Mary Lojkine
Mary is a keen photographer and self-confessed gadget freak with an attic full of much-loved devices dating back to the 1980s. She'll probably never use her Walkman II again, but she won't be parted from it. She also has power cables for three different countries...
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Thursday 29 March 2007, 4:07pm
Adobe Photoshop CS3: How much?!
Adobe Photoshop CS3 is available for preorder and will be shipping in the spring (based on the recent weather, this could mean any time between now and June). Now I need to find £163.32 for the upgrade, which is a positive bargain compared to £569.88 for the full version. To pour vinegar on the wound inflicted on my bank account, Adobe is offering free shipping... to people who spend more than £195. Since I don't qualify, it'll be an extra £6 to get the box delivered. Gngh.
Photoshop is incredibly powerful, and the new features look very cool. I'm keen to try the Smart Filters, which let you apply effects as overlays, without changing the underlying image. I'm also looking forward to the Auto-align Layers command, which should make it easier to combine the best parts of two or more photographs into a single image. Photoshop is the best program ever, and it's certainly the one I use most on my home PC.
Nevertheless, the price is starting to look silly. Adobe no longer allows cross-platform upgrades, so if I wanted to run Photoshop on my new Mac Mini, I'd have to pay the full £569.88. The Mac is currently selling for £578.99, so the software would cost just £9.11 less. To be fair, you'd want a more powerful Mac than mine to do Photoshop justice, but it seems odd that it's still so expensive. Computer hardware has become much cheaper over the last ten years, but Photoshop has been stuck at around £500 since the dawn of digital time.
Since I recently argued that it's reasonable to spend £500 on a lens, maybe I should be happy to invest the same in software. The lens will last much longer, though, and I'll have a better chance of selling it on if I want to upgrade. Where would you put your money?
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Comments on this post
I really hate Adobe as a company, they stiff their customers at every opportunity : 1. In USA this software costs $650 (#325), in Singapore $850USD and $1100 USD in UK and Australia. 2. Every time I get a new camera it seems I have to upgrade photoshop e.g. one camera raw worked fine in CS but not my new camera, downloading raw filter is an option but then they don't make a raw filter for CS for my new camera have to go to CS2 When you treat customers like this is it any wonder they copy or just go to Apple Aperture. Its a software product, it can be sent anywhere for the same price. Additionally support usually seems to come out of somewhere like India these days anyway , in fact don't sell me "support" its useless normally! It gets my goat that we pay twice the amount for this product
Posted by IGJ on Sat 3 November, 2007 4:43 AM
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