I finally converted over to Win 10 Pro.... Still not impressed....

[Bobby Henderson]

For years Adobe has been sort of circling around the 3D field without fully committing to a full-blown 3D application that does modeling, rendering and animation. They are getting their feet more and more "wet" in the 3D field. But I think they're still trying to figure out what product niche of the 3D industry they think would be best to tackle. For the time being it looks like they're trying to assemble important pieces, technology and assets together so if or when they do decide to launch a full blown 3D application it will be complete and competitive.

Currently Adobe's 3D offerings are really limited. There is a "lite" version of Cinema 4D that integrates into After Effects. And there is a similar Cineware app that side-cars into Adobe Illustrator. But that's far from having a full blown version of Cinema 4D. Both Illustrator and Photoshop have some basic 3D-like effects in their standard tool sets, but it's not real 3D. There are signs Adobe may incorporate actual 3D tools within those applications. You can't build models in Adobe Dimension, just wrap graphics over pre-existing models and arrange them in scenes with other pre-existing models. Substance Painter is a popular texture materials application for 3D models. Adobe now owns and further develops the Substance suite of applications (Painter, Alchemist, Designer and Source). Source is the only one of those included in an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.

The key missing feature is a modeling program. But what kind of modeling program would best serve Adobe's user base? There's more than just 3D modeling for film/video. For instance product package design is a big market for graphics work. There are 3D applications dedicated to modeling retail product packaging and even the store displays for those packages. Some of the applications will even fold-out the package designs into flat 2D form to send into Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop for applying the graphics.

Adobe has some difficult choices to make with 3D. Meanwhile other tools on the market, including Blender, are getting better and better.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Premiere Pro has suffered a good bit lately and Adobe appears to finally getting some issues resolved. But it has created an opening for users to check out rival video editing suites. Still, at least for my uses, the integration Premiere and After Effects has with Photoshop and Illustrator is just too valuable to give up.

Premiere's stability issues were sufficient reason for us to almost completely give up on it, even though we heavily relied on the integration especially with AfterFX. While Media Composer and Nuke have a steep learning curve, once you're there, you don't really want to look back again. That's also the strong point of Adobe products, the integration between Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, etc. is pretty hard to find in any other products.

One area where I see Adobe running behind the pack is 3D, while with ever-increasing processing capability, this will probably a large market for the potential future, which is now largely filled in with AutoDesk's product, who silently bought out almost all relevant 3D software solutions over the last decade and a half, so there's little left for Adobe left to buy, other than buying AutoDesk itself... I guess the only serious contender in that area not owned by AutoDesk is Blender, which is an amazing piece of Open Source software.

Adobe has been trying to keep up with Adobe Dimension, but other for some computer generated product packaging pictures, I've never really seen it being used for anything serious. But I do think there is a whole lot of market in the integration of 2D and 3D... It would be great to have the texture-editing abilities of something like Photoshop, right there in your 3D software for example. Often I wished there would be an Illustrator-like engine to edit stuff like splines inside 3D software, other than the often clunky options available. Or why not use vector-based textures, live from Illustrator? Dimension offers many of those features, but it lacks a lot of others.

[Bobby Henderson]

Yep, my CS 4 still activates and updates... I last updated it about 6 months ago.

The last actual update for Photoshop CS4 was 11.0.2, released in 2010 as a security update. The last update for the CS4 version of Camera RAW was 5.7, also released in 2010. If Adobe is actually pushing through any updates whatsoever for any CS4 application I can only guess it would have something to do with the activation system and anti-piracy efforts.

Typically once Adobe moves on to another full version cycle, like from CS4 to CS5, the previous version does not get any more real updates. No new features, performance improvements, etc for that old version. The same holds true for Creative Cloud applications. New features and improvements only get added to the latest, current versions. The only times I've seen Adobe go backward to update old "legacy" versions of software is to patch security flaws. Adobe will let CC users go a version or two backwards with some applications out of compatibility concerns. But generally they push pretty hard to keep users current.

