Traditional Photoshop is going away (1 Viewer)

It appears that Photoshop CS6 will be the last version of Photoshop sold in the traditional manner. Adobe has just announced Photoshop CC (which stands for Creative Cloud) and apparently has stated that there will be limited support (and no significant upgrades) to Photoshop CS6 or other standalone products. To stay with Photoshop (and get updates and fixes), you will need to sign up for a cloud based subscription. I’ve found a US website that lets you switch to Photoshop CC from various older versions for $9.99 / month for the first year. At current prices, it switches to $19.99 per month after the first year to keep your subscription going. Adobe is also offering a Creative Cloud membership (includes Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Lightroom and much more) at a first year introductory rate of $19.99 / year – that one switches to a regular price of $49.99 / month after the first year. I signed up for Creative Cloud a year ago (at $29.99 / month) to try the various Adobe products that I couldn’t justify buying. Other than Acrobat Pro and Photoshop CS6, I didn’t find the time to really learn or use the other products and could not justify continuing at $49.99 / month. So this weekend, just before my subscription ran out, I ordered the Photoshop CS6 upgrade, only to find today that old fashioned CS6 will no longer be upgraded and will have minimal support. That’s my typical timing.

Oh well. Here is the US link if you have Photoshop and are interested in moving to Photoshop CC at a decent introductory price. I originally came to the Adobe (US) website from a different direction and these special prices didn’t shown – that is also annoying to me. I hope they have similar promotions for other countries. I saw on another site that the normal UK price for Adobe Creative Cloud is over $70 / month at US prices (that is really steep).

https://creative.adobe.com/plans?plan=offers&promoid=KFHQB

If anyone wonders about using the cloud based products, I found that they work just like the downloaded update versions. The software does not “stream” from the cloud; it downloads and doesn’t require a constant Internet connection to run. They also do a good job of keeping the software updated when it is delivered this way.

Thanks for that.

Update: I went back to the special offer page posted on my first link. I see that you can select a wide variety of currencies, so it appears that the offer is not limited to US customers.

What about "Elements"? Also only to be available on a subscription basis?

CS6 is still available to buy, but it will be the last of the line.

Elements and Lightroom will stay as a one-off purchase product.

Mono said:

Elements and Lightroom will stay as a one-off purchase product.

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Thanks--good to hear.

They don't plan to eliminate standalone Elements or Lightroom at this point. Lightroom 5 is due out in a few months.

There is a lot of discussion about the impact of this direction by Adobe. The move to subscription/cloud based software seems to be common as Microsoft is headed the same direction.

The big worry is about what happens when you leave the service. Will you lose earlier edits, will you have to convert large amounts of older files, etc? The fear is that the prices will increase from introductory rates and you will be locked into the system to maintain access to older files. At this point there are no long term commitments.

While they are not making the move for Lightroom right now, it seems likely that they will move future Lightroom and Elements releases to the same type subscription model.

The files are yours they are stored on your computer, if you choose to store them in the cloud as well then that is up to you. The software is downloaded to and installed on your computer as before but every month it has to check online to see you are still paying otherwise it stops working. If you stop the subscription then you will not be able to use that Adobe product but there is nothing to stop you using another program to further edit/view the files. The problem is if you have you files saved in the latest version of a propriety format. that is not some much an issue with Photoshop as most folk will save a jpg or tiff but does matter if you use other Adobe products such as InDesign or Illustrator. If you were to stop using the latest cloud only version then you would loose the ability to open them, you would have to first resave them in a older version.

I think the price point and market of Elements and Lightroom rules out a move to subscription model. The old retail price of full Photoshop equates to about 2 1/2 years of cloud subs for Photoshop, the price gets better if you use multiple Adobe products. If you apply that to Elements then the £70 sticker price would be £2 a month, hardly worth their while to set up such a scheme.

The main losers of the subs plan are those folk who don't upgrade every few years. Plus those who have just paid for CS6 and have upstream clients who use the Creative Cloud.

The issue is with files that have been edited with PS. Normally, you would want to pick up that file and resize it or possibly tweak the file for a particular output - often for the original client. But having to go back to an original RAW file could mean you lose all the edits. Going to a flattened TIFF would mean you would lose the ability to adjust layers and edits would be baked into the file to be used by another program. But you could not selectively remove any of those edits either - its an all or nothing approach.

This is both a matter of workflow and Adobe's policy for handling legacy edits. It could be as simple as a cloud utility that allows you to re-process for a desired output with existing edits.

This is especially problematic if the approach goes to Lightroom where you are working with a RAW file and edits appended in a sidecar.

As far as I know, Photo Mechanic is the only program that currently allows access to the result of edited RAW files in different editing programs.

Very Interesting reading

My understanding is that you don't have to subscribe to the service. You can still purchase the suite, or individual programs and download and install it/them on your computer as in previous versions. It is a choice, either the creative cloud subscription package or buying individual programs.

The subscription offers you more "bells and whistles" and access to more programs than buying individual programs, but there are cost trade-offs with a monthly subscription fee.

Storing your files on a cloud-based host is something you can choose to do. My files are stored on the computer and backed up externally as always.

My workflow with CS6 hasn't changed. I have purchased 4 licenses for our Marketing/graphics department and the only issue is that saving files over an IT network (no files are saved on local hard-drives) has led to some corruption issues. A cost-analysis showed it was not worth the cost to subscribe and better for us to buy the programs.

Julian H said:

My understanding is that you don't have to subscribe to the service. ..........

My workflow with CS6 hasn't changed.......

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Well, here is how I understood the situation.

CS6 is and will be the last version you can "own", i.e. buy and install on your computer and use without additional costs as long as the hardware -also of future new computers- will permit. For how much longer one can purchase CS6 and if file formats of newer camera models will be readable by a still updated (?) raw converter is the open question.
So as long as the copy you own offers the functions you need and runs on your hardware nothing will change for the user. However, with new OS and hardware in the future there is a chance that at one point old software will not run on new machines.........

From now on you will not own CS versions >6 anymore, you just rent them in the form of a subscription. Once you stop paying for your subscription you will have no more access to the software. Maybe the generic CS file format generated while you were working with CS as a subscriber can be processed by 3rd party software like gimp. If not you will be sitting on a lot of GBs of cryptic data until you subscribe to CS again......