Adobe testing a new price point for the Creative Cloud Photography Plan

PureClassA

Canon since age 5. The A1
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so, screw the consumer.
No. You can choose whether to remain or go. It's a business. They exist to make as much money as they can by offering a product/service that people want. If they have determined that the broad market still has a healthy appetite to pay $19.99 per month for their product, they'd be stupid not to. It's called price elasticity, and Adobe obviously has created so valued a product for this industry that they appear to have quite a large elasticity.

Unfocused Brought up a great point. You have DPP with all Canon cameras. It's a fine software. Use it instead. It's free!
 
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PureClassA

Canon since age 5. The A1
CR Pro
Aug 15, 2014
2,124
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Mandeville, LA
Shields-Photography.com
I thought Canon offered free photo processing software with most of their cameras. If so, then no one has to buy Lightroom or Photoshop. Let's face it, most of us use Photoshop and/or Lightroom because we prefer it to other products. It's an add-on like a second lens, speedlight, tripod, etc. There are plenty of alternatives. Many of which are free or nearly so. The complaint about Adobe seems to be that people don't want to pay the company the price they charge for a superior product.

This guy, playing "no fair" with his logic and stuff....
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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It Has nothing to do with encryption keys,
It has everything to do with understanding the actual risks and workable ways to mitigate them, as opposed to spreading FUD about the technologies you are not yet trained to accommodate (right?).

but let’s agree to disagree.
Why did you start it then?

Enterprise security is obviously not your day job. All good.
Not a day job, that's correct. I have a more interesting and better paid job, thank you very much. Still, enterprise security people I work with (and used to work with) have (and had) no problems with Google, Amazon and other cloud services.

But what I hope, based on my limited (decades long) experience as a network and data security developer and a network admin, is that SoHo security is not your bread either?
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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Who's speaking about stock market? Those companies didn't exist in a vacuum or in Wall Street only - they had customers which were hit by the bankruptcies and may have lost a lot.
So, which customers lost their data due to the bankruptcy of WorldCom, for example?

"Unexpected market changes" are not only driven by customers, but also by the appearance of new technologies the incumbents could not grasp in time.
This one is indeed driven by customers.

There could be also ill decisions and many other situations that can run a successful company into the ground. Splits, spin-offs of less remunerative branches of business, and merger happens, and companies do realign their priorities.
Still, no one is going to kill a cash cow. They will start with increasing the prices (or the opposite, switching to the "freemium" model), which will give you a lot of time to move your data to a safer place.

if they hold all of your data, I'd be very careful about having all one's eggs in a basket.
I would be very careful about having all the eggs in one basket no matter who is holding it. I would be slightly more relaxed, though, if it were Google or Amazon or Adobe, as opposed to my apartment or a mom-and-pop shop. Not because Google or Amazon or Adobe cannot lose them, but because my data is more likely to be lost in my apartment.

The good thing is that you can have more than one basket with the same eggs.
 
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SecureGSM

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Feb 26, 2017
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It has everything to do with understanding the actual risks and workable ways to mitigate them, as opposed to spreading FUD about the technologies you are not yet trained to accommodate (right?).


Why did you start it then?


Not a day job, that's correct. I have a more interesting and better paid job, thank you very much. Still, enterprise security people I work with (and used to work with) have (and had) no problems with Google, Amazon and other cloud services.

But what I hope, based on my limited (decades long) experience as a network and data security developer and a network admin, is that SoHo security is not your bread either?

Can we leave this conversation, please. thanks :) you do not know what you are talking about, plain and simple. I am in a senior role with 15+ years in Cyber Sec strategy and enterprise sales. your comment about me not being trained yet to accomodate a technology is hilarious.
My patch in my organisation is Software Services, Global Markets -- Cyber Sec (Qradar, i2, Resilient, BigFix), Hybrid Cloud Integration, Analytics, AI, Cognitive, Watson, IBM Cloud Private, Containerisation, Microservices.
one of a very few crosbranded enterprise business practitioners in my neck of wood. I work for a large multinational, I am not at liberty to mention the name but I am sure you get the gist and can look me up on LinkedIn.
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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So, which customers lost their data due to the bankruptcy of WorldCom, for example?

There is not worst dead than someone who don't want to listen. Evidently, in each market you lose different products

when a company crashes. If it was Kodak, you lost film/chemicals availability, if it was Enron, or WorldCom, or Lehman, it was something different. With a "cloud" company, evidently the risk is to lose the service, and in the worst case the data - being that the product. Of course the sector is still too young to see big companies suffering deadly situations, but there's no reason to believe it won't happen.

