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Gibbo

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I'm for.  Though It took me a long time to go down this route!  I hadn't realised how inexpensive it was to get the photography version.  Having a full, up to date version of photoshop has been a real boon now I have started scanning some of my old 35mm negatives.

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Thanks Bill and Mark, you've convinced me about the price; not so much for LR as well as for PS and Bridge. I much rather print from PS than from other apps; the adjustments necessary to come from screen to print I prefer to finish off in PS too

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I'm skeptical of the business model that makes the end user dependent on the goodwill or continued support of the software provider.

 
Somewhat analogous: I subscribe to Google Music, and several times albums that I've listened to have simply disappeared from the service - totally erased because (presumably) rights in my country have run out or changed. 
 
Yesterday, when my kids wanted to watch a film that I've purchased from the iTunes Store, we were presented with the dialog "Cannot play movie. The connected display is not authorized to play protected movies". It turned out that none of the movies I've purchased can any longer be played on an external display, because of some change in the way that iOS handles DRM-protected films connected to external displays through third-party adapters. The 40-minute Apple support discussion ended with no recompense because I purchased the films more than 60 days ago, and I still "own them".
 
Be careful when you put all your eggs in the Adobe rental basket.  
Edited by plasticman
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I went through the whole business of worrying what would happen if Adobe went under, or the CC service otherwise was lost to me - perfectly valid concerns IMHO.

I concluded that the price and product were both attractive enough to take the plunge. If the service ended, I was likely to have sufficient notice to do something about it, which would be most likely turning all my processed images (DNG and PSD) into TIFFs. I would retain the DNGs without edits. There is always likely to be a third party package that can handle DNG and TIFF files.

 

The risk that the CC system would disappear without enough notice to take emergency action is one that I am ready to take, but could be mitigated by creating TIFFs of all my files now - but that would occupy a lot of storage.

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With Adobe being a company based in the US with assets of over 10 billion US$ and over 12,500 employees, I think Adobe 'going under' will be the least of your worries... Considering the implementation of Adobe software in most computers around the world, in creative media particularly, there are too many people with a vested interest in not allowing Adobe to fail. And even if the unthinkable happened, there are other companies who would buy them out (although there are very few 'bigger' companies!).

 

Leica, on the other hand, are far more fragile... although in a much better position than a few years ago.

 

A little perspective here would be appropriate I think... ;)

Edited by Bill Livingston
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With Adobe being a company based in the US with assets of over 10 billion US$ and over 12,500 employees, I think Adobe 'going under' will be the least of your worries...

 

Adobe going bankrupt is a straw man argument not related to my concerns, at all.

 

The examples I gave above - where parts of a service suddenly become unusable or forbidden to use, even though they’ve been paid for and (in the case of the iTunes movies) I theoretically ‘own’ them - have nothing to do with the parent company going bankrupt.

 

Rather , the reverse is true: if enough people sign-up for Adobe CC so that it effectively becomes a massively profitable, monopoly service, then I’d assume users will be treated with the same individual disregard that Apple can afford to practice on its dissatisfied customers these days.

 

Just a few years ago it would’ve been inconceivable that music you’d bought on CD could simply disappear from your audio collection, or that DVDs you owned would suddenly refuse to play on your television screen.

 

This doesn’t even touch upon the fact that in the future Adobe are free to set whatever price they want on your subscription. Maybe they introduce a ‘pro’ service which includes the features you feel are essential - at a hefty premium. What about a built-in Digital Rights Management system which locks your pictures because the image-recognition algorithm mistakes your images for those of Cartier-Bresson (whose rights are by then owned by the Disney Corporation)…

 

Too crazy a scenario? I didn’t ever expect to be prohibited from seeing films I own on a normal TV, either - and being treated as though this is a totally normal situation which doesn’t even merit a refund of the purchase price.

 

And this doesn’t even get into the hitches and problems that some people have had being occasionally locked-out of their CC apps.

 

In case anyone thinks I’m over-reacting, I should maybe state that I now work as a programmer at a startup producing… software-as-a-service.

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With Adobe being a company based in the US with assets of over 10 billion US$ and over 12,500 employees, I think Adobe 'going under' will be the least of your worries... Considering the implementation of Adobe software in most computers around the world, in creative media particularly, there are too many people with a vested interest in not allowing Adobe to fail. And even if the unthinkable happened, there are other companies who would buy them out (although there are very few 'bigger' companies!).

 

Leica, on the other hand, are far more fragile... although in a much better position than a few years ago.

 

A little perspective here would be appropriate I think... ;)

Indeed, Adobe going bankrupt is the least of my worries. Plasticman's scenarios are more likely. After all, photographers get a very affordable deal compared to the "normal" CC fees. (I wanted to get InDesign for creating ebooks: £18/mo at the time for just the single package). So if the price went up too far, or the photographer's low cost deal ended, ending the service might be my choice - and I'd still need to deal with the consequences. Once I reckoned I had a risk management strategy, I bought into CC.

Edited by LocalHero1953
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Plasticmans post hadn't appeared when I posted my original... I was addressing what I believed to be your concerns.

 

Plasticman, however, presents a VERY good point and one I think we are all concerned about. Essentially, all these cloud derived solutions are 'monopolies' and the fear is of course that we store all our personal data with a host and then that host can basically blackmail its customers into either paying higher fees or losing our data.

 

Not an issue at the moment, and it may be that there will be future legislation that ensures that we can transfer our data from host to host in order to introduce competition in both price or services to the benefit of all... But if a company argues that it is their software that has been used to modify our original data and the modified data is then 'theirs'... and cannot be used by their competition because that would then involve a third party having access to all their algorithms, then we have a problem.

 

Who knows... maybe the film guys have a point! :p  ;)

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It's not for me. I only use Lightroom, and like it a lot, but the upgrade fee for a new version ($70 about every 18 months) works out better than the subscription model. I don't need the mobile bit, and I can pass on the frequent updates, especially on the laptop. Nothing is more aggravating than firing up the laptop at an airport gate to check email, and finding the pig slowed down to a crawl by an AV/Office/application update that started running in the background. I would not have appreciated the update to version 6 that trashed the Import dialog, without any warning. And reports like this aren't too encouraging, either:

 

http://www.dslrbodies.com/accessories/software-for-nikon-dslrs/software-news/why-nobody-trusts-adobe.html

But it's apparently working great for Adobe. There was an Adobe email that circulated a couple of weeks ago (maybe I saw it on PetaPixel) that was gushing about what the subscription model had done for last quarter's financials.

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I'm not a pro, and like Chuck, I use LR on my computer and little else;  a subscription service is not that attractive to me. 

 

And, while I feel that DNG and PSD files will be around for a long while, I believe locally backing up edited photos as PDFs is the safe and sane way to go, whether working on the cloud or PC.  I learned that lesson the hard way: I'm a TV and film writer who lost many, many scripts from the 80's and 90's because they were written on early programs and OSs that became obsolete and corrupted (the PDF, while it existed, wasn't as common and Acrobat was expensive).  So the only scripts I have from the era are those I physically printed out and saved. Everything I've written in the last 16 years has been converted to pdf and archived and, if I really care about it, printed.

 

And, yes, I also print the photos I care about. I have boxes of them and make duplicates to give to my audience of family and friends.

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Photoshop + LR via CC costs me no more than what I used to spend on upgrading the standalone packages - actually it probably costs less. 

 

If Adobe changes their pricing model so that it's no longer attractive I'd move to something else (no idea what). 

 

As mentioned earlier your existing package will continue to work, though you may need to reinstall any plugins for CC. 

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