Today at its Adobe Max creative conference event, the company announced that when its new software hits—well, not shelves—this June, they will be available as cloud based subscriptions only. Along with the cloud-based subscription model, Creative Suite is also being rebranded Creative Cloud.
For the subscription fee, users will be given full access to the entire set of Adobe's creative tools, with updates; as well as cloud storage services and collaboration tools.
What does this mean for photographers, illustrators, web designers and others in the creative field? If you normally purchase and use up to date versions, the only way you will be able to do so going forward is by subscribing to Adobe's Creative Cloud.
There have been a great deal of rumblings (which will likely grow louder as more and more people hear the news) in the creative community since this announcement by Adobe, and the company has put a FAQ on their website regarding the many questions that everyone's got.
Here's the low down:
For a monthly subscription fee to the entire Creative Cloud, you'll have access to all of the Adobe applications that were part of the Creative Suite (Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, Dreamweaver CC, After Effects CC, Premier Pro CC, Muse CC, as well as Acrobat XI Pro, Audition CC, Bridge CC, Encore, Fireworks, Flash Builder Premium, Flash Professional CC, InCopy CC, Lightroom, Media Encoder CC, Prelude CC and SpeedGrade CC), Edge tools and services (Edge Animate CC, Edge Inspect CC, Edge Web Fonts, PhoneGap Build, Edge Code CC, Edge Reflow CC, and Typekit); other services (including Creative Cloud storage, Story CC Plus, Kuler, Business Catalyst, Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, Behance and ProSite); Lightroom and Acrobat will continue to be available outside of the cloud;
As downloadable software that runs on your computer, not from a web browser or living in the cloud only, however, you will only have access to this desktop Creative Cloud (CC) software so long as your subscription is current. Canceling your subscription does not do anything to your files, you can still access them, and if you own an older version of the Creative Suite software, you can open and work on your files with those programs.
Individual, team and enterprise subscriptions are available.
You can purchase single app subscriptions;
Creative Cloud subscribers will get 20 Gigs of storage for their files. If you cancel your subscription, the capacity will drop to the 2 Gig free level of storage;
There is a free trial membership available that will give you 2 Gigs of cloud storage for files, and access to 30 days of trial use of the CC apps, as well as Lightroom and Acrobat.
Adobe is still selling Creative Suite 6 but the company says it won't be updating the CS versions in the future.
Pricing: $49.99 a month for new CC members; $29.99 a month for people who are existing CS3 or later users; student and teacher pricing is $19.99 a month; full version of one of the desktop apps such as Photoshop is also $19.99 a month; team pricing is $69.99 and $39.99 a month for new CC subscriptions and businesses using CS3 or later respectively (and teams get more cloud file storage).
For more information, read the FAQ at http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html or follow Adobe's Creative Cloud blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/.
Most likely, if you're reading this article, you use some version of Adobe software, perhaps the current Creative Suite 6 or an older version, even Photoshop Lightroom. What do you think of Adobe's permanent move to selling cloud based software subscriptions? Comments...