Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone - Slashdot

Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone

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• Re:

  Another victim of corporate greed. Before Adobe started this whole CC bullshit, they were the king. Now Affinity among others give Adobe some serious competition. Several of my friends in the creative industry have shifted to others

  • Re:

    That, and Photoshop is awful to use.

    Plus it hasn't really had any real updates in fifteen years so why pay a yearly subscription?

    (I'm still using CS2 - the version they gave away for free for a while)

    • Re:

      I've used photoshop since it was just Photoshop. I can imagine someone stepping into the CC world would have a hard time. But really, a huge amount has changed since CS2. I had to go to the subscription model after CS 4 for a lot of reasons. But if CS2 handles everything you need, there is zero reasons to update.

  • Another victim of corporate greed. Before Adobe started this whole CC bullshit, they were the king. Now Affinity among others give Adobe some serious competition. Several of my friends in the creative industry have shifted to others

    Yup, I jumped ship from Adobe when they went to the rental only model.

    Affinity Photo has really come to maturity fast. It has new from ground up engine behind it and often is MUCH faster than PS.

    It is a bit of a PITA from time to time, having to figure out the 'different' way to do the same stuff I did in PS, but with a little effort, I've yet to be stumped.

    The Affinity Designer and Publisher apps are amazing...I bought years ago, and still getting free updates.

    For video, I use a combo of FCPX but also Davinci Resolve which is an amazing amount of horsepower for video editing, color grading, sound and special effects all for free in one package...wow.

    If adobe would offer Photoshop again as a licensed version, I'd get that to put in my arsenal of tools.

    Oh, I can't forget moving to Capture One in place of Lightroom.

    It's a bit more clunky for cataloging, but OH the color and other adjustments you can do in C1...blows LR out of the water.

    I played with One1 RAW a bit too....great features, but I think the RAW engine in C1 is better and even on a high end computer it runs slow...

    I just prefer NOT to rent my software, I'll happily pay to upgrade when there is something worthwhile to upgrade for, but otherwise...no rental.

    Adobe is no longer the ONLY player in town, they now have SERIOUS competition.

    • Re:

      > Adobe is no longer the ONLY player in town, they now have SERIOUS competition.

      who are the others ? for science !

      • who are the others ? for science !

        I take it you didn't read my whole post? I listed many of them out.

        Affinity Photo [serif.com]

        Affinity Designer [serif.com]

        Affinity Publisher [serif.com]

        Davinci Resolve (plus other integrated tools) [blackmagicdesign.com]

        Capture One [captureone.com]

        On1 RAW [on1.com]

        And some of these, offer a CHOICE of a subscription model, or license model.

        Why can't Adobe offer that same choice?

        These are ALL serious alternatives to Adobe's suite of tools.

        Adobe had a lock on it all once upon a time, but that time is no longer...and they might want to consider adding back the license model to their subscription offering, if they don't want to lose business...which apparently is happening, or at the very least...they may have captured their old users, but are not attracting as many new creators as they'd like...?

        • Re:

          I definitely second the recommendation for the Affinity line. Its UI is close enough to Photoshop that it doesn't require a complete relearn, like one would have to do with the GIMP (nothing wrong with the GIMP, but a lot of people are used to Photoshop's way of doing things.)

          The hard part is finding a Lightroom replacement. Capture One looks interesting, but in general, I've not been impressed with what is offered.

          As for Acrobat, I've found that it is still the best game in town. I've had to fill out fo

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            I’ve jumped to the Windows, Mac and IOS Affinity apps myself.

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            Yes, people are used to things being organized into logical submenus...
            
            ...rather than being organized into illogical ones.

          • Re:

            Try darktable - I switched a few years ago and haven't looked back. www.darktable.org google 'darktable from a to z' for a full youtube tutorial

        • Re:

          Tried a few, but I need stuff they don't offer, and I need the suite as well.

          • Re:

            Tried a few, but I need stuff they don't offer, and I need the suite as well.

            Like what for instance?

            I'd like to see if I could help...so far, I've found nothing I needed to do in PS that I couldn't do in AP, and I've done some pretty hairy compositing in my day....

