Adobe Photoshop and Creative Suite to become subscription-only products

[Arthur]

 

Source: The Verge

 

Adobe is making a major move into the cloud. The company has just announced the next version of its flagship digital editing tools, Creative Suite, and for the first time the new products will only be available through the company's online subscription service. Adobe previously offered standalone editions of each product, which users could choose to keep or upgrade as new editions were released, but now the only way to receive major feature updates to the product series will be to remain subscribed to the $49.99 per month service.

 

The company is giving its application suite a new, but familiar name to emphasize the change: Adobe Creative Cloud will be replacing Creative Suite 6, the version released last year. The product series has been on a yearly release cycle since 2011, and this latest upgrade includes new features for nearly every product in the series, including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro, all of which now have their name appended with CC, instead of CS.

 

All of the apps in Creative Cloud will be replaced with the newly upgraded ones when Adobe releases them on June 17th. The company will continue to sell standalone copies of Creative Suite 6 applications for now, but it will not continue to update them with new features.

 

As the products' new naming scheme suggests, Adobe is enhancing the cloud integration between all of its services. The company says that a new desktop companion app will be able to automatically keep every app up to date. It's also integrating many of the apps with Behance, a site that allows artists to present their work and receive feedback from others. Adobe purchased the website in December, and it will now use the Creative Cloud companion app as a way to notify users of any comments made on their work.

 

Though Adobe is drawing a focus to its cloud services, it isn't actually changing much about them. Instead, this series of updates is tailored toward streamlining the interactions between apps and websites, rather than adding cloud-centric features. But for Adobe, the subscription requirement could help to stem the continual threat of piracy, while also making its products both more accessible to new users and more expensive in the long run. Users will be able to run the programs offline, but once each month, the apps will need to verify with Adobe's servers that a subscription is still valid.

 

As usual, the best known app of the suite — Photoshop — is receiving a number of major features to help repair photos that didn't turn out quite right.

 

The most impressive feature of the bunch is a tool that the company says will be able to remove blur from photographs that was caused by camera shake. The company demonstrated the tool for The Verge using a photograph of a painting hung in a museum — though we haven't had the chance to play around with it ourselves, when demonstrated by Adobe the tool did an impressive job at recovering detail that had been lost. The company first showed off the feature in 2011, and more than a few photographers with unsteady hands will be happy to see that's finally shipped.

 

Here's a rundown of some of the new features in the CC apps...

 

Big news today at MAX! We announced all new Adobe CC apps, reinvented to support a more connected way of creating with Creative Cloud services – like synced settings, colors, files, a brand new library of fonts, and the amazing creative community at Behance. Everything is available exclusively to Creative Cloud members and will be coming in June.

 

The best way to take everything in is by watching the keynote here, or read on for the highlights.

 

First, we’ve added hundreds of new or updated features to our desktop applications. Here are just a few highlights from today’s announcement:

 

• Camera Shake Reduction in Photoshop CC “deblurs” an image by restoring sharpness to images blurred by camera shake
  
• ACR8 is now available as a filter in Photoshop CC; you can apply Adobe Camera Raw processing to any of the layers in your document
  
• Touch Type tool in Illustrator CC allows you to design with type in a powerful new way by manipulating characters like individual objects. You can also use multitouch devices as well as a mouse or stylus
  
• CSS Designer in Dreamweaver CC provides the most up-to-date CSS and properties available via an intuitive visual editing tool
  
• Editing Finesse in Premiere Pro CC focuses on sleek design and customization capabilities, combined with new editing features and keyboard-driven editing improvements
  
• Live 3D Pipeline with Cinema4D in After Effects CC lets you add 3D objects to scenes and eliminate intermediate rendering between applications
  
• Parallax Scrolling in Muse CC allows you to create stunning effects with just a few mouse clicks—images and elements move in different directions at different speeds when scrolling
  
• Motion Paths in Edge Animate allows you to animate elements along totally customizable paths
  
• A completely modernized architecture in InDesign and Flash Pro has been rebuilt from the ground up to be faster and more reliable, with a streamlined UI
  
• InDesign has a great new QR code creator
  
• Flash Pro has real-time drawing and live preview
  

You’ll be able to download everything from the newly redesigned Creative Cloud Download Center that will make it easy to discover and access all the desktop apps, services, touch apps, and resources that are included with your membership, directly from the Creative Cloud website.

 

Second, we’re helping to streamline the creative process, making it more connected and productive. In these new CC apps, your settings, styles, fonts, colors, and assets can be synced to the Creative Cloud and available across your desktop and mobile devices. You’ll be connected to the resources you need and the people that inspire you.

 

• Sync Settings makes working across multiple computers or setting up a new computer a breeze by synchronizing your preferences, presets and other settings through Creative Cloud
  
• Sync Fonts connects you to Typekit, including a new library of 175 professional font families available for desktop use. These fonts, worth over $20,000 if purchased individually, are included with your Creative Cloud membership
  
• Sync Colours lets you capture Kuler color themes on your mobile device and access them in Illustrator CC, to use in all of your projects
  
• Easily share your work and get feedback from your community by posting your work-in-progress directly to Behance from right within Photoshop CC
  
• View file version history on the Creative Cloud website, which includes full file previews that make it super easy to browse changes or restore files
  

And finally, we’ve created an all new Creative Cloud desktop app with a beautiful new user interface, completely integrated with your desktop tools and Creative Cloud services. It will:

 

• Manage your files and sync them to the Cloud
  
• Install and update your desktop software
  
• Install and manage your Typekit desktop fonts
  
• Keep track of everything in your creative work, from Behance notifications, to collaboration invitations, and even updates to you CC apps — all in a single activity stream.
  

