I am upset. I really feel Adobe is robbing their customers.
I've paid for Photoshop 3, 4, 5, 6, and seven. I've paid for Creative Suite One and Two, which include Photoshop 8 and nine.
And now they tell me that I'm not elligible for an upgrade to Photoshop 11 (CS4), because it's "a different product" than the Creative Suite, even though it includes Photoshop. I have to pay full price! Oh, it's on special offer, "only" five hundred and thirty pounds! (A thousand dollars!)
This is just f***ing disrespectful of loyal customers.
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Update: I looked it over, and I could get the upgrade to the Suite for a hundred pounds less, and I might like to have the newest version of Illustrator at some points, so I decided to go with that.
I still think they are really exploiting their near-monopoly though.
At least I skipped CS3, so I avoided one "upgrade tax" payment.
Other comments: If you're hooked on confusion, try to figure out which of the myriad versions of the Creative Suite is right for you. They have to have special software on the site to help you choose!
Also, getting the box version (including shipping) was cheaper than buying the download. Very odd.
Sorry for all this bitterness, I just had to vent.
11 comments:
Many people nowadays are unhappy with Adobe. This has also opened the market to competition.
Pixelmator is one alternative to PhotoShop. It is much faster and costs only $59.
Also, I recommend Aperture instead of Adobe Lightroom.
Why?
I have Aperture, but it seems many are happy with Lightroom also.
I have (on a Mac) PSE 6, Pixelmator, LightZone, GraphicConverter etc. And of course iPhoto, which I'm in fact using quite a lot despite the limited feature set.
There are lots of alternatives, but Adobe does have a lead in the number of features. And many are just used to doing their workflows the Adobe way.
I hardly do any picture editing so this is a genuine question: what's missing from the GIMP that makes it worth paying these sort of amounts?
The obvious missing item is more than eight bits per pixel colour. As I understand it the newest version of the GIMP (in beta test?) supports 32 bits per colour although it's somewhat experimental still.
When it supports 32 bit fully, will the GIMP be a contender or is there anything else important missing?
I don't know the GIMP, and at this point it would take a lot to get me to re-train, I must admit shame-facedly.
Eolake, not much retraining necessary at all to use GIMP. Photoshop has been king for so long, but things are changing.
Just like photography itself.
Use what you are comfortable with, and can afford. Most working photographers are OK with Adobe's pricing when they are able to factor the price into the amount of money the photos they retouch actually earn them. If you retouch 1,000 photos, and pay $500, that's 50 cents each, which is a small amount of money compared to the labor investment of doing that retouching.
If you're not making money off Photoshop, don't buy it. :)
I like Lightroom after using it for 18 months. It's not perfect, but I don't feel I need to upgrade to 2.0, and will probably upgrade only when they release 3.0. But then I am a hobbyist and use only some of its functionality.
I feel really comfortable with being able to afford the GIMP. In case anybody doesn't realise, it's free (in both senses of the word).
Its user interface is a bit odd to my way of thinking but it's fine once you get used to it. I can't compare it with Photoshop, etc, as I've not really seen them other than very brief demos.
I like the book Beginning GIMP by Akkana Peck. I haven't read it right through and don't do much image manipulation but when I get stuck on something I go to her book and it sorts me out.
Actually they warned PS7 users that they had a limited time frame to upgrade to CS3. And then if you upgrade to CS3 within a 30 window of the CS4 release you'll get a free upgrade from CS3 to CS4.
I'm not sure if that window has closed yet since I think, but am not sure that the official US release date is November 7 th or some such.
If you want to upgrade then I'd call Adobe ASAP and check. You may be OK.
Anyone that thinks GIMP is in the county as CS4 is just wrong, sorry to tell you that.
I really object to worthless upgrades, most office products for example. But Adobe has been pouring a huge amount of powerful new ideas into Photoshop. It is well worth the $200 every 3 years.
Of course even they admit that it is very difficult to become proficient in. They say that everytime they make an attempt to streamline the interface, by dropping old elements, that users raise caine.
But many many companies have come along over the years with the idea that they would make a better cheaper photoshop. They are all dead and laying the the ditch somewhere in the past. Corel is the only one to put up that much of a fight and they are a pale ghost now days and have given up the competition. I have several boxes of wana-be software around here. Harvard Graphics for one.
BK
Thanks.
I think it's more than $200 per three years, but then I agree that it seems Photoshop is way advanced.
Anyone that thinks GIMP is in the county as CS4 is just wrong, sorry to tell you that.
That's not a terribly useful response when I specifically asked what was missing in the GIMP that's so important. Educate me, don't just condescend.
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