          • • Re:

              Large scale animated gifs and cinemagraphs with all of Photoshops adjustments. The massive overlay ability, and the seamless actions, and the plugin inventory. Can you point me to the programs that do everything Photoshop does? As an expert, you can lead me to a better alternative, glad you chimed in, because there are few experts in everything that photoshop does, and I considere it a stroke of luck that you are here. I don't know everything that Photoshop does, so pleased to meet someone who does.

    • Re:

      I am also a happy user of all the Affinity products, for a couple of years now. It's such good value for money that I even purchased Publisher from them, although I have not used it even once.

      I would have agreed with you, maybe 2 years ago. Now if they want me to look into Adobe products again, they better be priced similar to Affinity products. Unless Affinity drops the ball in a big way, Adobe is not getting a single cent from me anytime soon. Or like I said, Adobe better price it's products better.

    • still using PS5....

      Sadly Affinity lost out on my machine because I couldn't do anything without them taking 270 seconds on each start to detail all my fonts -- the slowest of anything else had been the 12 seconds firefox needed. When I reported the problem, I was told to change the way I did everything and get a font manager.

      Ever since Win7 came out I had no problem with my few thousand fonts and font managers became a thing of the past.

      They brushed off my comments, saying the number of fonts was my problem. If they just in

      • Re:

        Sadly Affinity lost out on my machine because I couldn't do anything without them taking 270 seconds on each start to detail all my fonts -- the slowest of anything else had been the 12 seconds firefox needed.

        I'm a little lost here...what does Firefox have to do with Affinity Photo?

        When was the last time you tried AP? They have frequent updates, and one of the last ones, I believe, was a major engine upgrade...

  • Re:

    They say Microsoft getting piles of money with Office 360 and wanted in on the game. The thing is, Adobe isn't Microsoft.

    • Re:

      But in the case of Office 365, what you're really paying for is the 5 TBs of OneDrive cloud storage for the five users you're allowed to share the subscription with. The Office suite itself is nothing more than the cherry on top of the OneDrive sundae. The subscription cost is $100 a year which makes it about $8.33 a month which is an absolute bargain considering that most online cloud storage providers are a hell of a lot more expensive and don't give you nearly the same amount of storage.

    • Re:

      and unlike Adobe even MS still let you buy the stand alone versions.

• Re:

  I would certainly they prefer to have the option of persistent than subscription but for some places like my company we have been very happy with the subscription model.

  Programs are always up to date and we can work off multiple machines (2 active at any time, its easy to "turn off" one machine as needed, so I can use Adobe on my work PC, laptop and Home PC at any time).

  Also when someone leaves the company we can just turn off the license and not worry about what machine it was installed to, pulling the cod

• Re:

  Plus there's now a dozen browser-based image editors for people to choose from without paying ridiculous money to Adobe.

  And there's things like Krita.

• by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @01:51PM (#62618706)

  Yes, and I'm certain a web-only free version of Photoshop, would not ever force you to upload your photos to some repository that would instantly grant Adobe some kind of rights to market, advertise, or sell your works in exchange for Photo-mmmm-donut...

  (A few million people) "He's joking though...right? I mean it can't REALLY say that in the EULA...can it?"

  *scrambles to find EULA*

• GIMP is pretty feature rich these days and there's a half dozen other photo editing and illustration apps that can be used. Developing countries in particular are big on them. A buddy of mine wanted a cheap drawing tablet and the reviews of the cheap ones were all from folks in South America because that's what they could afford. None of them used photoshop. There were a whole bunch of competitors.
  
  Adobe lives because of the extra work and cost it takes to interoperate between different systems. Linus Tech Tips had a video a while back where he went a week or two w/o adobe software and while the alternatives were fine the extra work from making them behave together (and the extra money spent on the man hours doing that) was just a little less than what he was paying Adobe per year (almost by design...).
  
  But in countries where labor's cheaper that doesn't happen. And if they get a foothold there Adobe could go into a death spiral when they're no longer the standard.

  • GIMP is pretty feature rich

    GIMP is used by precisely no one doing serious work. There are other alternatives, but GIMP's poor colour management, lack of CMYK workflows, lack of easy to use multi-bitdepth editing (they finally included 16bit support over a decade late at a time where other tools started natively handling 32bit HDR files), all makes it a non-starter for anyone but a home user.