I used to use Premiere, Audition, and Encore quite a bit, but almost never touch Creative Suite now. Da Vinci Resolve is a more intuitive video editing tool (IMHO), Diamond Cut is way more powerful for processing older recordings (e.g. captures from 78 RPM shellac records, of which I do a lot) to apply legacy EQ curves and noise reduction, and it's been many years since I've needed to master a DVD or BD - everyone wants files, now. GIMP does everything I need to with photos.

Blackmagic Design has a pretty impressive video editing suite. You get a LOT for a relatively low price. But I think Blackmagic Design uses the software as a loss leader to sell its professional hardware (which isn't nearly as inexpensive).

Premiere Pro has suffered a good bit lately and Adobe appears to finally getting some issues resolved. But it has created an opening for users to check out rival video editing suites. Still, at least for my uses, the integration Premiere and After Effects has with Photoshop and Illustrator is just too valuable to give up.

GIMP is a good image editing program for any kind of casual, non-professional use. I have a list of free or low cost applications I recommend to non-designers wanting to do occasional DIY graphics work -such as a small business owner wanting to make his own logo for us to use in a sign design. I don't recommend that, but some people insist on doing the DIY thing anyway. GIMP is not very good in an actual advertising production environment. There's too many limitations when stacked against Photoshop. The same goes for Inkscape when pitted against Illustrator.

I don't think Adobe CC is a rip-off for professional use. Yes, I have my fair share of problems with some of the Adobe products, who doesn't, but that doesn't make CC a rip-off product in itself. Still, it would be great if there was a bit more competition.

I'd like it too if there was better competition with Adobe. It varies regarding the creative field. Competition is fierce in the video production and web development spaces. Adobe's teams are fighting just to keep up there. In the general graphic design field and print publishing spaces Adobe is dominating hard. From my own experience the rivals to Adobe in those spaces are the ones struggling. In the case of Adobe Illustrator its lead is widening considerably.

I don't just use Adobe applications and am not a 100% zero sum game Adobe fanboy either. I've used CorelDRAW heavily for 30 years and have the current version. I've also tinkered with Inkscape for many years. I have the PC & iPad versions of Affinity Designer. My iPad also has Vectornator and Autodesk Graphic loaded. I don't play with as many pixel-based image editors; I'm far too used to the Illustrator-Photoshop combo.

Except, why on earth would people, especially supposed professionals, want to use something that is vastly inferior to other available products?

Mark, please specifically name applications that are superior to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, particularly for advertising and publishing purposes. I would even throw After Effects in there even though that motion graphics application does have some credible rivals.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I guess it greatly depends. Some Adobe products do have some real competition to speak of, some of which, who are being considered more sophisticated than Adobe products. But they obviously have a few products up their sleeve, which are considered to be the de-facto standard among professionals:

- For Premiere, there are products like DaVinci Resolve and Avid MediaComposer, both products are well regarded and are often used in high-profile productions. Even though DaVinci Resolve isn't being used for cutting in many projects, it's still the de-facto color-timing product for a vast array of professional productions. Then there is a controversial one: Final Cut Pro.
- For AfterFX there is Nuke, which is vastly more powerful (and more expensive) than AfterFX.
- For InDesign there is QuarkXPress, but Quark largely missed the boat years ago, so Quark is often seen as the also-run show for desktop publication software nowadays. Serif recently released "Publisher", which looks promising, but still has a long way to go to become a serious InDesign contender.
- Photoshop has quite a list of contenders, like Affinity Photo, The Gimp, PaintShop Pro, Krita, but for many people, the Photoshop workflow is intrinsic to their workflow and PSD compatibility is hard to come by.
- Illustrator has also a few contenders, like Affinity Designer, CorelDRAW or Inkscape, but much of the same as for Photoshop applies here.
- Adobe Acrobat DC for which there are alternatives like Nitro PDF and a ton of other more or less reliable or very flaky PDF editing and compositing tools. While I personally think that Acrobat sucks, most of the alternatives suck even harder and aren't entirely cheap either.
- Adobe Lightroom, for which there is Skylum Luminar, Capture One and a ton of other paid and free options, some of which I think, outperform Lightroom on most aspects.

Then there are those other packages like Dreamweaver, XD, Animate and Audition, but I don't think Adobe can really be considered a leader in any of those.

