Adobe turns subscription screw again, telling users to pay up or downgrade New generative AI products mean new higher prices for individual Adobe Creative Cloud customers, unless they downgrade to a version with fewer features. Less than two years after Adobe hiked prices for Creative Cloud All Apps customers, the Photoshop giant has done it again. This time, however, it isn't just increasing prices …
Here we have Adobe Corporation, king of the price gougers. All this latest move will will do produce more sales for Serif Europe's Affinity range of products. Gimp 3 has also seen a useful improvement, particularly when combined with PhotoGimp 3 patch so they might also get more users.
They have even made Photoshop Elements into a 3 year perma-rental product as well and that really is unacceptable.
Serif was bought by Canva who for the moment are keeping the one off purchase but looking to introduce a subscription model "alongside" and we've ALL heard that one before....
Inkscape is free, open source (iirc) and "industry standard " (no matter what the pro Adobe zeitgeist is, I've seen a growing number of creative roles naming knowledge of inkscape as a must or a strongly desired. Even seen a few with "Adobe suite or equivalent" which speaks volumes of the feelings of smaller companies in particular about Adobe's sub model....
Inkscape is fine but that's really an alternative to Illustrator/ Designer not Photoshop/ Photo
One advantage of Adobe / Affinity is the ability to easily flip between programs when working on a project.
As for Canva, im fairly confident they are not get rid of the pay once, use forever model, rather than subs. What you may see is an integration option, so you can push between the two products, probably on a subs model.
Affinity is great but it lacks some tools to reach parity with Adobe, a video editor being the biggest.
I didn't know Serif was bought by Canva, that's not great news. It would vahe been a better fit for Black Magic Design to pair Affinity with their DaVinci Resolve video editor and offer a full packade.
Open source video editor KDEnLive is my go to and I find it far more premiere like than openshot or davinci resolve it.
Zbrush is a piece of software my wife loves and I love to hate, the colour scheme is rancid, the menus break the whole window standard of file menu being first, it crashes for fun and yet it's evangelised as if it was written by the almighty themselves....
I have the "Photography plan (20GB) " that's going from $14.29 AUD a month to $23.99 AUD a month, a sixty percent price hike for the exact same software.
(as we already have ai gen. bullshit, that's developed, paid for, in there)
It was already a rip paying monthly for the same product, but this is the straw that broke this camels back, screw adobe, there's plenty of perfectly cromulent alternatives out there, I already own a lifetime Luminar Neo licence I got on a humble bundle the other year, I'll just switch to that and pay nothing no more.
Although GIMP lacks familiarity to most Adobe customers, and also may not yet be as slick for all intended purposes, it already interfaces to AI at a simple level. Given that image processing now is a cutting-edge area among developers and users, we should anticipate Adobe facing a bumpy ride. Also, cloud-based services drawing upon private information may become unpopular.
Who is going to pay for creating the model, yet alone hosting it?
Open source doesn't really work with projects that need a massive initial investment. It's historically been decades behind the commercial alternatives for e.g. speech recognition, OCR or language translation. AI will be no different.
I dumped their shit 10 years ago, I won't even use Reader anymore because of the garbage included with their shitware of the day. There is plenty of other software for the casual user to use, and for the "Professional" I hope you understand that you don't own or control anything you allow to their "Cloud".
Requirement for your physical passkey to be permanently inserted / webcam activated and facial recognition used to disable the software if anyone other than the authorised user sits at the computer or auto bills per detected face for another user for another year at the highest price tier (for your convenience and interruption free usage of course....)
Please tell me that you are NOT suprised by this !!!
This is how subscription payment models work !!!
Once you have decided that you MUST use this app you are on the hook ... stop complaining and keep paying !!!
This is why everyone is trying to convert their payment model to a subscription model ... many people will keep on paying because they cannot afford [pun intended] to use another app.
Isn't capitalism (AKA 'pure greed') wonderful !!!
:)
At this point, Adobe isn’t so much a software company as it is a subscription tollbooth for legacy file formats. The idea that we keep paying more just to access the same three tools wrapped in shinier UI is almost performance art.
Frankly, Adobe should be bought by EU and handed over to a university or nonprofit and fully open-sourced. There’s no real innovation going on (slapping AI filters on everything isn’t R&D, it’s denial). The core products are functionally done. Photoshop peaked when they added layers.
Treat it like infrastructure: water, power, bin collection... and Photoshop, Acrobat. All essential, all better when not held hostage by shareholder expectations.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe's execs secretly dream of someone taking it off their hands. Maintaining this monolith is probably more of a burden than a business now.
My life is punctuated by periodical events: Seasons, aging, and equally unsuccessful attempts to lose weight or to learn Gimp at the most basic level (like editing different layers). I lost a bit of weight, but Gimp I fully gave up on.