    • Re: I bet they bailed to competitors

      I want to like Gimp but even the hassle of trying to open a file and not seeing a thumbnail but instead a jpg icon... it's just not fun to use. When you're used to editing photos on a phone in milliseconds it is even more jarring

    • Re:

      A pretty sweeping statement. What makes you think home users don't do serious work? CMYK is not a problem unless you're going to print your work on dead trees.

      • Re:

        Definition.

    • Re:

      GIMP isn't used by anyone doing casual work either, because they have all moved to working on tablets now. Tablets are relatively cheap and integrate both a stylus and screen that you can draw on directly, the kind of thing that used to cost a small fortune.

      Adobe was late to that space and is now struggling against competitors who offer very good products at much lower prices.

    • Re:

      Talk about exaggerated statements.
      I'm a game developer, illustrator and I have a degree in graphic design. I use GIMP pretty much every day and there are scripts and plugins that only GIMP has.
      Also, during college (years ago) I used GIMP as a replacement for PS to do all my college work (again, GRAPHIC DESIGN). I printed all my jobs with no major problems, every print job requires adjustments in one way or another.
      I also used Gimp to teach digital painting at a local art school for several years (but eventu

    • Re:

      I used photoshop briefly in college, but have been using GIMP ever since. I'm well aware that its limitations, but none of things you mention are obstacles to me getting serious work done.

      Is there some reason that I should pay money for photoshop? What would it give me that I couldn't do in Gimp, that I would need to do?

    • So that's a good point

      And fun fact there's serious work being done to improve GIMP's CMYK support. I didn't know about it myself so I googled it and there's several projects including one backed by Google. So that would be explained why Adobe is suddenly very concerned.
      
      A huge part of what makes Photoshop what it is is that they have a ton of patents. Those patents go back to the early 2000s and cover things that are basically essential for image manipulation. Patents are good for 20 years and as they expire gimp implements t

• by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @02:00PM (#62618752)

  "We want to make [Photoshop] more accessible and easier for more people to try it out and experience the product,"

  Corrected that for them... "We've lost a lot of revenue since we went to this ridiculous subscription model that all of our customers hate. So we need to make a lower end version to attempt to get some of the people who bailed on us to spend money again."

  No - and yet this gets modded as Insightful? - does ANYONE do research these days?

  Not even going to bother to point you at the bullshit you wrote that got modded up - DYOR.

  The subscription model actually helped many people to afford to be able to use the software.

  Photoshop CS6 was $1000.
  The current subscription model gives you 4 years of use for that price - so sure, it's like a perpetual fee, like a mobile phone contract.

  Are there downsides? Sure there are, I personally think it sucks, but I can afford to lay down $1000 on software - many can't.

  • Photoshop CS6 was $1000.

    Wow...you overpaid back then even.

    But let's grant you it was $$$ then.

    You can get an license for Affinity Photo now, when on sale twice a year for about $35 I think it was.

    I bought mine at least 5-7 years ago....and have still been getting updates. They were also the first that had FULL power app on the iPad..and even now I think their engine on iPad has more functionality and speed that the PS offering.

    No...there are viable competitors for PRO work now, Adobe doesn't hold the crown alone now and I think competition is going to start to hit them.

    I think this web offering deal is the first sign that Adobe sees trouble ahead.

    • Re:

      Yeah, I have Affinity Photo - plus Designer - great products, but I'm struggling with decades of finger memory - and really, that's how big software keeps on going, it's a PITA to switch.
      I know Photoshop for what I need it for, like the back of my hand - with Affinity, it's having to relearn everything.

      And I'll fess up, although I _can_ afford Adobe software, I've always had it bought for me by the company I work for - which is yet another business model win for Adobe, much like Microsoft word - to the poin

  • • Re:

      Businesses are their primary customers while Education gets special pricing. The tiny niche of home users that were willing to spend hundreds of dollars on photo or video editing software were never really their market anyway, they don't care about those people and so now those people are served by alternatives like Affinity. Which is a great thing! We see competition in the space and the customers that the incumbent didn't previously care about are catered to by a company that does care about them. Everybo

      • Re:

        What you said - the biggest sales of Adobe software are driven by business.

