# The Bane of Adobe Creative Cloud



## jrista (Dec 10, 2013)

I've been largely unhappy about Adobe Creative Cloud. Personally, I don't think it is fair to the huge numbers of freelance photographers, graphic designers, web designers, etc. who have effectively built their entire livelihoods on Adobe software. I think that Adobe, with a $50/mo fee for the full CC Master suite and $20/mo per-app fee, is greatly taking advantage of freelancers unmitigated and everlasting dependence. 

That said, I decided to give the PS CC + LR5 $10/mo deal a try. It was the first deal that Adobe offered that seemed reasonable (we'll see if it stays that way in a year), and I wanted LR5. I still own PS CS6, and I prefer to use it as my primary editor...with SELECTIVE use of PS CC. Well, I've learned a few things, and I thought I'd warn people.

First off...Adobe CC is infectious. By that, I mean, once it is installed, the CC versions of it's products take over any automatic integrations and file associations. If you double-click a .psd, it opens in CC, rather than CS6. Worse, if you use LR, whenever you open images in Photoshop, it always opens in CC. The worst part is...there seems to be NO WAY to configure LR (either v4.x or v5.x) or other Adobe apps to use the Photoshop version of your choice...your STUCK with CC, unless you uninstall it...and then, you have the hassle of getting CS6 working again. Frustrating, and annoying...Adobe should allow their users to choose which version of Adobe products are used, rather than automatically forcing you to CC.

There is a deeper, more malicious demon lurking within Adobe Creative Cloud, however. I stopped using the .psd format a while ago. I never seemed to need the extra information that .psd stored over and above .tiff, so I switched to .tiff. As such, I NEVER expected that saving .tiff files created with Photoshop CC would not function properly in Photoshop CS6. I thought that since I was using a universal format, they would be compatible with anything that could load .tiff files. 

Well, this plain and simply isn't true. An example is using smart objects. I use smart objects with stacked images, along with tweaking the stacking mode (usually mean & median), to do some pretty amazing noise reduction with still frames (macro, landscape) and astrophotography frames. Thanks to the issue described above, some of my recent astro stacks were done in PS CC, rather than PS CS6. I tried to open these .tiff files in PS CS6, and while they opened, they did not render 100% correctly. The issue? The "renderer" for the smart object stacks could not be found. PS CS6 supports exactly the same stacking modes, but Adobe cleverly changed how they store that information in .tiff files...so it is no longer backwards compatible. 

So the warning here is, *BEWARE*! While Adobe says you can open files saved with Creative Cloud apps, they have apparently "tweaked" a few things here and there to make life difficult for those who try to get around their insane monthly fees and use their "bought and paid for" previous versions. Even if you save in universally supported file formats such as TIFF, your file compatibility is NOT guaranteed. You can work around some of these issues, but just beware...there may be some "tweaks" to how CC apps save data that might permanently bind a perfectly normal TIFF file to that CC app, preventing its use in a prior version. 

This is the kind of maliciousness that I was afraid Adobe would employ. To my great dismay, it seems my suspicions were correct. The truly frustrating thing is, I cannot afford the extremely hefty upgrade prices for some of the apps I need to upgrade, such as Illustrator and Premier. Even worse, in many cases, my versions for some apps like Premier are too old to upgrade (CS3 era), and I'm required to pay full price. So, my options are to either subscribe to CC, and get locked in forever...or shell out an unholy amount of cash for a product I already own, but for which I simply need an upgrade. Despicable. Adobe is rapidly becoming my most loathed company. 

Anyway...BEWARE...


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## Mt Spokane Photography (Dec 10, 2013)

Are you using a PC or MAC? Its easy to set the desired program to open files on a PC, just go to start / default programs and change the settings for the file extensions.

I don't know if cc will change it back at the next update.

Its pretty universal that the latest version of a program will open for a given file extension, the update process assumes you wanted to update to the latest version and not keep using the old one. This is not a Adobe issue, its common to all software.


