Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6
patdryburgh.com

Of course, if you are only adding extra licenses onto a key you already have, no big deal.

In any case, it's inexcusable. But that's what you get with a monopoly.

Forget the next SoLoMo craze - who wants to disrupt Adobe? They need it.

"Adobe is Lazy" - Steve Jobs (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-...)

I own CS3 and was entitled to the one year discount. However my account at adobe where my copy of CS3 is registered was created many years go and appears to be incompatible with their current systems. My account information says I'm from the USA, which is incorrect, I'm from Australia. So when I try to buy Creative Cloud at the Australian Adobe store it redirects me to the American store and when i try to buy it at the American store it say I'm not allowed (because my ip is from Australia).

Right, so I just assumed I'd login and change my country to Australia. Wrong! Their admin panel breaks when I login. JS errors, tried many browsers to no avail. I assume this is because I am missing half the information it assumes I should have.

OK, I'll just call Adobe and they can change my details manually. Wrong! I spent 1hr and 20mins on the phone while they transfered me about. Eventually someone tells me that someone else will fix my account shortly and then I will be able to buy Creative Cloud. Well it's been 3 weeks now and my account still isn't fixed and I can't bring myself to give money to such an incompetent company.

I agree. As a photographer, I use Lightroom and Photoshop for most of my post-processing needs. Lightroom, when it hit, barely felt like an Adobe application (it's great), but Photoshop has always been a nightmare of crashes. CS5 on OS X is especially bad.

As an experiment, I tried to use (only) Lightroom and Pixelmator[1], which is the closest "indie" alternative to Photoshop I could find/had experience with. Note that GIMP was out as 2.8 wasn't released by then, and older versions were horribly clunky. Pixelmator gets a lot of things right; it's fast, has a clean UI and supports a raft of layer blending types. But it lacks a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts-and I don't mean "Photoshop shortcuts", I mean shortcuts, period.

This in itself slowed me down considerably; I have a small set of Actions in PS that I use for some final tweaks on most images. Having to re-create those layers manually, for each image, isn't that fun.

I would definitely say that for most users, Pixelmator (or Acorn, etc.) can definitely replace Photoshop. But it's difficult to move away from PS when there's such a large ecosystem attached to it (as unfortunate as that realisation may be).

[1] http://pixelmator.com/