud-subscriptions: Adobe is going to an annual fee basis no matter what--either subscription or forced upgrades each time a new version comes out. If so, in the near future, the cloud-based subscription may be the only option available.

I can't afford that. There are probably others like me as well, maybe a lot of us out there, who depend on PS in our work, but don't have the resources to upgrade every time, or buy a subscription. Adobe can do this because they are really the only game in town. So I have a suggestion. It may sound like an angry, knee-jerk reaction, but it's been fulminating for awhile, and it's a serious suggestion…

Open a fund. If everyone who owns PS now would contribute $100 (half the cost to upgrade PS alone) to the fund, we could put together a sizable amount. Then we could use the fund to hire a core team of programmers/designers, and support the development of an open source editor that could really do the job. Probably best to start with what's out there, something like the GIMP. And there are good programmers out there with experience in graphic/photo editing. Fabbio Riccardi comes to mind--Lightzone was an innovative program. I have no connection with Lightzone, it's just a thought to show that the resources necessary to do this are available, if the community is interested.

Once underway, we could look at developing other programs as open source, vector-graphics and page-layout, but probably best to start with the basic editor.

We need options, no matter why Adobe is making these decisions. In an increasingly digitally-based art world, having one program able to exert this much control is unhealthy.

[jake klein]

I thought they are doing this so that users of older copies cannot jump all the way to the latet and greatest for such a low cost. Do you think an owner of CS3 should be able to leap all the way to CS6 after a 5 year gap?

Now about this:

"Adobe is going to an annual fee basis no matter what--either subscription or forced upgrades each time a new version comes out. If so, in the near future, the cloud-based subscription may be the only option available."

This is bad though, I don't see how they could do this. They would lose business from a large percentage of hobby shooters. But then, I'm not sure what percentage of hobby shooters there are compared to pros, who can easily write off the software upgraes each year during tax season, or spread the additional cost into their pricing throughout the year.

Or they're realizing they can't stop the pirates, so if you want to keep a licensed version you'll have to pay to play. Sad.

[Charles L Webster]

No one is forcing you to upgrade or to continue using Adobe products.

If you're a pro, it's not a problem to pay for annual updates. If not, just keep your current version, or start evaluating some of the other solutions.

Most amateur photographers don't use, or need, the full suite of features that the current Photoshop offers. So why keep paying for them?

At the company where I worked before retiring, a software audit discovered 1,300 bootleg copies of Photoshop on the company's 4,000 computers. That's what Adobe is trying to prevent.

[Jerome Marot]

Originally Posted by Michael Seltzer

Open a fund. If everyone who owns PS now would contribute $100 (half the cost to upgrade PS alone) to the fund, we could put together a sizable amount. Then we could use the fund to hire a core team of programmers/designers, and support the development of an open source editor that could really do the job.

I don't believe that. As you should know, there are other image editors, written by competitors, for example Corel Photo Paint. At the time that program was still available for the Mac, I used it and found that it was a quite plausible alternative to photoshop. Whatever you'll manage to write with the fund is unlikely to be any better than Corel Photo Paint, which has been developed for a decade with the financial means of a major software design firm. At their pinnacle Corel had 50 millions users and a revenue of 250 million $.

Yet, as you also now, Photo Paint or the other competitors are far from having the popularity of Photoshop amongst pro photographers. Why is that so?

The reasons are threefold:
-first, there is a lot of teaching material and software (like actions and plugins) which are available for photoshop and nothing else
-second, people are used to a software and don't want to learn a new interface. Pros don't have time.
-third, and maybe most importantly, photoshop has become a synonym of "I am a real pro and not an amateur". At the time I used Photo Paint, I was looked down by colleagues using the "real" photoshop who insisted that it could not do what I knew it could very well do.

These three reasons are not likely to be changed by a community-funded effort.

[Jerome Marot]

Originally Posted by Charles L Webster

Most amateur photographers don't use, or need, the full suite of features that the current Photoshop offers.

Most pro photographers don't use or need the full suite of features that the current Photoshop offers either.