As for Adobe - I don't think they'll lose any sleep over outrage.
No business ever so slightly and remotely related to design would use anything else. It simply HAS to use Macs and Adobe. It's a prerequisite of hiring manpower in a highly volatile job market, where designers are hired and fired as projects come and go.
I'm talking grunt design, not haute couture star designer names and devil wears Prada stuff. Those baby & toddler sets at Target, those Snoopy t-shirts - they all get coughed out in quantities by armies of designers and artists that have to account for a million little details. They don't have the time for a missed copy/paste, or for a selection pointer that switches from x to y or whatever. They have plenty of stuff to deal with already, and they simply don't have the time to switch to other tools or platforms, on their money.
Whatever these companies have to pay in Adobe subscriptions and Mac overpricing is offset by the availability of easily replaceable designers. No company in their right mind would shrink their hiring pool to 1/20th or 1/50th of their usual by requiring designers to work on PCs and / or on Adobe alternatives.
Retraining a seasoned designer to just use the same Adobe product on a PC rather than on a Mac would be a very tall order requiring real dedication and time. And many would flat out refuse and look elsewhere. And that's just the change of shortcuts and keys.
Retraining for a different design suite would be close to impossible, unless paid time is dedicated to this as part of a specific project.
The PC vs Mac part might be changing, although - if you're in New York city and your designers are locally trained - they all come from schools where they've seen nothing but Macs. But the Adobe vs anything else part is a no go.
The occasional star that would get hired and would require Gimp on a PC will be gladly obliged, and whatever's needed will be purchased. But the majority of the flock will float Adobe on Mac.
It's not about workflows.
It's about the little automatisms that a seasoned "short order" artist (like a short order cook) is used to. Shortcuts, palettes, interfaces commands... what a drag and drop would do on one system vs the other...
The workflows themselves don't differ much. The steps are the same. The tools are the same. But start dragging around, dealing with network paths, etc - and little differences start to compound like snow you'd push with your wheels.
Add to that the purely Mac habits that every such designer would have, such as - in a non-exhaustive list:
- Open a dozen or two Illustrator files that start at 500mb each (I'm talking 15 yrs ago here, I'm not sure what the standard is today), on a network share, leave them open for 10 days, and expect them to stay there and not crash because every evening you turn off your computer by turning off the screen.
- Do some insanity like dropping some 600mb file depicting a button that you can zoom to a microscopic level in a file depicting a coat, that is itself 400mb only, and zoom out the button to scale not realizing or not caring that all the data is still baked in. A mac would choke on this and take some time, eventually crunching it through. The designer will simply know that their machine is slow.
A PC will die a horrible, horrible death, crashing, and rightfully so.
- Basically - bake mistakes into the process, that you'd never care to fix because well. It works, and you don't have time for that crap, plus you can ask for a new computer.
Here we're talking Mac vs PC rather than Adobe vs something else, but they mostly go together. At least - as of a few years ago, because I'm no longer in that specific field - a Mac + Adobe combo would be more forgiving.
There's stuff I'm missing and forgetting as well. But in short - this was the combo that worked, with THAT specific type of professionals, and there's a BOATLOAD of them.
A posed, non-stressed, not under time constraints professional will have the time, ability and desire to invest into what is best, possibly learning to deal with the idiosyncrasies that different equipment and software products will bring.
A short-order artist won't have time for that crap, literally. If their company tries to push that on them - they might be able to, if they train them on company time. If they simply drop the change of them - most would simply quit and go elsewhere, as that specific market is very dynamic.
You are talking about 15 years ago.
I use MacOS but MacOS has been so unstable and slow with SMB shares for years its not funny and they deprecated AFP long ago after MacOS classic ended. I use an M3 Macbook Air with 24 gb ram for form factor and battery life but I have to run everything via secondary Windows machine or VM to backup to my corporate NFS.
This certainly used to be the case, and a lot of that I'd put down to Adobe historically ignoring the widespread piracy of Photoshop, which meant it was freely available to young kids everywhere. Some of those kids would become designers, and when hired, they'd ask for a (fully legit and thus, pricey) copy of Photoshop, which the business would then buy for them.
I suspect Adobe's shift to subscription based software, has slowly choked off the supply of new designers who insist on Photoshop, but this will take a decade or two to work it's way through the industry.
...and a lot of that I'd put down to Adobe historically ignoring the widespread piracy of Photoshop...
If Adobe was historically ignoring widespread piracy they wouldn't have been the first to come up with the mandatory subscription model and shove it down the throat of everybody, thus opening the path for everybody else :)
I was on the receiving end of the phone when this happened and Adobe sellers started calling and trying us to switch to subscription almost daily.
It invariably would go like:
Ad: Switch to subscription, it's way better and betterest and then even better than that !!!
