Time is a healer, but for dodgy versions (we’ll say no more) of photoshop – time certainly isn’t.
Things change, I’ve changed and it’s time to look forward. However looking forward with Adobe can be expensive, certainly when the future is prefixed with the initials CS. I’ve ranted about Adobe’s software costs before, and whilst Lightroom is now a much more sensible £100 it’s still the exception. CS6 is great, I know I’m trying it.
But CS6 has a problem. It’s £667, Adobe’s banking system still hasn’t worked out exchange rates yet, so in the US it’s $649 which is £413 (ex Vat) – ok the ‘real’ UK price is around £500 – which is still bloody expensive, but less of a kick in the nads. Suddenly something I once discounted as being utterly stupid is now looking sensible. It’s an Adobe subscription for Photoshop. Currently around £17 a month or just over £200 a year. Spread over 3 years its about even with the initial purchase price. But this is Photoshop, they’ll be a £200 upgrade if I bought it, so it’s looking even ‘cheaper’.
So what’s it like then, sort of like this….
On the face on it, it looks much the same – although with the darker interface that Lightroom introduced to me. It’s smooth and fast (running on a Mac Mini – i5 2.3 ghz, 8gb Ram), still copes well with a number of images thrown at it. Slight tweaks to the UI are taking a little while to get used to. It would be nice if it went completely full screen like Lightroom (maybe it does, I’ve just not found out how to yet). My actions I imported from CS3 seem to have a manual element to them – but on the whole happy with the application. So much so that I’ll kick off the subscription once the 30 day trial is up.
Some random images I was messing with….
Found some nice features in the Save for Web module – seems now you can add a bit of info in the JPEG file. So a Copyright notice can be there – will look to see if further manipulation is possible.