Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Come on in, Danskin Triathlon, Austin, 2006

I just had to post a W00t! for Adobe’s most welcome change of heart regarding its upgrade policy for older versions of Photoshop, but not having any new photographs on hand I had to dig back and pull out an older one from the “reconsidered pile” to have something to go with it. The water’s great, come on back y’all.

I saw the Adobe Relents news first on Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape site and knew immediately that I would be reversing my own course: I will be buying a Photoshop upgrade in 2012 after all! It will be to CS6 when that launches later in 2012, skipping over 5.5. I am so happy that I did not fold and pay for a CS5.5 upgrade on New Years Eve (see my previous post, Farewell to the Photoshop Tax).

That’s two lots of positive news out of Adobe in two days. Yesterday brought the Lightroom 4 Beta announcement, something I will be downloading and installing this week. Michael Reichmann (again!) has had an advance copy for some time and he has posted a video preview titled A Kitchen Table Video Overview on Luminous Landscape. Unlike Photoshop increments, the transition from Lightroom 3 to 4 appears to offer a lot of meat for photographers. So Adobe will get two orders from me this year reflecting quite a change in my attitude in just a couple of days.

That’s not to say that I regret my investment in Pixelmator; I’ll be keeping an eye on their progress and $30 is not a lot to spend as a vote of encouragement. You never know when that lifeboat might come in handy.

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You can read more about Adobe’s change of heart in the Adobe Listens to Users, Defers Big Changes to CS6 Upgrade Policy article on the ProDesignTools site.

A new year's gift for Marcel

December 31, 2011, I had a decision to make: pay to upgrade from Photoshop CS4 to CS5.5 or lose a 20% discount. The end of year deadline served to bring forward a bigger decsion: whether to remain a Photoshop customer at all. I found that I could not justify even the reduced $140 that the increment in version number would cost me. That’s is all the upgrade would have brought: a change of digits at the end of the name that contained no new capabilites that I cared about.

Like many photographers, I am deeply frustrated by Adobe’s change in policy – to no longer offer upgrade pricing for owners of three versions prior but only one (see Scott Kelby’s open letter to Adobe for the full details on this) – but perhaps there is a silver lining? Whether Adobe’s planners are being smart capitalists or doing a Netflix remains to be seen, but it has been quite refreshing to be forced to recognize that I truly don’t need Photoshop at all.

The fundemental reason that photoshop upgrades offer nothing new to photographers is that there is nothing we need that it does not already do and can’t get cheaper elsewhere. Despite the “photo” in the Photoshop name, photographers have not been Adobe’s primary market for the product in a long time (if we ever were). Adobe’s own Lightroom, Apple’s Aperture, ACDSee Photo Manager, and a growing collection of tools from other suppliers cover the needs of photography more effectively than Photoshop; it’s time to move on.

A few weeks ago, right after news of Adobe’s upgrade rule change percolated out, I spent $30 on a copy of Pixelmator through the Mac App Store. It’s not a complete Photoshop replacement, not yet at least, but in combination with Lightroom I am confident I have all my bases covered. I won’t regret discontinuing payment of the semi-annual Photoshop upgrade tax.

About that big! Star of Texas Rodeo, Austin, 2003

Adobe is the software vendor to whom I have paid the most over the years; more even than to Microsoft (who have lost my business altogether) and the only software company to whom I can still expect to regularly pay hundreds of dollars more in the coming years. Over the last 18 months my dependence has shifted from Photoshop to Lightroom but there are still rare occasions where Photoshop is my only option so I have to have it. Or do I?

What a marvelously greedy cash cow Adobe has built on the back of digital camera progress! I have not needed or cared about a single new Photoshop feature since version 6 but I have been forced into upgrade payments to gain Camera Raw support for a Nikon D100 and then again for a Nikon D300. And the last time, to CS4, so that I could move from Windows to a Mac – sideways hardware moves are only allowed if you are on the current version. The timing of the last two upgrades has sucked, being forced to occur just weeks before the expected announcement of the next Photoshop version and so just failing to qualify for an automatic upgrade.

Now, the news out of Adobe is that they are changing their longstanding upgrade policy: no longer will upgrades be supported for two three versions back but only for one. If I want to get to CS6 next year, I will first have to upgrade to CS5 or put myself back to square one and have to pay the full whack for CS6 and beyond. There goes another $400 for nothing, not a single function that I need or care about.

It is always a red flag when a company’s marketing declares “New Choices for Customers.” New choices generally means new ways for customer to pay more. In this case I will have the “choice” of $50 a month to join the “Adobe Creative Cloud” and, for $600 a year, make myself even more inextricably bound to them with my files stuck on their servers. THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Adobe holds a virtual monopoly on this market and they are making the maximum Machiavellian use of it. They are losing their Flash monopoly to HTML 5 (Apple’s refusal to play that game has given courage to the rest of the world) and now they look to be replacing their lost revenues from the pockets of photographers and graphic artists.

Scott Kelby, president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, has written an open letter to Adobe on this subject. Let’s hope someone is listening.

Me? I am seriously motivated to kiss Photoshop goodbye.

Trees and Ripples

Color is the first thing I see, the main thing I photograph. There is no obvious subject in this image other than color itself. If you look long enough you will find the sunlit pine trees and a breeze blown pond of the Colorado Rockies, but it could be anywhere, anytime.

This is another re-found picture, overlooked for seven years, for which I owe thanks to Adobe Lightroom’s all-in-one-place catalog view of my photographs. However, I am hesitant to praise Adobe too much or too soon; I will reserve judgement until after the just announced announcement of Creative Suite 5. Earlier this week, Adobe told the press that on April 12 it would tell the press about the still later release of CS5. The updated product suite will not be available on April 12th, that’s just the date when we will be told the release date.

What this manic game of marketing musical chairs means for me is that almost certainly, yet again and as predicted, I will have been forced to upgrade to the current release of Photoshop just in time to be too early to qualify for a free upgrade to the new release. So pretty much the only thing I care to hear announced on April 12th is that my March 1st CS4 purchase qualifies for an automatic CS5 upgrade.

I had to buy Photoshop CS3 just before CS4 was announced in order to be able to read the images from a Nikon D300 camera, I had to buy CS4 just before the CS5 fanfare to convert my license from Windows to Mac. That I am getting free use of of the Lightroom 3 beta is small consolation because I am going to have to buy that when the beta runs out; having got used to what it can do I am unlikely to be willing to give it up. The free beta is both a good way to gather product feedback and a still better way to get new customers hooked. Adobe knows what every street corner drug dealer knows: give away free samples and they will have no choice but to come back and buy more.

All in all though I should be grateful, and I am, that I can afford to buy the expensive equipment that demands this expensive software. Few are so lucky.

[April 5, 2010 – looking back at this post and Thom Hogan’s 2010 News and Comments archive I realize that my title probably borrowed too much inspiration from his news report on the subject. I’m am pretty sure I first learned of Adobe’s plans from reading his site and while the sentiments that it generated are my own I need to acknowledge their origin.]