Adobe is making life difficult for we loyal Photoshop users by forcing a change in business model on us – whether we like it or not. If you haven’t already started shelling out the $500+ per year for the full Creative Cloud experience, because you mostly just use Photoshop, now you get to decide whether to spend $240/year to keep up with Adobe’s enhancements. Adobe says it will no longer update the Creative Suite version of Photoshop – except for limited additional raw file support for new cameras. Of course, there is no guarantee of the specific upgrades and enhancements Adobe will be adding, so it wants us to take a leap of faith that it is worth what most of us paid for each Photoshop upgrade every 18 month (or 36 months for those who routinely skipped a version) every 10 months – and not get any permanent rights to the product. So if we stop paying, we lose our right to use Photoshop.

At a strategic level, if you upgrade to CC and routinely save off your files as full-featured PSDs, this will eventually mean (once you start using features from CC that aren’t backward compatible with CS6) then you are committing to (at least) $2400 per decade, maybe over $10,000 during the course of your career/hobby, for the continued ability to edit your files. For a work-a-day photographer that isn’t an insane sum of money for such a powerful tool. But for anyone who might not always be a hard-core image editor, or is already only a casual user, that is quite an impressive sum of money – and doesn’t account for the likely price increases over that time.

What do you get from Photoshop Creative Cloud?

First and foremost, you get the new features Adobe has just released for Photoshop. The biggest are a new version of Smart Sharpen, a “Shake Reduction” filter to remove blur from images that is the result of camera shake, and an image upscaling tool for large resolution changes – ala Genuine Fractals. You also get all of the Photoshop Extended features like 3D, even if you previously only had the Standard version. I’ll be writing more about those and the other new features, but in general I’d rate them as “cool” but “not essential.” Second, you get whatever updates to Photoshop Adobe releases while you have your subscription. Of course, there is no way to know in advance what those will be. Adobe has clearly stated that it will not, now or ever, make those or other new features part of the packaged product. So unless they change that policy, you’ve got to hop onto the cloud to stay current.

So what’s a Photoshop user to do?

Fortunately, Adobe has given us a bit of way to muddle through this transition for awhile to see how it goes. Existing customers of recent versions of Photoshop or Creative Suite can subscribe to the Photoshop Creative Cloud for a discounted $9.99 per month for the first year. So for $120 you get to peek into the future enough to see if you like it and want to buy into the new treadmill. Or perhaps there will be enough backlash against Adobe’s “cloud-only” pricing that it will be convinced to start offering additional options. One tricky bit about this choice is that if you wait too long you won’t be able to get this special offer (it only applies through July).

What I have done is keep my Creative Suite 6 license (of course) and use it for most of my Adobe applications. I have separately licensed Lightroom 5 (the upgrade from LR4 is about $80 from B&H, less if you’re a NAPP member) and Photoshop Creative Cloud for $120 for 1-year. That leaves all of my options open. Since I’m a heavy Photoshop user, I’ll probably keep up with my Photoshop subscription even when it goes up to $240/year, but at least I have a year to make that decision.

If you are not a heavy Photoshop user, now might be the right time to make the jump to Photoshop Elements 11 (only about $80) if you want to stay with a traditional image editor. If you are intrigued by the non-destructive editing model of Camera Raw and don’t do much to your images in the full interface of Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom 5 ($127 from B&H) is another obvious choice.

Let me know your thoughts based on your usage patterns! In the meantime, I’m also working on evaluating some free image editing tools like GIMP and Raw Therapee, and will be writing more about those as alternatives to sticking with Photoshop.

Photoshop CC New Feature List:

• All-new Smart Sharpen
• Photoshop Extended features included
• Intelligent upsampling
• Adobe Camera Raw as a filter
• Adobe Camera Raw 8
• Editable rounded rectangles and other shapes
• Multiple shape and path selection
• Improved 3D painting
• Camera Shake Reduction
• Smart Object support for Blur Gallery and Liquify
• Mercury Graphics Engine
• Content-Aware Patch and Content-Aware Move
• On-canvas 3D controls at your fingertips