Upgrade tradmil
If they fix the bugs instead of bloating it up with useless features to justify the next upgrade it might be worth subscribing. I have been skipping 2 or 3 versions up until now.
Adobe's second quarter net income eased on poor European demand as well as its move to take Creative Suite into the cloud. Net income eased 2.4 per cent to $223.8m from $229.4m in the same quarter of last year. Adobe also said that it was cutting its revenue growth estimate for the full year, blaming the economic crisis in …
Doesn't work like that though because it's a sliding scale.
Lets look at Production Premium CS6. All ex VAT.
Upgrade from CS3 - £794 (this is a time limited offer to get people to upgrade)]
Upgrade from CS4 - £794
Upgrade from CS5 - £595
Upgrade from CS5.5 - £357
These prices also reflect additions to the suite etc. There are two genuinely new pieces of software in CS6 for us video guys so its probably worth it as they offer considerable workflow improvements.
Cloud? It's just a subscription model! They'll gouge users per seat once they have got rid of those of us who like to buy our software up front.
Heaven help any wildlife editors who find themselves working in the deepest jungle for months on end who suddenly find their software has disabled itself because it hasn't contacted the Adobe servers lately. Or edit suites that might not be connected to the internet for security reasons etc.
Mind you Adobe have been building to this with yearly updates and hefty upgrade fees for anyone who falls behind more than 1 version. Many editors used to only upgrade every few years. Now they have to upgrade every year or else.
I agree with Tom. We only upgraded LR to get functionality with the new Canon 5D III. Before that it was PS7 and then CS3. Only upgraded to CS5 again for compatibility with new cameras. LR still doesn't work nicely with networks, and don't even think of being able to work on networked files switching between laptop and desktop without practically copying all your work each time you swap (must be the only cloudy company that doesn't know about the existance of networks)
As for skipping upgrades; the upgrade saves so little that you only have to skip 2 updates to save money. You don't miss much; the nice tech they showed off as new 2 years ago didn't even make it into the version only just released :( Oh and the same bugs are just carried over too.
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GIMP isn't an acceptable replacement for Photoshop for most professional purposes. The big killers are that they're still working on getting support for more than 8 bits per channel into the main code base, and seem to have no announced plans with respect to CMYK. In terms of many of the professionals that use Photoshop, the extraordinarily lazy official OS X port (ie, it's X11 based*) and out-of-date third party versions (eg, Gimp.app is still at 2.6.0) is an issue too. And that's without even getting started on the interface, which isn't just different from Photoshop but often in direct contradiction to the norms on both Windows and OS X.
That being said, I personally consider it invaluable — entirely as a non-professional, you understand.
(*) which means it takes forever to run, uses widgets with different behaviour from the rest of the OS, fills your hard disk with hundreds of megabytes of 'font caches' as it duplicates functionality built into the OS, etc. It's the way X11 apps run on the Mac I'm complaining about, and nothing more.
GIMP isn't an acceptable replacement for Photoshop for most professional purposes.
I disagree heartily. As a professional web developer with access to both Photoshop and GIMP I find myself using GIMP far more often. Maybe things are different on the print side of things. I can certainly see how the lack of CMYK would hamper a print designer, but for my purposes there's really nothing I would do with Photoshop that I can't do with GIMP. Often I can even get things done faster with GIMP because I've used it far many, many years whereas I've only had Photoshop for couple of years.
" GIMP because I've used it far many, many years whereas I've only had Photoshop for couple of years."
For 99% of imaging people it's the other way around. Plus, I've got to say it, Photoshop is a fantastic piece of software: never crashes, fast for what it does, great memory management - I can work on huge files - and some of the features are pretty incredible. I think it's the most stable and effective piece of consumer software I've ever used, and compared to the steaming pile that is Acrobat it's a wonder they're written by the same company.
Given the company's approach to European customers (rip off pricing), It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out why Creative Cloud sales are disappointing in Europe. Arrogant companies fail, Adobe has the chance to redeem itself, let's hope they take it - REAL SOON NOW.
aren't stopping me upgrading, but Adobe's "bleed 'em dry" pricing does. I'll wait for a year or so, when upgrades appear at more acceptable prices on eBay. As for the subscription service, if the costs were more tolerable for single seat operations such as my home-based one, I might consider it, but for those prices I want it delivered in a gold leaf covered mahogany box by Charlize Theron - naked.
"upgrades appear at more acceptable prices on eBay."
You'll be able to wave goodbye to that soon. Adobe would do away with boxed versions today if they could. Only thing stopping them is that they don't want to take the hit of upsetting the resellers. But slowly everything is moving towards direct download from their site.
Like it or not, a huge failing for broad professional adoption is its name.
On top of that hobby photographers I've recommended it to were under the impression it was Linux only. The ones that then tried it eventually bought Photoshop when they could.
I used it for years before I got Photoshop, and I keep an eye on how they're doing with it - but it's a long way from being as accomplished an image editing tool as Photoshop no matter how much I, and my wallet, would like that not to be the case.
Adobe used to make such great, world-changing products.
Now, everything they touch ends up nerfed in some way.
I'd be sorry for them except I was given a copy of the complete National Geographic for Christmas, and the Adobe AIR reader it came with and is useless without is a nightmare, incapable of remembering the zoom my tired old eyes require from page to page and periodically (hahaha) locking up as I browse.
Regardless of feature set, photoshop just isn't that expensive compared to the GIMP to make people swap away from the industry standard. £500 isn't even the cost of one lens, and is probably what the average photographer has spend on carry cases so for software this really is quite cheap to them.