        However, Affinity is gaining ground - slowly, but surely.
        Plenty of freelancers are using it - it's a total pain for many to switch, but the cost savings add up.

• Re: Correction

  Yeah, too expensive. I don't have heavy needs so I switched to GIMP and Affinity Photo.

• Re:

  Since Adobe (ADBE) is a public company, you can fact check this kind of claim. Show me in the chart where they've "lost a lot of revenue"...

  ADBE Annual Revenue
  Pre-2010 Max: $3.58B (2008)
  2010: $3.80B
  2011: $4.22B
  2012: $4.40B (first real year of Creative Cloud)
  2013: $4.06B
  2014: $4.15B
  2015: $4.80B
  2016: $5.85B
  2017: $7.30B
  2018: $9.03B
  2019: $11.17B
  2020: $12.87B
  2021: $15.78B

  Additionally, Net Income is also up significantly from $774.67M in 2010 to $4.822B in 2021. You don't have to like Adobe, but it's very clear w

  • Re:

    When looking at historical numbers be shore to adjust for inflation, those things quicly add up, even with relatively low yearly rates

    • Re:

      According to the CPI Inflation Calculator, $3.80B from 2010 would be worth $5.09B in 2021. So, they tripled their revenue, when adjusted for inflation.

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    2012-2016 being stagnant is fairly damning. Suggests strongly that there was major resistance to the sub model. 4 years using the old packaged versions is a typical innings for a company. After 4 years it starts to become too much work to deal with the little hassles from using old, unmaintained software and I'd guess that's why it starts to creep slowly upwards. But this is them making more money off fewer customers, and just ask Microsoft how "long term" arm twisting is for a business strategy. 'member wh

    • Re:

      That's a pretty hilarious statement when there are so many others talking about the viability of the alternative offerings from Affinity, GIMP, BlackMagic, etc... What is it that Adobe's apps can do that the alternatives can't?

      You actually think there is a sizable market that HAVE to use Photoshop yet at the same time it doesn't matter if it's a 4+ year old version of Photoshop?

      Yeah, all of a sudden you didn't have to shell out $699 [prodesigntools.com] for the software (or $1299 if you wanted the entry-level CS suite) so it ma

  • Re:

    I wonder how much of that is the subscription model and how much is the expanding market.

    Between 2010 and today we have seen a lot more people becoming "creators", e.g. YouTubers or doing art on a tablet with a stylus. That has been driven by advances in technology. In 2010 you need an expensive camera to take 1080p video, and an expensive computer to edit it, and then it would take very long time to upload. Today even low end smartphones can do that, with mid range ones offering fairly decent 4k. Same with

    • Re:

      My opinion is the two are inexorably tied together. The department I used to work for attended Adobe MAX annually going back to when it was Macromedia MAX. Over and over and over again, year after year, Adobe preached that the future was creativity. Every keynote. Every general session. Every presenter. Every year. And, to their credit, Adobe bet on that future of creativity and won. Without *that* bet at *that* point in time, there is likely far more competition and a deeply eroded market share. As a bonus

• Re:

  Yup, previous photoshop customers like myself have already switch to GIMP and other free online tools. I don't mind paying for software, but I'll never do a subscription for anything but my phone/internet bill.

• Re:

  Boy howdy. I have to use Photoshop, and need the whole creative suite.

  But if I were to give my honest opinion - Cover the wimminfolk and the little ones ears!

  I seriously hate those motherfucking cocksuckers! Sorry for the family unfriendly text.

  The phoning home on every boot. The excruciatingly slow verification process just about every time you open a program. The ridiculous cost.

  Yes, the programs are really good. Adobe is just using the excuse that if we're being graped, we should lie back a

• Re:

  yep 100% this. Wife wanted photoshop and some of the other cloud products, the only options was a hideous subscription with insane monthly costs for something she would use a few times a year. We could have maybe justified an outright once off purchase but not the ongoing cost for the occasional use. She has now found alternatives for all, some free others paid but none subscription. subscription can make sense for many, but having no option for those that it doesn't make sense for is moronic.