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[Vester]

I have a confession.

I own my copy of Photoshop CS3.

That's incredibly rare, in my country.

Same for my copy of Flash 8. I just haven't chosen to upgrade to CS2 or whatever because, well. Adobe.

[Davion]

Yeah, I think I was still using Photoshop 5.0 when CS2 first came out haha.

[Neruz]

That's the master edition, but the most absolute basic edition for CS4 will rack you up $1800.

Might be expensive when you don't have a full time job, but you can save up that amount of money easy after a couple of paychecks if you have even a mediocre income.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get one's hands on 1.8 grand, i'm saying that 1.8 grand is a rediculously, unjustifiably high price for CS4.

[Davion]

If the price is unjustifiable then why is it that GIMP, Paint.net, Scribus, Inkscape and nearly every other image manipulation program tries to copy Adobe's applications? Seems like you're getting what you pay for.

I mean, I agree it's expensive for most people but if you're serious about it you should eventually buy it.

[Vester]

Aye. It's literally their choice to price it as high as they do. And if the price remains that high, that means people definitely think it's worth it to buy it.

[DennyTom]

If Adobe were willing to price their products reasonably, maybe people might buy them.

Instead of, you know, not.


Cause 2 and a half thousand dollars is totally reasonable for the Creative Suite. It's clearly worth half as much as a decent used car.

Or, you know, not.

I seriously doubt that. People pirate casual games that cost 5 bucks. Why would they not pirate software that costs 300 bucks? I am considering buying Illustrator and/or CorelDraw suite for comercial use ... personally I would like to see lifetime (or ate least few versions) free upgrades instead of lowering prices. If the proposal is $800 for one license of CS4 and free upgrade to CS5 and CS6, I would buy it right now.

[Soviet Travolta]

Adobe pricing comes from the fact that their most important clients are companies using their software. To be in legality, those compagnies need to buy licences for every computer in their offices using them. Even in a small company of a dozen of designers, you need to buy as many licences as there are work computer. You can easily imagine the amount of money it generates, and only by selling to companies. The pricing simply isn't designed for the single customer. They could have different pricing policies depending on the kind constumer, but they dont seem to bother to do it. Or it might be that if they lower their prices for the single customers, the companies will demand they lower theirs.

I know many independant illustrators and graphic designers for whom it simply isn't worth it to buy the Adobe products. At least as long as you aren't very famous.

[Gunner-Chan]

I actually have a legal copy of adobe photosop elements that was given to me by a teacher at college for helping him out with some stuff for his class. Pretty cool actually.

[Rilder]

Hopefully, HTML5 can provide an open alternative to Flash.

If you have a browser capable of html5, then poke around here to see what I mean. http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

That is awesome.

[Dasleah]

Adobe can charge whatever they want because of the complete lack of competition. Other companies chose to specialise or be absorbed, so really the only viable and 'standard' option is the various CS packages. And don't go quoting things like Inkscape and GIMP and Blender - they're all fine tools, but none of them have the support and maturity that Adobe's products have, regardless of how poor that may be. Adobe is as much a brand as anything else - it makes people feel secure and carries the 'professional digital media user' aura with it.

It's not all bad, though. I have here a completely legitimate Master suite of CS4, including the various Elements programs (which are honestly what most people will only ever actually need when it comes to Photoshop - there are features worth paying for in the full editions, but if you don't know you need them, you don't) and a few others, for a grand total of $AU99.

The benefits of being in an Education industry family.

And really, the price is only insane if you're not in a professional environment. Photoshop is meant to be used for high-end things - sure, to you guys it may seem like a few thousand dollars for a piece of software is a huge thing, but consider the fact that it's meant to be used on projects whose cost runs into the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you only have to purchase it once every 3 years (if you're insane and want to actively waste money) it's not a huge overhead. An expensive foot in the door, yes, but you've got to look at these things over a 5-6 year period and potentially millions of dollars worth of service produced, it's not an unreasonable thing.

[Sensei]

Yeah, it's for commercial purposes. Still GImP and Blender are great tools. And yes, I say this having actually used them as well as their counterparts. 3DS has a lot of tools Gimp doesn't have and the general logic is somewhat different. And I could care less about support, I've been using weird, poorly documented stuff for... like, ever.

[Ampersand]

The primary reason I find the pricing ridiculous is because for the same price, I could pay my way into a university art class.

For the same price, I could buy a top tier Corei7, and the latest in nVidia's massive graphics bricks. Probably more than one of each.

For the same price, I could rent an apartment for a few months.

And sure, you might say that their target market is major corporations, but plenty of software companies have licences where such software is far, far cheaper or even free if not used for personal profit. Adobe doing this would probably generate more customers, as more people would be able to acquire skill in using their software, and thereby later get into jobs that require it.

Sure, they could do the microsoft thing, that is code something awesome, comment out half of it, then sell it at a lower price, but that would just be aggravating.

[DennyTom]

There are three things to consider:

a) do you need it just for fun or for commercial purposes?
b) what functions do you need? or how advanced user you are?
c) do you work alone or will someone else with his own software further edit what have you done?

There is huge space for editors like gimp or blender ... it is just harder to export data for someone for further editing. I guess I would need only .cdr and .ai readers (not edittors) to be happy.

[Armok]

I'm probably rather inconsistent in my stand on this:

- for 3d, I am unable to work in blender, and generally am of the opinion that you get what you pay for. I use a copy of Maya that I acquired in strange and indirect ways that were neither buying nor pirating, so I'm unsure about it's original legality.
- For image editing, I used an old copy of photoshop elements that came with the package of a computer I bought a few generations before the current one. Nowadays however I use only gimp, for consistency and compatibility. The only thing I really miss in gimp are the varius special layers such as layer masks and adjustment layers, but that's probably because I havn't looked hard enough for it. If someone knows an addon or something that fixes this in some hackish fashion, please give me a link.
- for vector graphics... I have inkscape, but dislike it. Basically I simply end up not ding vector graphics or animation because I don't have the software. I have had a very aggregating experience recently regarding compatibility with standard formats.

I'm not sure how these things will change if I get a job requiring these tools, or if I get the time to figure out the GIMP source code.

[kuro_suna]

That's the master edition, but the most absolute basic edition for CS4 will rack you up $1800.

Might be expensive when you don't have a full time job, but you can save up that amount of money easy after a couple of paychecks if you have even a mediocre income.

I'm not saying it's impossible to get one's hands on 1.8 grand, i'm saying that 1.8 grand is a rediculously, unjustifiably high price for CS4.

On top of that that CS4 is as buggy as hell, it crashes constantly and interface keeps screwing up.