This one is indeed driven by customers.

No - because not always customers have no control over it. A new technology could, for example, made all cloud service no longer secure.

Still, no one is going to kill a cash cow.

It only depends on how milk they can extract from each cow. Remember, once a cow can't be milked enough, it's killed, and sometimes no much time is allowed. It may happen that many little customers becomes an hindrance which doesn't get much revenues compared to the cost of supporting them, so, sure, they will up prices so much to make you leave, and make space for more remunerative customers. Think it as a kind of "cloud gentrification".

Also, to be able to migrate somewhere else you need the opportunity to do so - which means you need another cloud service, or your own infrastructure to do so. If you no longer have it, and also it becomes impossible to source it, good luck...

I would be slightly more relaxed, though, if it were Google or Amazon or Adobe

Do you know how many products Google already killed because they were not remunerative enough? Ask Google Code or Google+ users, for example.

My approach is my data can be lost *anywhere". I do not trust any of the technology or companies storing them. Nor I think even the biggest company is unbreachable or can't lose data, no matter how they work to protect them.
 
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cayenne

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Mar 28, 2012
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I'd look into Resolve. I've got Premier, AVID and Resolve, but I could see switching over to Resolve. The only issue is After Effects, I don't see a suitable replacement on the horizon.


I've not attempted to use it yet, BUT....Davinci Resolve also includes Fusion, their equivalent of After Effects.<>P
From what I read and watch, it appears to be as powerful, but there is a learning curve as that Fusion is nodal based rather than with layers type editing paradigm....and you don't have quite the number of 3rd party plugins that AE has, but from what I can tell, it is every bit as powerful.

Resolve also includes a sound editing section now too, that is supposed to be on par with Adobe Audition....I've not researched this one much yet.

But worth looking into, especially for the price (FREE).
 
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cayenne

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Some practices and methodologies you are referring to are quite unsubstantiated.
None of the public cloud providers would guarantee any data protection or integrity whatsoever. Read SLA. It is all at your own risk.
Adobe, Amazon and other known to have a long track record of cyber security incidents, millions and millions of user accounts leaked, user data accessed by third parties, etc.
the rule of thumb is: transfer to cloud only the data that you can absolutely can afford to have lost completely or illegally obtained by non-authorized party.

Only 20% of enterprises are on cloud already, insecurity is one of the issues there


Not to mention, that many of the cloud storage offerings....well those companies take advantage of your content and use it to train AI systems and do facial recognition for databases, etc. Hell, who knows that they do with that data they generate from your content, nor who or what agency it goes to next.

Are you comfortable with that?

Just some things to ponder.
 
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justaCanonuser

Grab your camera, go out and shoot!
Feb 12, 2014
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Currently I try to leave the world of Adobe, like an addict saying NO to the drugs he used to consume. I simply do not want to add subscriptions for software to the pile of regular payments draining already my account every month. Pay some hundred bucks once and use it until you need an upgrade is much better for financial self-control.

These days I test a combination of DPP 4 and the freeware Darktable e.g. for non-Canon lens corrections (I have my own way of organizing images anyway). Darktable has a surprisingly huge list of "modules" and is quite powerful, but has many flaws, so it is definitely no pro tool. One big flaw is that the modules you just want sometimes work, sometimes not. This instability is a typical freeware problem and can really distract your workflow. I may change to the Capture One non-subscription offer, hoping they'll stick to it for a while.

The bigger problem for me is Photoshop and Illustrator, I use both now about 20 yrs, and like them. Maybe I have to reside to Corel products, despite for me their products have quite anti-intuitive interfaces (currently I have Coreldraw and Corel Paint installed on one of my computers). Corel packages are quite expensive, too, but there are still non-subscription options available.
 
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Hector1970

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Mar 22, 2012
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Compared to the price of cameras and lens Photoshop and Lightroom is quite cheap. I think Adobe thinks so too and is testing the water. I don’t mind paying what I am at the moment but if Adobe stretch it I may look at alternatives. Lightroom is very bloated for a simple tool and there’s been some very unstable versions released. It’s been passed out by a number of basic pieces of software. Photoshop is a lot more powerful this I would miss more. Any price rise is a great opportunity for Luminar or Affinity to persuade customers to switch to them. Adobe is doing well. They smell an opportunity here but they could also kill the golden goose.
 
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I don't use the cloud storage and I don't want that cloud storage for sure. I already have 1TB for 5 users with Office 365 Home for about £8 per month. Raising cost by £10 to give me 1TB I'm not going to use is proper rip off. Plus, I trust MS to secure it and provide better tooling much more than Adobe.

