Adobe says goodbye to CS7, welcomes Creative Cloud

 

 

 

 

 

Yes, that’s right, although it seems that not all users will give it the same reception as the company.

During the last MAX conference, Adobe has closed the doors on Creative Suite, with its version 7 just announced at NAB, to adopt the subscription model through Creative Cloud that will include the full suite of applications.

Starting next June, new versions of Adobe CS will be available only through a Creative Cloud subscription, with the new name CC(After Effects CC, for example).

Creative Cloud

Creative Cloud was introduced by Adobe in April last year, and over the course of the last year, new tools and capabilities have been added.

Adobe claims Creative Cloud features $25,000 worth of professional fonts through TypeKit, which should appeal to anyone designing a logo or title sequence in After Effects or Premiere Pro.

Many of Creative Cloud’s functions are design-oriented. Examples are Kuler (for iPhone), an application that allows you to pick up color palettes from the environment by pointing with the camera; Mighty, a “smart pencil” with Bluetooth connection for drawing; and Napoleon, a kind of “digital ruler” that helps you draw accurately by visualizing shapes.

Creative Cloud offers a free subscription to Behance Prosite, a personal portfolio generator now integrated into the CC suite of applications (before Adobe bought it in 2012 it was priced at $99 per year).

What will happen to previous versions of CS?

Fortunately for some, CS6 products will still be available for purchase, although all of Adobe’s innovation will be focused on the new CC versions and the subscription system. This means that those of you who choose to stay on previous versions will not receive updates to fix system bugs, nor will you get the latest news and features.

The rates

If you want to keep up to date with the entire Adobe product line you will have to choose one of the possible monthly subscriptions.

An individual Creative Cloud subscription with 20 GB of cloud storage will be around $50. If it’s a team subscription, the price goes up to $70 (per user), and includes 100 GB of cloud storage and centralized administration, deployment and billing.

Discounts are available for existing users and government and education institutions (you can check them all at this link). For example, users of CS3 and later versions will have to pay a reduced rate of $30 per month, for the first year, for the individual subscription. For team subscriptions, it remains at $40 per month per user, from now until August 31.

In addition, subscriptions to individual software (rather than the full suite) will be available for about $20 per month, with 20 GB of cloud storage.

These prices carry a one-year commitment, with a penalty of 50% of the remainder of the contract in case of cancellation.

From here you can start trying it for free with a 30-day version and 2GB of cloud storage.

Repercussions and opinions

With a development of this caliber, controversy is guaranteed, especially among those users who are trying to skip the upgrade process or those who don’t want to risk putting valuable assets in the cloud.

This second issue has an easy answer, it is not necessary to upload anything to the cloud. That is, this is an option provided by Adobe that enables integration between applications and services, being able to synchronize editions, settings, files, colors, fonts and more between multiple computers.

For users who do regularly update their software, this change will be good for them, costing an annual fee of $840 (with equipment subscription), mainly if they want to benefit from the latest features added to Creative Cloud.

Another concern among users is the Internet connection. The applications can be used without any problem without being connected, locally. It is only necessary to connect once a month to validate the licenses, although the software will continue to run offline for 180 days. Once the subscription expires, Adobe grants a 90-day grace period to download the files hosted in the cloud.

If we read several user comments posted on the net we will find a general dissatisfaction (some of them say they know how FCP 7 users felt with the introduction of FCP X) due to the prices and the obligation to have to subscribe instead of providing both options (with the possibility to buy a permanent license).

However, those who are already using Creative Cloud are happy and say that it is an advantage to always have the latest version and to be able to use several computers at the same time.

Questions continue (and will continue) to arise among different forums that create discussion, such as “what will happen if there are months when I can’t afford the cost of the subscription and don’t have my own application?” or “have customers who have been paying for their licenses and upgrades thrown their money away?”

What do you think?

Don’t forget that among our online courses on demand we have several dedicated to working with Adobe systems. Here you can take a look at them.