Greetings!

Beginning September 16, 2013, until the end of the year, Adobe is offering a Creative Cloud subscription for Photoshop and Lightroom for $9.99/month (read: $120/year), with no increase after the first year. According to their blog post, this will be THE price for the 2 products, for the life of the subscription (all things subject to change, of course). This offer, geared towards photographers, is based on feedback Adobe has received from the photographer community.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like I’m getting one-hundred-dollared to death for software upgrades (that I may or may not need). No sooner do I buy the “XYZ Collection version N” for a reduced price of $99 or $149 (or whatever), 6 months later (or less) I get the email to upgrade to “XYZ Collection version N+1” for only $99! ENOUGH ALREADY!!!

That being said, knowing you’re going to pay $120/year, in advance, for the latest and greatest Photoshop and Lightroom (presently, I only use Photoshop) might not be a bad deal. Do I always need to have the latest and greatest? Probably not. But, as I understand it (please correct me if I am wrong), Photoshop CS6 will be the last boxed/downloadable version of Photoshop (aside from Elements) going forward. So if in 1, 2, 3 years I do want the latest and greatest Photoshop, I will have to pony up for a Creative Cloud subscription at whatever the current price is. End of story.

The caveat for this once-in-a-lifetime-offer, you have to already own Photoshop CS3 or newer to get the deal (no problem for me, I own CS3 thru CS6, I’m good… a sad confirmation of the one-hundred-dollared to death assertion).

I understand $120 annually is a good chunk of change, especially for the casual photographer that isn’t necessarily making money at this, but if I casually add up all of the money I’ve spent on Photoshop thus far (initial investment, continuous multiple version upgrades, etc.), I’m averaging close to, if not over $120 a year… and that’s just for Photoshop!

All said and done, I’m probably going to go for it. At the moment I can afford it (that too being subject to change), so I might as well drink the Kool-Aid now and get it over with. If it doesn’t work out, I can always cancel my subscription… at least I think I can. 🙂

Good luck with your decision… bottoms up!

You can read about the details here on Adobe’s Blog.

-Dennis

P.S.  As I post this, I just received an email with an offer to upgrade to VMWare Fusion 6. (*sigh*)

The Canon 5D Mark III is named Popular Photography’s Camera of the Year.

You can read all about it here.

Welcome to our new website!

I have to say I’ve had fun putting this new site together.  David and I are very happy with the result… we hope you are too.

You may have noticed the photograph in the header.  Right now it’s a single image, but there’s a feature we can activate that will turn the static image into a slideshow.  To do that we need images.  If you’d like to have your image(s) considered to be included in the header, please follow these directions —

1. Submit your images directly to me: dennisditto (at) gmail.com
2. Images must be 960 pixels wide by 300 pixels high, 72 ppi
3. Images must be 8-bit sRGB, JPG or PNG format, 500K or less
4. Watermark your images, subtle but visible
5. Please include your name and image title(s) in your submission
6. If you have any questions, just ask

Once we build up a good size gallery of images, we’ll activate the slideshow feature, so check back to see if your image has been chosen.

Thanks in advance for your submissions!

-Dennis