Question about PS upgrades vs. Photoshop CC

I presently use Photoshop CS5 and need to upgrade in order to be able to use Adobe ACR to open images from the 7DMkII.

An upgrade would cost $199, while "renting" Adobe PS CC, which includes both PS and Lightroom, would cost $9.99 per month.

I know Adobe stops supporting versions of PS at some time, so I am wondering if I buy the upgrade (equivalent in cost to almost two years of "renting" PS CC) will Adobe stop supporting CS6 in a few years. If this does happen, I would probably be better off financially to "rent" PS CC.

Hope some of you have crystal balls more accurate than mine. Seriously, all I am asking for is opinions. I won't hold anyone's feet to the fire.

Thanks in advance.

Just buy light room and export to cs5 as dng or tiff...

Here is a bit of rebate for the cloud from amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ref=pe ... B00KNDCCE6

Or you can just download the latest DNG converter and convert your 7D2 CR2 files to DNG and then use CS5 to convert them.

Yes, Adobe will stop supporting Photoshop CS6 at some point. I'm actually somewhat surprised they haven't done it already. Assuming you're entirely satisfied with the feature set of CS5 (and therefore also of CS6), and care nothing for any of the other upgraded functionality of CC and beyond, then the $200 you might spend now upgrading to CS6 would have to last you until whenever the next thing is that would break CS6 and leave you once again in the position you're in now.

There have already been 2 major releases of Photoshop since CS6 -- first CC, then CC 2014. (Major releases are ones that are not fully compatible with each other, and in the olden days would have installed as side-by-side instances of the app. So the modern era progression has been CS, CS2, CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6, CC, CC 2014.) I suspect another major release may drop next year, though perhaps not. Whenever it happens, at that point CS6 would be 3 major releases behind the curve. It starts to get hard seeing Adobe continuing to support CS6 past that point, given that in the past they always stopped support of a Photoshop release as soon as the very next release hit the market.

The other responses above are worth considering. Use the free DNG conversion tool, or Adobe Lightroom, or indeed any other RAW conversion utility such as Capture One, DxO or whatever, and you could continue to use Photoshop CS5 for the foreseeable future... basically until an operating system upgrade breaks it. Or until you maybe have some other compelling reason to upgrade, besides just camera RAW file compatibility with ACR.

For what it's worth I've been on the Adobe cloud subscription model since it became available at the very beginning, while CS6 was still the current release. I have no real regrets. There have been annoyances typically with goofy installer behavior and various temporary glitches with licensing, but on the whole nothing major that prevented me from getting useful work done. And the full Creative Cloud package I have has saved me a lot of money. I currently have installed and use Photoshop, Lightroom (a bit), Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, and just did my first small web design project using Muse this past weekend.

I've been critical of how Adobe handled the whole transition to the "cloud" model, and don't hold back my criticism of it. But I also don't hold back that switching to the rental has been largely successful and economically beneficial for me. Though I realize subscription isn't a fit for other people who prefer to upgrade much less frequently and don't use a broad suite of products, I personally wouldn't go back to the old "purchase" model.

Mike in O wrote:Just buy light room and export to cs5 as dng or tiff...

I second that.

I have downloaded DNG and tried it. I have been able to use the DNG converter to convert 7DII raw images to a DNG file that the ACR in PS CS5 will recognize. Seems to work OK.

I have only one problem. When I select the folder for the images to convert with DNG(using step #1 as shown in the picture below)  I am not able to select individual pictures within that folder. When I hit the "convert" button (at the bottom of the picture below) in DNG it converts all the pictures within that folder.

I would like to convert only select pictures, not every picture in the folder I have selected. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Yup, if you want just specific pictures set up a seperate conversion folder and drop copies of the pictures in there and then run the conversion.

E.J. Peiker wrote:Yup, if you want just specific pictures set up a seperate conversion folder and drop copies of the pictures in there and then run the conversion.

Thanks, EJ. I thought that might be a way around the problem.

Royce Howland wrote:Yes, Adobe will stop supporting Photoshop CS6 at some point. I'm actually somewhat surprised they haven't done it already. .

They are still selling CS6.  I think once they stop selling CS6, they then will stop supporting it with Camera Raw (how gradual I do not know).  I just upgraded my CS6 (finally installed it) with the latest Camera Raw.

I personally prefer having the perpetual license copy of CS6.  Once you stop paying for the CC version it stops working.  

I went through a similar decision process.  I already have CS6 and was still using LR4.  When we got the 7D2 I fully expected to have to go to CC which would have included LR5 to get RAW conversion and was prepared to make the switch.  When Adobe kindly offered ACR upgrade for CS6 I made the decision to wait on going to CC and just upgrade to LR5. I spent about $80 to upgrade LR.  My thought process is that this will get me by for a while.  My personal circumstances are that I am about to retire and very busy with getting ready for that as well as many projects I am involved in outside of work.  So the potential hassles of the switch to CC is something I want to avoid until I have more time. That said, I do see that CC will be my platform in the future.  The good thing about CC not working if I stop paying is that I will still have CS6 to fall back on. I would just have to flatten images processed using CC so I could go back to the non cloud version.

The sooner you change to CC2014 the better.  I am a member of the Adobe Lightroom group in San Francisco.  I have CS5, CS 6, and CC2014.  CC2014 has so many improvements, among them the non destructive editing, that you should upgrade.  For $10 a month you get Lightroom and Photoshop, and can use it on both a Mac and a PC at the same time.  Adobe has no given a date yet, but they will be ending support for CS6 because the new versions are being written in a different language and it is becoming very difficult to maintain backward compatibility for the older versions.

Also consider using Canon DPP4 to convert your raw images to tifs. Canopn does not make their code available to Adobe, so while the ACR converter may work, it will not be as good as DPP