A. Adobe's top mgt changes their mind and continue to upgrade and sell CS's "boxed version" at the current price point,
B. Those who consider the subcription only model unacceptable fund the development of competitive solutions like pixelmator, pl32, the gimp,... by buying licenses or donating funds today (already done as far as I am concerned for Pixelmator and pl32). It will take a few releases for them to be at the right level, we keep using CS6 box in the meantime,
C. We stop digital photography and devote our time/cash to something else.
Hi Bernard,
Yes, that pretty well sums it up, although option C is personally unacceptable as well.
Option B is the most probable one, and in my experience many are currently going in that direction, using CS6 to bridge the time required to transition.
Besides Capture One Pro, DxO, and apparently PhotoNinja is well received, a Raw converter/developer like RawTherapee already gives a very good base material to work a bit more on, and e.g. TopazLabs photoFXlab offers a useful command center that allows access to their suite of generally excellent Plugins, in an (edge-aware) masked adjustment/blending layer approach that works very well, except for saving the layered work-in-progress as a layered file (I've just added a feature request for that on their forum).
Already, compared to Photoshop, superior image quality can be achieved with the image resampling algorithms as implemented by ImageMagick (up- and down-sampling and image transformations), and Photozoom Pro (only for upsampling), and even Pano stitchers offer a choice of resampling algorithms that retain better detail when correcting for distortions and keystoning.
There are many other photo-editors (e.g. Photoline is pretty powerful), but some offerings are a bit too much focused on a particular field of expertise (in which they are better than others) for use by the general public. An example of the latter would be PixInsight, a development environment (allowing user generated JavaScript to process image data) mainly (because of its roots) focusing on Astrophotography, but with a lot of usable features and some interesting unconventional approaches that offer benefits for general use as well.
A promising initiative like Gimp first requires the transition to 16-bit/channel processing later this year or the beginning of next year to become a full alternative, but progress may speed up with a bit of outside hands-on sponsoring. And of course things have become more interesting since Google acquired Nik software ...
Cheers,
Bart