Everything we announced today will be available in June, exclusively to Creative Cloud members.

 

 

Adobe are also working on a cloud connected ruler and pen!

 

http://i.imgur.com/tsOmt7H.jpg

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Jexqp-MK0pI

Edited May 6, 2013 by Arthur

[Arthur]

Adobe have also killed Fireworks.

 

blogs.adobe.com/fireworks/2013/05/the-future-of-adobe-fireworks.html

 

Today at the MAX conference we announced the latest generation of our creative tools now known as CC including Photoshop CC, Dreamweaver CC, Flash Professional CC, Edge Animate CC and many others. As you may have noticed this announcement did not include updates to Fireworks CS6.

 

Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow. At the same time we have shifted to focus our engineering teams on building smaller, more modular, tools and services for specific tasks in web design. Due to this overlap and as well as our change in our product development focus, we have decided not to update Fireworks to CC and instead will focus on developing new tools to meet our customers needs.

 

While we are not planning further feature development for Fireworks, we will continue to sell Fireworks CS6 as well as make it available as part of the Creative Cloud. We will provide security updates as necessary and may provide bug fixes. We plan to update Fireworks to support the next major releases of both Mac OS X and Windows. As more specific details on the next version of Windows and Mac OS X are made available, we may adjust these plans.

 

We understand that Fireworks has one of the most passionate communities on the web, and that this change will be difficult to accept. Our goal in refocusing our development efforts is to build a new-generation of task focused tools that enable our customers to create great web content.

 

The Web Platform and Authoring team

[LosOjos]

I have a feeling that competitors are rubbing their hands together! No piece of software is worth $600 per year to most people.

[synaesthesia]

My word - that could be interesting. I suspect that'll spell the end of any Adobe software for us when we need to retire CS5.

[Arthur]

I wonder how the cloud-connected CC Suite is going to work in a school environment? Knowing Adobe, there's bound to be some convoluted process involved to get it up-and-running.

 

that could be interesting

Especially since many of the best alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver etc. are Mac only.

 

e.g. Acorn, Pixelmator, WebCode, Sketch, Opacity, Coda, Espresso, Flux, Fission

[truebluesteve]

I wonder how the cloud-connected CC Suite is going to work in a school environment? Knowing Adobe, there's bound to be some convoluted process involved to get it up-and-running.

 

 

Especially since many of the best alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver etc. are Mac only.

 

e.g. Acorn, Pixelmator, WebCode, Sketch, Opacity, Coda, Espresso, Flux, Fission

 

And no doubt the support from Adobe will be appalling as usual

[jallsop]

That nails it. I was going to update from cs3 (I know) up to the next version, but not cloud. I can't afford the kind of prices they are going to charge for this. one year service.

[free780]

Bloat in the cloud. Good riddens really. Drawplus etc are much cheaper and less bloat.

[LosOjos]

Especially since many of the best alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver etc. are Mac only.

 

e.g. Acorn, Pixelmator, WebCode, Sketch, Opacity, Coda, Espresso, Flux, Fission

 

There are plenty of free Windows/Linux alternatives out there, not to mention all the paid-for options, let's not all rush out and buy Macs just yet

GIMP, Paint.NET, Inkscape, WebMatrix

[Qwerty580]

if you don't want to go via the cloud simply take out an ETLA agreement.

[SHimmer45]

wish they would fix the shoddy licensing and activation for CS6 before doing this.........

its not like its an expensive bit of software which deactivates itself...

[jcookhgs]

Wonder how this will affect organisations/people that took out the 2 year upgrade/maintenance plan. Awaiting a call back from our reseller as we took it out last year to effectively negate the cost of an upgrade so if things hadn't of changed would have been entitled to a free upgrade to anything released during that 2 year period, be it version 6.5 or 7.

[gshaw]

This suggests the software will need a direct connection to the Internet to verify the subscription and download updates - what's the betting Adobe will take the stupid route and force those running a large number of installs to update individually...

[localzuk]

if you don't want to go via the cloud simply take out an ETLA agreement.

 

As simple as they hey? The cloud is still used via an ETLA agreement. Its still not a perpetual agreement - you walk away with nothing if you cancel it.

 

As an individual, this cloud offering is a great idea. I can afford and almost justify the cost for myself to pay for it monthly. However, a school couldn't. Many schools buy a version and skip 1 or 2 versions before buying again. We went from Macromedia Studio 8 to CS3, as an example. We've not gone with any newer CS stuff, as we decided its just too expensive for what it is, so we've shifted to Serif instead.

 

Put it this way - the prices involved for CS* are greater than we pay for all of our Microsoft licensing, and that's just ridiculous.

[Qwerty580]

ETLA agreement which is 3 years (basically like the MS agreements) with a starter pack of £21.00 per FTE. you will get 1 or 2 releases out of that so it personally works out better.

[synaesthesia]

Better? Let's reiterate what @localzuk said above. It's *far* more than *all* the MS stuff via EES. It is *not* a good deal nor does it work out well for the majority of schools.

[localzuk]

ETLA agreement which is 3 years (basically like the MS agreements) with a starter pack of £21.00 per FTE. you will get 1 or 2 releases out of that so it personally works out better.

 

Define 'starter pack'...

[truebluesteve]

I just find the whole thing sticks in the throat a bit. The subscription model wouldn't be so bad if I thought it was actually for for money but the software is bloated and the support terrible. We have CS5 currently and I don't see us buying into this anytime soon.

[Arthur]

The CC apps are now available to download.

 

http://i1.minus.com/ibbAqY2wc4Ih2o.jpg

[Arthur]

...and (unsurprisingly) a day later pirated versions of Photoshop CC are already available.

 

Adobe's subscription-only Photoshop CC has already been pirated