As you probably know by now, last week during the Photoshop World in Las Vegas, Adobe announced a new Creative Cloud product bundle aimed at photographers. You may remember when Adobe first introduced CC in May it was met with a lot of criticism from many photographers. I wrote about it back in July. Now, three months later we have a proof that Adobe listened and acknowledged that the previous deal wasn’t that compelling for this market segment. Hats off to them.

So, what are the details of the deal ? Basically for $10/month (in North America) you have access to the latest and greatest of Lightroom and Photoshop. Plus some extras like 20GB of cloud space, Behance Pro, etc. Here’s some info on the deal announced on Julieanne Kost’s blog. I must say that I didn’t expect Adobe to come up with this but once again, they listened and demonstrated that photography market matters for them. Essentially, the pricing of this bundle is on par with what many photographers had been paying for the software in the past when you factor-in release skipping. Am I 100% happy ? No, I am not but I would say, I’m 80% happy. The monetary side of this is very good and we have to respect what Adobe did. But on the other hand, I’m still philosophically uneasy about the subscription model. I know, Adobe is not going back. I get this. But I still do not like it despite the fact that they made the whole proposition quite affordable. Am I going to sign in ? I haven’t made the final decision but probably yes. What sold me was a very interesting interview with Thomas Knoll posted on Luminous-Landscape.com. Thomas who wrote the first version of Photoshop back in the 1980s, explained (between the lines) better than anybody else why they did what they did with CC. He also acknowledged that the previous deal wasn’t compelling for us. That honesty and forthcoming made me look at this whole thing a little bit differently, less emotionally. I encourage you to listen to the interview.

Today’s image was taken during my trip to Maine. I took a nice, relaxing cruise from North-East Harbor one morning and saw this lighthouse on one of the hundreds islands in the area.