“This week is the 25th birthday of… Adobe Photoshop, an image-editing program that was created when we snapped pictures on film and displayed them on paper,” Farhad Manjoo writes for The New York Times. “It has not just survived but thrived through every major technological transition in its lifetime: the rise of the web, the decline of print publishing, the rise and fall of home printing and the supernova of digital photography.”
“But now, for all its cultural cachet, Photoshop risks missing out on a far larger market of casual photo bugs and their smartphones. Once, for better or worse, we Photoshopped photos. Now, more often than not, we Instagram or Snapchat them, and everyone, it seems, is a photo editor,” Manjoo writes. “But not everyone needs or even wants a fancy program like Photoshop.”
“So Adobe is taking a big risk and reinventing Photoshop. The process actually started in 2011. Rather than selling licensed copies of Photoshop and its other high-end creative applications for hundreds of dollars each (Photoshop used to sell for $700 a copy), Adobe began offering monthly access for as little as $10 a month,” Manjoo writes. “The price change was initially met with fury from loyalists, who didn’t like the idea of renting rather than buying… [But] Adobe now has 3.5 million subscribers to its Creative Cloud suite of apps (which includes Photoshop), and it expects to have nearly six million by the end of this year, with annual revenue generated by those subscriptions approaching $3 billion. It’s on track to beat the record $3.4 billion that Adobe made from selling boxed software in 2011.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Mac image editors: Download the free Affinity Photo beta, we think you’ll like it – February 11, 2015
New Mac-based Photoshop rival ‘Affinity Photo’ is now a free beta – February 9, 2015
New Pixelmator for Mac and iPad updates now available – December 17, 2014
Pixelmator gets even better with Limestone upgrade for OS X Yosemite – November 11, 2014