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## privatebydesign (Dec 10, 2013)

The way Smart Objects function was changed dramatically in CC, it allows you to use ACR as a filter, CS6 does not. It doesn't surprise me there are coding anomalies, being polite there, where Smart Objects are concerned. Not saying it shouldn't be fixed, but looking at it from their side they need to protect current features from being walked back to CS6.

What is going to be very interesting is when CC's ACR gets updates that are incompatible with CS6, is somebody going to crack ACR? I expect so. Lightroom users will always have a cheap workaround, but the day of broken ACR for new cameras is getting nearer.


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## CarlTN (Dec 10, 2013)

Informative thread, I'm glad I don't currently need CC. I suspect the market will sort it all out in the future. As in, Adobe will suddenly be getting serious competition if they charge unfair prices...besides the cracks already mentioned.


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## GmwDarkroom (Dec 10, 2013)

jrista said:


> Worse, if you use LR, whenever you open images in Photoshop, it always opens in CC. The worst part is...there seems to be NO WAY to configure LR (either v4.x or v5.x) or other Adobe apps to use the Photoshop version of your choice...your STUCK with CC, unless you uninstall it...and then, you have the hassle of getting CS6 working again. Frustrating, and annoying...Adobe should allow their users to choose which version of Adobe products are used, rather than automatically forcing you to CC.


I do not have CS6, but I have LR4, LR5 (from CC), PS CC, and PSE 10. I had no problems creating an "Edit in" shortcut in both versions of LR to open a file in PSE instead of PS CC. Not that I have any real use for PSE anymore, but as an experiment it worked fine.

It is true, however, that installing CC took over the default "Photoshop" source for LR. Not sure if a re-install of CS6 would take it over or if there's a registry setting.


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## RLPhoto (Dec 11, 2013)

I don't trust adobe as far as I can throw them.


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## GmwDarkroom (Dec 11, 2013)

RLPhoto said:


> I don't trust adobe as far as I can throw them.


So out of curiosity, what do you use for image editing?


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## RLPhoto (Dec 11, 2013)

GmwDarkroom said:


> RLPhoto said:
> 
> 
> > I don't trust adobe as far as I can throw them.
> ...


CS6 + LR4


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## jrista (Dec 11, 2013)

Mt Spokane Photography said:


> Are you using a PC or MAC? Its easy to set the desired program to open files on a PC, just go to start / default programs and change the settings for the file extensions.
> 
> I don't know if cc will change it back at the next update.
> 
> Its pretty universal that the latest version of a program will open for a given file extension, the update process assumes you wanted to update to the latest version and not keep using the old one. This is not a Adobe issue, its common to all software.



Sure, you can change the extensions. I've done that, however it is a frustrating process as there are a LOT of file types that open in Adobe programs...takes forever to fix manually, when they should give you the option of NOT changing the associations in the first place. I think this is something all software should do, although I guess in that case it might actually be a Microsoft problem, to protect file associations rather than allow them to be overridden if the user doesn't want them to change without prior verification.

That said, Adobe also changes all the links between each of their apps. Any time I use an Adobe app to open something in Photoshop, it now always opens in CC, rather than CS6. I've found no way to configure that either, so I am stuck opening things in CC. Problem is, I have quite a lot of third party plugins/filters for CS6, and not all of them seem to work in CC yet (and I don't know of upgrades will be free.) 

All around, it's been a massive hassle, fixing it is extremely annoying, and it has only soured my opinion of Adobe even more so than when they first announced CC. Not really sure what this company is doing, but they have discovered a new knack for pissing people off, and I completely understand why now.


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## CarlTN (Dec 11, 2013)

It will be interesting to see if this affects Adobe's share price and earnings, over the coming year.


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## jrista (Dec 11, 2013)

CarlTN said:


> It will be interesting to see if this affects Adobe's share price and earnings, over the coming year.



I guess we'll see. I'm still holding out hope they will come to their senses and offer per-app pricing at a more reasonable $3-$5 a month, vs. the insane $20/mo.


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## CarlTN (Dec 11, 2013)

jrista said:


> CarlTN said:
> 
> 
> > It will be interesting to see if this affects Adobe's share price and earnings, over the coming year.
> ...



I feel the same, since I will wind up eventually having to use it too.


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