As many of you will have heard, it appears that Adobe have decided to stop selling Photoshop after version CS6. Having used Photoshop since 2005, I found the news disturbing, to say the least.
If you wish to continue using Photoshop, you will have to rent it. The price in Australia is listed at $20 a month, which is likely to be more expensive than buying an upgrade every time a new version comes out.
The big problem isn't the price, however, but the lack of future security. When you buy a copy of Photoshop, you can be confident that you can use it to work on your files as long as you can find a machine to run it on. When you rent Photoshop, you will need to keep paying Adobe every month for the ability to use your own files. If you stop paying, you will lose the work that you put into creating them, which may be substantial. (You could use non-proprietary formats like TIFF, but that would be limiting if you like to keep things like adjustment layers.)
Maybe $20 a month isn't that bad, but how do you know that Adobe won't decide to up the price to $50 or $100 if they think that they're not making enough money? For that matter, what if Adobe go out of business one day, or just decide they can't be bothered supporting Photoshop anymore. This may seem unlikely now, but it who can predict what may happen in the world of technology?
Sadly, I think CS6 will have to be my final version of Photoshop. I simply cannot bring myself to spend time creating files for software that I cannot own. I think this would be the case even if it cost $5 a month.
For the time being it appears that Adobe will still sell Lightroom, but I'm no longer confident that they will continue to do so long term. Migrating away from Lightroom would be a major pain, since the raw adjustments I've made to my Photographs probably wouldn't convert well to another product. Unfortunately the choice may be forced upon me.
