The next article provoked a lot of responses, not a single one of them supportive of Adobe's decision. Some of the highlights:
- Things can be worse overseas, where Adobe prices higher than the conversion rate in many areas.
- High prices with restrictive update policies may provoke more piracy. Personally, I don't think any pricing or policy justifies piracy. What it justifies is finding an alternative. Photoshop is not a monopoly.
- The primary things that bring photographers to Photoshop appear to be speed, layers, plug-ins, and color management.
- Other alternatives that were mentioned a lot:
- PhotoLine, a simple Euro$59 program out of Europe.
- GIMP, the free open source alternative that originally appeared for Linux but now has Mac and Windows builds. Still a bit geeky and rough on the edges for some, but performance wise it's fine.
- Pixlr is a free cloud-based Photoshop look alike, complete with layers. Haven't really tried it much myself, but it looks promising.