Bid Photoshop Adieu – Some Alternative Software Choices
Adobe has finally jumped the shark. They announced Monday that after CS6, they aren’t going to sell Photoshop anymore, they are going to license it for $29.99/mo from the cloud. $30 a month? Really? All the people who bought a version and kept it until it was completely dead (me, included) are going to see a serious sticker shock. In their mind, it’s $about $400 a year, the same as buying a new version of Photoshop every year. Well, only corporations buy a new copy of Photoshop every year. I treat Photoshop like cars – I buy them and use them until they are dead and/or no longer serve my needs.
It’s expensive software, and I think that’ll be the end of Photoshop for a lot of people. I love it, but that sounds abysmal. And some speculate it’s to ward off rampant piracy, which sounds right for about 2 seconds until you consider that 1) there wouldn’t need to be piracy if it were priced at all reasonably and 2) they allow for the piracy for that very reason. They could’ve locked it down long ago, but to be seen as the market leader, everyone has to agree that it’s THE software to use. If that base had been limited to corporations, they’d never have gained the foothold they have now.
I’d sworn off Aperture because I didn’t want another Apple product, since they’ve been very predatory/ customer unfriendly the last few years, but at this point, Apple seems like a nonprofit compared to Adobe. Here’s a link to the announcement:
I feel sorry for all the people who make their living from Photoshop-related products, like makers of plugins and Actions and photoshop books and videos, because it’s going to start to dwindle as soon as CS6 can’t run on some future operating system. They aren’t just affecting themselves, they are damaging an ecosystem.
So in honor of Photoshop’s imminent pop-culture death, here are some links to some other software you’d better start to pay attention to:
Photoline
Acorn
and last but certainly not least,
Lightroom is affordable, but in addition to the fact that you simply can’t do all the things you can in Photoshop, a lot of people are going to be wary of Adobe products. The fact that you’d have to shell out another $400-$600 for a new version of Photoshop if you bought a new camera because they won’t update the RAW support for anything other than the newest Photoshop was already very costly and annoying. This last move is just unnecessary and ridiculous. And the corporate greed that is so rampant at both the companies I mentioned helps separate people across a large digital divide. Assuming that everyone has high speed internet and can use a cloud? Wrong. (I do, but I’ve been on high speed since the olden days of DSL filters and ISDN). Assuming that even those who have high speed want to be crippled by the constraints of their internet connection? Wrong.
Boo hiss.