Another thing that's hard to beat is the fonts library Adobe has access to. Like Bobby indicated, the font library that is included within Creative Cloud is pretty extensive and although many fonts are available elsewhere, you'll be licensing them font-by-font, which can become a pretty expensive endeavor.

I don't think that, in overall, Adobe products are vastly inferior, many of them could be better and I don't always like where certain products are heading. I think it will be good to have some more SERIOUS competition for Adobe's behemoths like Photoshop and Illustrator, but for anything related to IT there seems to be one consistency: The winner takes all...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I don't think Adobe CC is a rip-off for professional use. Yes, I have my fair share of problems with some of the Adobe products, who doesn't, but that doesn't make CC a rip-off product in itself. Still, it would be great if there was a bit more competition.

But I do understand people who simply use a limited feature-set of the complete Adobe suite. They may be perfectly happy with all the features in e.g. CS4 and don't want to pay for software they already paid for. Also, the subscription model changes the way you need to account for stuff. Software used to be an investment, with more and more software going to the service model, that's no longer the case. This can have some profound impact on your bookkeeping, depending on how much you spend on software to keep your business running.

Except, why on earth would people, especially supposed professionals, want to use something that is vastly inferior to other available products?

[Marcel Birgelen]

Marcel, I have not paid for W7 support at all and I just updated my old Workstation a few days ago. Both updates were security related...

Mark, like I said: Microsoft is seemingly still tickling down some major security updates to the "free support tier" of Windows 7, probably to avoid major disasters from happening. Still, Microsoft officially pulled the plug on it. So, there will be no more updates, other than maybe the extremely essential ones and even those could stop any time, when MS decides the remaining install base is small enough not to cause them any headaches if another major exploit hits the scene.

I'm not fond of the Win10 upgrade either, it adds very little to no added value for me, other than that I'm on a "supported track" and I know I can keep my workstations and notebooks somewhat safe. In return we get a lot more spying form Microsoft, more disk usage and a constant stream of mostly useless updates to both the base OS and UI. But you can't hold back forever. I've switched to Linux what I can, but many tasks still require the MS and/or Apple ecosystem if you don't want to constantly punch cylinders through square holes...

I don't think the situation is that overly simple. And I think the situation is different from one software company to the next. Going subscription-only is not going to work for some companies. One example is Corel and its DRAW application. The sheer lack of updates and un-fixed bugs over the past two versions are signs of trouble. The company is privately held (it changed hands from Vector Capital to KKR last year), so I don't know its financials.

To be honest, I think that most major software vendors really love to jump on the subscription bandwagon if they're not there yet. What the customer thinks of this, is less relevant than their own revenue stream. In the old model, you have to convince users to buy into your upgrade package every new release cycle. Software manufacturers usually tried to put a few "showcase features" into their products, in order to convince their user base to upgrade. You can save a lot on marketing and you don't need to invest into an expensive release cycle of new "showcase features", if you can keep milking your customers anyway, just for the privilege of accessing their software. As long as your competition doesn't catch up on you and the market doesn't render your product irrelevant for some other reason, you can keep on milking your existing code-bases on a far more consistent basis than with the old release model.

Obviously, the comparison to the film and music industry is a simplification, but it does bear a lot of resemblance. Pull an old release through a bunch of filters and re-release it on the current hot medium and you can sell your old tomatoes as if they're fresh and shiny again.

ISome people think Adobe Creative Cloud is a rip-off and that they have customers bent over a barrel. I don't agree with that. First, it's not casual "hobbyist" software. It's for professional, paid use. Nevertheless you get a hell of a lot for that $54 per month fee.

I don't think Adobe CC is a rip-off for professional use. Yes, I have my fair share of problems with some of the Adobe products, who doesn't, but that doesn't make CC a rip-off product in itself. Still, it would be great if there was a bit more competition.

But I do understand people who simply use a limited feature-set of the complete Adobe suite. They may be perfectly happy with all the features in e.g. CS4 and don't want to pay for software they already paid for. Also, the subscription model changes the way you need to account for stuff. Software used to be an investment, with more and more software going to the service model, that's no longer the case. This can have some profound impact on your bookkeeping, depending on how much you spend on software to keep your business running.