Me: Sure, but that will cost us $20k/yr. For Illustrator only. We currently pay $20k every time a Mac generation changes, because we are fully operational with the old version of Illustrator, we use it in a specific way that works, and the new features are useless to us. The only event that forces us to upgrade to a new perpetual license is when a Mac breaks and I can't fix it, because the new ones come with an OS that is high enough to REQUIRE a newer (not the newest) version of Illustrator. So we are ballpark at $20k every five years or so, because I'm quite comfortable fixing them. Our workflow doesn't change, and we are using a tool that works.
Ad: Crickets...
Me: So, respectfully, we don't need to switch to a subscription model and I have instructed everybody even remotely able to sign agreements to not communicate with you when you try to push this on u...
Ad: Switch to subscription, it's way better and betterest and then even better than that !!!
So we stretched it as much as we could. Of course, eventually, we got swept into it as well.
And btw, the article is not only about Photoshop, it's about the whole suite I believe. Illustrator is the main tool in many businesses. Not sure what alternatives exist to that one.
Affinity Designer is an alternative. It's more basic than Illustrator, but has all the features many people need. If you were OK with older versions of Illustrator, I'm sure you would be OK with Affinity Designer.
I switched fully away from Adobe when Affinity Photo was released in 2015. Now I use Affinity Photo / Designer for graphics work and DaVinci Resolve / FCPX for video. Never looked back.
My wife was looking for some Adobe products - mostly Photoshop, and some InDesign -- because of the industry she works in just before one of the previous price hikes / gouge.
Ended up using a lower cost alternatives - Serif is a good shout....
Adobe tryung to stay relevant on name/reputation but losing both....
The only reason people use their software, is employers demanding applicants have skills in Adobe software. Thats it. Otherwise everyone would be using Affinity and Corel at this point.
Its an industry gate keeping barrier for design careers nothing more. Most good designers that deserve to be hired should be able to adapt quickly.
Davinci, Vegas and Final Cut at least provide some decent competition in the video editing space.
The only reason people use their software... is NOT employers demanding of applicants... I use it in my business. For the $56 a month, honestly that's a bargain. You get everything they do and it comes out at way cheaper than what they used to charge for buying the software previously in version cycles, without all the extras that you get today. That $56 a month enables my business to generate revenue of $10,000s per month.
These prices are for yanks only, although I'm not naive to know that I will see them down the line, but the Adobe bashing is tiring.
A single $56 subscription allows you to generate $10k+?
Most creative businesses have a net margin of around 8-10% once overheads and directors salaries are properly accounted for (ie not hidden in dividends).
What sort of services are you delivering that allows for a single person to be generating more than $10k per month with just this software suite?
I'm not arguing that you don't feel it's good value, for you it might well be. But when you're in most creative agencies, subscriptions for software is a meaningful chunk of your cost base and increasing far faster than the rate card can.
Meanwhile when you purchase the excellent video editor NLE Blackmagic Design's Davinci Resolve, you get new updates for free.
I don't mind proprietary as long as the software is great and the business model fair. Here's hoping that Blackmagic Design stays privately owned and keeps it's sound business model.
Krita and Gimp are my go-tos for open source photo/image editing.
Not sure if people still use the last non-subscription Photoshop and Premiere but presumably newer image formats are not supported.
What annoys me about DaVinci resolve is that their Linux support is pretty second rate. They require you use a RHEL compatible distro which even then sometime breaks the software due to dependency issues. It doesn't support AAC audio on Linux even in the paid versions, despite Black magic being part of the MPEG forum so the cost to implement a AAC codec in the paid Linux version would be trivial to them.
Currently I have a license for an ancient version of Elements & Premiere - suits me for years.
Yet, with the new plan, I can get Elements & Premiere, with a 3 year license, not renewable, nothing. So I pay for software that stops working in three years to come.
Sorry Adobe, but this is b***s**t. I know: Your product, your terms, but my money, so no new Adobe products for me. I keep my current old software until the hardware on which it runs fails.
Thank you & Goodbye
Some years ago a local council grant enabled our local Civic Soc to produce a folded tourist information leaflet. UK readers will know the format - it's found in every hotel and tourist information office. The text is out of date but we have a PDF version of it. Okular tells me it was produced by InDesign. A PDF can be edited with LibreOffice Draw. The other 3 pages can be edited as a mixture of images and text boxes but the front page is just a single big image, including the text on it. At least that's how it appears in the PDF and in print. But open it with Draw and there's something else. A big black rectangle, the size of the finished folded leaflet blocking the copy. How it doesn't show in the PDF viewer or in print I don't know - PDF is a strange thing.
Easily removed but is leaving this debris behind this debris something commercial professional software line InDesign does? Or something commercial, professional InDesign users do?
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