I like Lightroom and I don't mind subscription model but to pay double, I expect significant improvements in the product to see increase in the value. That is a major issue because there were few new tools in Lightroom since it became rental but no major improvement and performance is still crap.

Lightroom benefits only from classic vendor lock-in because I can't take my library and import it to another product with all my develop settings easily. I can only import TIFFs with processing and loose ability to modify it later or RAWs and loose all my processing.
 
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A lot of people here argument with moving to Capture One from Lightroom. It also cost $20/month and cheapest perpetual license is $299. No surprise that Adobe wants to get the same if people are willing to give it to competitor :unsure:

And before you start arguing that you own perpetual license and don't have to update every year, let me give you another example - FoCal.

You buy a perpetual license of FoCal with an year of updates and you have very high chance that if you run it on Mac, it will stop working after major OSX update. I'm using FoCal once per year and in past two years every time I wanted to use it I found that my current version does not work with current OSX and Canon cameras. Surprise surprise, my year of updates has expired as well. First time, I paid. Second time, I deleted FoCal and did calibration manually with Spyder LensCal.

Even perpetual license can be just another way of rental if vendor cuts off updates.
 
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AlanF

Desperately seeking birds
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Aug 16, 2012
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A lot of people here argument with moving to Capture One from Lightroom. It also cost $20/month and cheapest perpetual license is $299. No surprise that Adobe wants to get the same if people are willing to give it to competitor :unsure:

And before you start arguing that you own perpetual license and don't have to update every year, let me give you another example - FoCal.

You buy a perpetual license of FoCal with an year of updates and you have very high chance that if you run it on Mac, it will stop working after major OSX update. I'm using FoCal once per year and in past two years every time I wanted to use it I found that my current version does not work with current OSX and Canon cameras. Surprise surprise, my year of updates has expired as well. First time, I paid. Second time, I deleted FoCal and did calibration manually with Spyder LensCal.

Even perpetual license can be just another way of rental if vendor cuts off updates.
For the hell of it, I opened a very old Focal version 1.9 (2012 vintage) on my Mac to see if it would work in manual mode on some old 5DSR files (introduced 2015) I had stored. It did calculate the AFMA. Pity you deleted FoCal.
 
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You buy a perpetual license of FoCal with an year of updates and you have very high chance that if you run it on Mac, it will stop working after major OSX update. I'm using FoCal once per year and in past two years every time I wanted to use it I found that my current version does not work with current OSX and Canon cameras. Surprise surprise, my year of updates has expired as well. First time, I paid. Second time, I deleted FoCal and did calibration manually with Spyder LensCal.

I thought Mac users got used to that sh*t long ago. Apple switched processors twice, and users had to re-pay for all their software each time.

I got PSP 5.01 beta in '98. Twenty years and half a dozen major windows releases later, I had no problem installing it on a new Windows 10 machine.

[Yes, there's old software that wouldn't install on new Windows, e.g. MS Office and Nero Burning ROM, but situation is much better than it is on the MacOS side of the fence.]
 
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Here we go again: you are mistakenly thinking of your local storage as of inherently "more secure".

If you consider yourself a kind of business that can be targeted for its customers' data, all your backups (as well as all your other persistent storage) shall be encrypted with keys not easily available to an attacker. Neither your local not public cloud backups are the exception.
AS we have learnt neither online storage or local storage are foolproof both have been compromised by hackers. The real difference is if you store all your stuff in Adobe cloud service, if for any reason to choose to end using the service you have to download everything which would be time consuming if it runs to thousands because you would lose your access when your payments end.
Ive backed-up my stuff locally 4-ways and keep a regularly backed-up drive off-site.
 
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Feb 28, 2013
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No. You can choose whether to remain or go. It's a business. They exist to make as much money as they can by offering a product/service that people want. If they have determined that the broad market still has a healthy appetite to pay $19.99 per month for their product, they'd be stupid not to. It's called price elasticity, and Adobe obviously has created so valued a product for this industry that they appear to have quite a large elasticity.

Unfocused Brought up a great point. You have DPP with all Canon cameras. It's a fine software. Use it instead. It's free!
All of your points are correct. However history teaches us that the minute you try and gouge your customer someone else will rise and take those customers and Adobe has increasingly new entrants into the photography sector all eager to take some of their crown. Plenty of global examples of this.

The majority of users of the photography plan are not professionals, price is sensitive and cheaper alternatives are out there.
 
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