[Leo Enticknap]

I used to use Premiere, Audition, and Encore quite a bit, but almost never touch Creative Suite now. Da Vinci Resolve is a more intuitive video editing tool (IMHO), Diamond Cut is way more powerful for processing older recordings (e.g. captures from 78 RPM shellac records, of which I do a lot) to apply legacy EQ curves and noise reduction, and it's been many years since I've needed to master a DVD or BD - everyone wants files, now. GIMP does everything I need to with photos. The only Adobe application I now use regularly is Acrobat 10 Pro.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Yep, my CS 4 still activates and updates... I last updated it about 6 months ago. I just downloaded the latest Lightroom what I really dislike is the highlight correction. It just gives very primitave results compared to Capture One.

[Bobby Henderson]

Yes, mine is the CS-4 copy, but like W-7 Pro it also still updates. Why Adobe went to monthly is beyond me because in doing so they lost a lot of customers.

Adobe hasn't been releasing any updates for CS4 in years. I don't even know if the activation servers for CS4 are still online. I know CS2 and CS3 are "dead." Adobe allowed registered users of those suites to download activation-free versions. I don't know if those are still available. Eventually everything up through CS6 will be taken off line and no longer supported.

As to Adobe losing customers, yeah some people called it quits with Adobe. But overall they've gained a lot more customers with Creative Cloud than they lost. Just look at their stock price. Prior to June 2013 when the first version of Creative Cloud was released Adobe's stock was range-bound between $10 and $30 per share from the year 2000 (and even less before that). Since June 2013 Adobe's stock price has gone from about $43 per share to over $500.

Naturally other graphics software companies are now trying to copy Adobe's approach with their own subscription setups. Few of them develop "must have" applications like those within Adobe's collection.

I wouldn't exactly call Capture One a Niche Program either. It's widely used by professional photographers all over the world, and it's been around for over 20 years and so is very mature and refined. It's also reasonable to purchase at about $280 USD.

It's still a photo processing application. You can't design something like a billboard layout, a vehicle wrap or a simple motion graphics design within Capture One. That can be done in Photoshop (and done even better in conjunction with Illustrator).

Isn't this the same story with "intellectual property" all over again, no matter what the subject is? Software companies want to get paid over and over again for the same code they were already paid for.

I don't think the situation is that overly simple. And I think the situation is different from one software company to the next. Going subscription-only is not going to work for some companies. One example is Corel and its DRAW application. The sheer lack of updates and un-fixed bugs over the past two versions are signs of trouble. The company is privately held (it changed hands from Vector Capital to KKR last year), so I don't know its financials.

Some people think Adobe Creative Cloud is a rip-off and that they have customers bent over a barrel. I don't agree with that. First, it's not casual "hobbyist" software. It's for professional, paid use. Nevertheless you get a hell of a lot for that $54 per month fee. The Adobe Fonts service alone is worth a fortune. It's easy to get suspicious of Adobe, that they could just go through the motions once they have you on that subscription hook. I don't see that being the case. I actively participate in the Illustrator Beta program. One feature I specifically requested involving type was incorporated last year. Adobe is intensifying its beta efforts. Several of their applications have beta and pre-release versions available to try in the Creative Cloud panel. For applications like Illustrator and Photoshop they're now doing two beta drops per month and one pre-release drop per month. Out of all vector drawing programs on the market nothing has seen as many updates as Illustrator, both in terms of point release updates introducing new features or more frequent bug fix/performance updates. Plus, they introduced a full blown iPad version of Illustrator recently. Adobe is also overhauling its applications to run native on Apple's M1 CPUs.

I actually tried Lightroom again today, and frankly, there are aspects of it that don't function nearly as well as the same functions in Capture One.

Which version of Lightroom did you launch? CS4? The current version has quite a lot more capabilities. The same is true for the basic Camera RAW application (lots of new color grading features for instance).

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I actually tried Lightroom again today, and frankly, there are aspects of it that don't function nearly as well as the same functions in Capture One.

