Here we have Adobe Corporation, king of the price gougers. All this latest move will will do produce more sales for Serif Europe's Affinity range of products. Gimp 3 has also seen a useful improvement, particularly when combined with PhotoGimp 3 patch so they might also get more users.

They have even made Photoshop Elements into a 3 year perma-rental product as well and that really is unacceptable.

The Serif apps get updated a lot more frequently, too.

Although GIMP lacks familiarity to most Adobe customers, and also may not yet be as slick for all intended purposes, it already interfaces to AI at a simple level. Given that image processing now is a cutting-edge area among developers and users, we should anticipate Adobe facing a bumpy ride. Also, cloud-based services drawing upon private information may become unpopular.

"it already interfaces to AI at a simple level"

You say that like it's a good thing.

Who is going to pay for creating the model, yet alone hosting it?

Open source doesn't really work with projects that need a massive initial investment. It's historically been decades behind the commercial alternatives for e.g. speech recognition, OCR or language translation. AI will be no different.

I dumped their shit 10 years ago, I won't even use Reader anymore because of the garbage included with their shitware of the day. There is plenty of other software for the casual user to use, and for the "Professional" I hope you understand that you don't own or control anything you allow to their "Cloud".

A version with ads ?

(No, I don't want to give them any ideas... but this seems to be the way things are going these days...)

I cancelled my Photo plan when they tried to increase my monthly price from 9.99 GBP to 14.98 GBP. I've since had several emails inviting me back for £19.99 GBP per month. I'm not tempted.

LOL! It seems that the users of GIMP are not the gimps being forced to bend over even further...

Please tell me that you are NOT suprised by this !!!

This is how subscription payment models work !!!

Once you have decided that you MUST use this app you are on the hook ... stop complaining and keep paying !!!

This is why everyone is trying to convert their payment model to a subscription model ... many people will keep on paying because they cannot afford [pun intended] to use another app.

Isn't capitalism (AKA 'pure greed') wonderful !!!

:)

Only it was M$ shafting Non Profits...

Tech douche bros all look the same to me as well.

At this point, Adobe isn’t so much a software company as it is a subscription tollbooth for legacy file formats. The idea that we keep paying more just to access the same three tools wrapped in shinier UI is almost performance art.

Frankly, Adobe should be bought by EU and handed over to a university or nonprofit and fully open-sourced. There’s no real innovation going on (slapping AI filters on everything isn’t R&D, it’s denial). The core products are functionally done. Photoshop peaked when they added layers.

Treat it like infrastructure: water, power, bin collection... and Photoshop, Acrobat. All essential, all better when not held hostage by shareholder expectations.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe's execs secretly dream of someone taking it off their hands. Maintaining this monolith is probably more of a burden than a business now.

Yeah, see title.

(Adobe pictured)------------------------------>>>>

My life is punctuated by periodical events: Seasons, aging, and equally unsuccessful attempts to lose weight or to learn Gimp at the most basic level (like editing different layers). I lost a bit of weight, but Gimp I fully gave up on.

As for Adobe - I don't think they'll lose any sleep over outrage.

No business ever so slightly and remotely related to design would use anything else. It simply HAS to use Macs and Adobe. It's a prerequisite of hiring manpower in a highly volatile job market, where designers are hired and fired as projects come and go.

I'm talking grunt design, not haute couture star designer names and devil wears Prada stuff. Those baby & toddler sets at Target, those Snoopy t-shirts - they all get coughed out in quantities by armies of designers and artists that have to account for a million little details. They don't have the time for a missed copy/paste, or for a selection pointer that switches from x to y or whatever. They have plenty of stuff to deal with already, and they simply don't have the time to switch to other tools or platforms, on their money.

Whatever these companies have to pay in Adobe subscriptions and Mac overpricing is offset by the availability of easily replaceable designers. No company in their right mind would shrink their hiring pool to 1/20th or 1/50th of their usual by requiring designers to work on PCs and / or on Adobe alternatives.

Retraining a seasoned designer to just use the same Adobe product on a PC rather than on a Mac would be a very tall order requiring real dedication and time. And many would flat out refuse and look elsewhere. And that's just the change of shortcuts and keys.

Retraining for a different design suite would be close to impossible, unless paid time is dedicated to this as part of a specific project.

The PC vs Mac part might be changing, although - if you're in New York city and your designers are locally trained - they all come from schools where they've seen nothing but Macs. But the Adobe vs anything else part is a no go.

The occasional star that would get hired and would require Gimp on a PC will be gladly obliged, and whatever's needed will be purchased. But the majority of the flock will float Adobe on Mac.

How are the workflows different?

There frequent calls to unjustifiable arrogance subroutines in the Mac product whilst the PC product requires a mandatory update check and cloud image every 15 minutes, or when saving.

It's not about workflows.

It's about the little automatisms that a seasoned "short order" artist (like a short order cook) is used to. Shortcuts, palettes, interfaces commands... what a drag and drop would do on one system vs the other...

The workflows themselves don't differ much. The steps are the same. The tools are the same. But start dragging around, dealing with network paths, etc - and little differences start to compound like snow you'd push with your wheels.

Add to that the purely Mac habits that every such designer would have, such as - in a non-exhaustive list:

- Open a dozen or two Illustrator files that start at 500mb each (I'm talking 15 yrs ago here, I'm not sure what the standard is today), on a network share, leave them open for 10 days, and expect them to stay there and not crash because every evening you turn off your computer by turning off the screen.

- Do some insanity like dropping some 600mb file depicting a button that you can zoom to a microscopic level in a file depicting a coat, that is itself 400mb only, and zoom out the button to scale not realizing or not caring that all the data is still baked in. A mac would choke on this and take some time, eventually crunching it through. The designer will simply know that their machine is slow.

A PC will die a horrible, horrible death, crashing, and rightfully so.

- Basically - bake mistakes into the process, that you'd never care to fix because well. It works, and you don't have time for that crap, plus you can ask for a new computer.

Here we're talking Mac vs PC rather than Adobe vs something else, but they mostly go together. At least - as of a few years ago, because I'm no longer in that specific field - a Mac + Adobe combo would be more forgiving.

There's stuff I'm missing and forgetting as well. But in short - this was the combo that worked, with THAT specific type of professionals, and there's a BOATLOAD of them.

A posed, non-stressed, not under time constraints professional will have the time, ability and desire to invest into what is best, possibly learning to deal with the idiosyncrasies that different equipment and software products will bring.

A short-order artist won't have time for that crap, literally. If their company tries to push that on them - they might be able to, if they train them on company time. If they simply drop the change of them - most would simply quit and go elsewhere, as that specific market is very dynamic.