Adobe has announced that Creative Suite 6 will be the end of the line for its boxed, standalone versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Affect Effects, and their fellow digital editing brethren. In the place of Creative Suite 7, Adobe will instead release Creative Cloud (CC), which is exactly what it sounds like: To use Photoshop CC, or indeed any of the new Creative Cloud tools, you must sign up for a monthly subscription.
Adobe will continue to sell standalone versions of the Creative Suite 6 apps, but they won’t be updated with new features, and there’s the implication that Adobe will eventually cease selling non-subscription products. To get your hands on Adobe’s incredibly sexy de-blur technology, or a new sharpening tool that only sharpens the foreground, you’ll have to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription. For the complete Creative Cloud suite, which is equivalent to the CS6 Master Collection, you’ll have to commit to 12 months at $50 per month ($600/year). If you want access to just a single app, such as Photoshop, it’s $20 per month with no annual commitment. If you’re upgrading from CS3 or later, the first year is half price — after that, you’ll probably end up paying the higher rate.
To put this into perspective, the Creative Suite 6 Master Collection will set you back ~$2,500, while a single Photoshop CS6 license is ~$700. At $600/year for the complete Creative Cloud suite, it would be more than four years until you surpassed the hefty CS6 Master Collection standalone price. At $240/year for Photoshop CC (or another Creative Cloud app), you’re still looking at 2-3 years before you “overpay.” Let’s not forget that you should get a new major release of Creative Cloud apps every 12 months as part of the subscription price, too. For your monthly fee, you also get 20GB of cloud storage, and access to services such as Behance. From a convenience standpoint, Creative Cloud does sound rather appealing — and to be honest, the pricing is really quite generous.
The problem with subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) models, though, is that they reduce the number of options available to the consumer. Let’s not be naive, either: As with almost every major business decision, Adobe only switched to SaaS because it hopes to make more money — especially from pirates, who might be squeezed out by improved DRM (or maybe the lower cost will encourage them to go legal?) While Creative Cloud sounds like a good deal, what about the people who don’t want to be tied to a subscription? There are plenty of people who use Photoshop 7 because they have an old computer, or simply because they’re happy with its feature set. Old, boxed versions of Photoshop can be picked up very cheaply, too.
What about people who live in countries not supported by Adobe’s subscription service? At the moment, Adobe lists 29 supported currencies — whereas, with boxed versions, you can install Photoshop in any of the world’s 249 territories without issue. For now, you only have to connect your PC to the internet every 30 days so that Adobe can check your subscription — but what if Adobe changes its terms of service in the future? What if, like SimCity, Adobe implements always-0nline DRM? What if Adobe decides to bump the price up next year? What recourse do consumers have, if Creative Cloud is the only option?
Well, fortunately there are alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and the Creative Cloud suite. There’s the GIMP, of course (Windows/Mac/Linux), though we’d be lying if we said that it was comparable to Photoshop in terms of usability or features. For Mac, Acorn ($30) is probably the best of the rest. For Windows, Paint.Net (free) is probably your best bet. For your illustration and video editing needs, viable alternatives are harder to come by. Corel Draw is good — and Corel has committed to releasing standalone, perpetual licenses for the foreseeable future — but expensive. There’s Final Cut Pro for Mac, of course; Sony Vegas for Windows is OK, but again quite expensive.