Marcel, I have not paid for W7 support at all and I just updated my old Workstation a few days ago. Both updates were security related...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Isn't this the same story with "intellectual property" all over again, no matter what the subject is? Software companies want to get paid over and over again for the same code they were already paid for. The same is with movie studios and record companies: they want to earn bucks for the same material perpetually. Imagine you'd actually perform any real, new work for your money if you can just keep asking money for the same perpetually?

Regarding Windows 7: Keep in mind that, while you can still 'update' your Windows 7 installation, Microsoft officially ended the "free support" January last year, you can still get "Enterprise support" for a hefty fee for a few years. They seemingly have pushed a few highly critical updates down the "free" pipeline anyway, even after their official EOL deadline, but they're not obliged in any way to do so. In that regard, Windows 7 is a ticking time bomb, especially if you're using it for anything on-line.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Some people can manage to ditch Adobe and avoid its subscription system. But it really depends on their use case.

With my own work flow there is no acceptable alternative. We have 3 licenses of Adobe CC at my workplace. One issue is handling brand assets from companies of various sizes, particularly larger firms. Their logos and other materials are almost always very Adobe-centric. Other drawing programs can import EPS, AI and PDF files, but they're often not 100% accurate about it. None of them have complete feature overlap with Illustrator. Sometimes if you import a PDF or AI file into CorelDRAW or Affinity Designer things in the artwork "break." Large format printing is another issue; we get the best results feeding our HP Latex printers and Mimaki UV flatbed printer Adobe-generated files. The Onyx and RasterLink Pro RIPs we use to drive those printers use Adobe PDF technology and stay up to date to handle new bells and whistles Adobe adds to the standard with updates to Illustrator, InDesign, etc.

Capture One is a niche program; it's a pixel-based image editor geared to processing RAW images from cameras. I think of it as a rival to Adobe Lightroom rather than Photoshop.

The difference with Photoshop is it has far more tools for editing and altering all kinds of pixel-based images, not just photos from cameras. For mixing elements of graphic design with photo imagery there is nothing better than Photoshop. One unbeatable advantage it has is its tight integration with Adobe Illustrator for mixing vector-based and raster-based elements together. Corel PhotoPaint, Affinity Photo and several others have lots of similarities with Photoshop, but they fall short when compared to how Photoshop and Illustrator work together. Similar comparisons can be made regarding Adobe AfterEffects.

Yes, mine is the CS-4 copy, but like W-7 Pro it also still updates. Why Adobe went to monthly is beyond me because in doing so they lost a lot of customers. I wouldn't exactly call Capture One a Niche Program either. It's widely used by professional photographers all over the world, and it's been around for over 20 years and so is very mature and refined. It's also reasonable to purchase at about $280 USD.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Since I still have its predecessor and it still works as well as it ever did...I'd say you are wrong and it is quite old now.

If yours still updates you're very lucky. Mine worked just fine, except it would not update the OS nor load newer apps. Eventually yours will do the same thing.

[Leo Enticknap]

I was able to use the Win 7 Ultimate key to activate the Win 10 Pro installation for free.

There is one gotcha, which is that it might not work if the W7 computer on which that license had been installed has not been powered up and online for over a certain time period. I suspect this to be because if a W7 computer cannot "phone home" to Microsoft for a certain length of time, it is considered deactivated, and has to be reactivated the next time it goes online.

I found this out the hard way in January. I refurbished a PC (blasted the case out with a Datavac, new fans and thermal grease, more RAM, and a new SSD) that had not been powered up since 2014 and that had a W7 Pro COA sticker on it. I tossed the hard drive that was in it out (don't trust its reliability if that old), replaced it with a SSD, and installed W10 from scratch. It wouldn't activate, and asked me for a key number. It wouldn't accept the key number on the W7 sticker.

I then nuked the drive, installed W7 using the key on the sticker, activated it, nuked the drive again, installed W10 again, and this time it activated automatically.

[Steve Guttag]

Then, based on my experience, you probably have at best two years of life left in that Mac.

Since I still have its predecessor and it still works as well as it ever did...I'd say you are wrong and it is quite old now.