Re: Re: An infuriating goodbye to Photoshop

I spotted Online Goddess’ blog post, Re: An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop, which itself is a reply to Gavin Anderegg’s An infuriating goodbye to Photoshop on Bubbles and had to add my tuppence worth.

Like Gavin and OG, I’ve been using Photoshop a long time. I switched to Photoshop 5 after Corel bought Paint Shop Pro and ruined it, and although I always preferred PSP7 over Photoshop, PS5 saw me through the years of blogging and pixel art and eventually working in web (when standards were lower and I was allowed to design stuff for clients).

When Adobe went over to the subscription model and Photoshop became “Creative Cloud” I was not particularly happy, but even as my own design work tailed off I was still regularly dissecting PSDs for clients and so it seemed only fair to pay for something I was making money from.

I wasn’t particularly happy with the way CC seemed to take over my computer with background processes, nor the fact that I had to regularly update my startup apps list to prevent it strong-arming it’s way into the fresh boot line-up, but these were minor annoyances that I could overlook (griping out loud to nobody listening in the process).

As the years went by, the cost slowly crept up and the best monthly price was reserved for those who cycled through new accounts using multiple email addresses, or went through an endless threaten to cancel / get new offer hassle. The double pricing scale was infuriating but I kept on renewing.

Eventually the days of slicing PSDs gave way to exporting from Sketch and later Figma, but Photoshop still helped when I inherited the odd legacy project or needed to do a bit of basic image manipulation. I seemed to use it just enough to keep it, but never quite enough to warrant spending time looking at alternatives. Convenience has a price, I guess.

Until… earlier this year, when I went to edit my hosts file to point a client’s domain at new IPs to test a migration prior to the DNS switcheroo, and there before my very eyes were a set of IPs that I very much had not put there.

In my opinion, this was a step too far. Given that Windows makes the user load the hosts file with administrator privileges to edit it, CC editing it unrequested, unwarranted and without direct permission felt weirdly violating. Like Gavin said, this was malware behaviour. I cancelled my subscription on the spot and immediately removed Creative Cloud from my computer.

I’m pretty much exclusively using the free Affinity software now, having previously paid for and used Affinity Designer for editing SVGs. It’s got enough similarities to Photoshop that I’m not completely lost, and free is a pretty convincing price point to be honest…