3Dshark

Thanks for your article. I had first used Photoshop 2.5 back in 92. And regularly upgraded right from CS1 through to CS5 when I went freelance. Each upgrade seemed to bring a great new bundle of features. I held off CS 5.5 and 6 as they seemed buggy and couldn't really see and real added value. I was nervous about the whole subscription thing for exactly what you're article outlines, there's no way to plan for future price hikes. If Adobe decide to increase the price by £10 then you have to suck it up. I also didn't like that a software company could also dictate my hardware upgrade cycle, highlighted when I was at an Adobe users group a while back where the presenter was unable to use his laptop as he'd just updated After Effects and the graphics card was deemed out of date. So what to do? There are alternatives, I now use Affinity Designer over Illustrator. After a learning curve a much prefer it as an environment. They have a Photo program which is so close to Photoshop it's spooky. And they launched a page layout program this year. All single purchase, subscription free. For video, graphics Black Magic DaVinci. Still struggling to find a replacement for After Effects.