Adobe Photoshop CS6 • Updates and Workarounds.

Back in April, when Adobe Photoshop CS6 Beta was released, the company dropped offi­cial sup­port for Win­dows Vista, but it continued supporting Windows 7 and XP users.

A couple of months later, Adobe gave an “advanced warning” that 3D feature upgrades in Photoshop CS6 would no longer be supported with Windows XP. Additionally, Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP.

Even though it is ancient, Windows XP is still the best selling Microsoft OS, and makes up nearly 40% of their market share (after having peaked at 76.1% in January 2007), it is somewhat expected that Adobe’s software developers now insist on the latest upgraded versions of Windows OS (Windows 7 and 8) to run their applications.

This is what Adobe had to say:

Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers. The team hopes that by providing this information early it will help you understand our current decisions around operating system support and where we we’re headed with future releases of Photoshop.

We encourage all customers who are currently using the 3D features in Photoshop CS6 Extended to begin upgrading their video card/hardware now so they can fully take advantage of future Photoshop innovations as soon as they are available.

Creative Cloud members will also be required to update their vRAM to at least 512 MB in order to access 3D features found in Photoshop CS6 Extended.  If they don’t update, they’ll see the following dialog box:

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The Cloud Wars.

 
Adobe recently announce that “everyone can join the Creative Cloud,” and while customers will have access to a free membership to explore certain features, a monthly price of US$50 (based on a one-year subscription) has been set. The idea is that users can access the latest version of Adobe’s popular programs (like Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4), without  buying the boxed version and subsequent upgrades. In addition to receiving updates to the programs as soon as they are released, users also get 20GB of cloud storage for syncing their work.

On Amazon, Adobe Photoshop CS5 costs around $639. With a yearly subscription you save about $40. Not an amazing deal if you need to use the software every day, but you could  “rent” it for $50/month, and only use it when you need to meet a deadline, and then stop paying while you are working on something else. The idea is good on paper, but I am not completely sold on the benefits of a subscription system. Unfortunately, I believe that there’s no turning back. This is how we will be buying and using software in the near future.

At the same time Adobe set the “Creative Cloud” pricing, Amazon lowered their S3 storage rates. Small businesses with fairly typical 50 TB of data capacity, will see a 12% reduction in costs. Bigger companies storing up to 500 TB of data will enjoy a 13.5% reduction in costs.

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