Wow, Adobe has a lot of my money!

dobe builds great creative solutions, and through the years, I’ve purchased, upgraded, and cross-graded a slew of their products. My primary focus has been Photoshop, and I was surprised to find that I had a stack of Photoshop versions dating back fifteen years or so. The Adobe collection in my office includes several versions of Illustrator and PageMaker, an old Photoshop and Illustrator suite that brought Streamline into the mix, and Premier. A recent addition to the menagerie is Lightroom. There’s also an old Macromedia bundle in the mix with FreeHand and its brethren.

The Costly Road To CS3

So when CS3 was announced I decided it was a good time to upgrade the whole shebang, and get Flash into the mix. A glance at the Creative Suite options shows me the cheapest route is to upgrade Photoshop CS2 (yeah just Photoshop) to Production Studio and then upgrade PageMaker to InDesign CS3. Those two upgrades, combined with Lightroom, tallies up to $1600. Ouch.

I’m a software engineer, not a professional graphic designer or photographer or video production guru — and $1600 seems pretty steep. While I understand not bending things just because some guy bought an old Macromedia or Adobe bundle, it seems like there should be some additional credit available for owning recent versions of Illustrator and Premier. And a way to wrap InDesign and Lightroom into a bundle. But I digress.

Looking Forward To CS3

Adobe’s silly upgrade schemes and their frustrating bundling aside, I’m eager to get Photoshop CS3 Extended up and running, not to mention the new Illustrator, Premier, Flash, and After Effects. But that won’t be available until July.

To review, some of the benefits of CS3 are better synergy between apps, including Flash, some performance improvements, 3D enhancements to Illustrator, and new 3D and video features for Photoshop (in the Extended edition). I’m also particularly keen on messing around with the image stacking features of Photoshop Extended.

Get CS2 To Get CS3 (Plus)

Unable to wait for CS3 Production Premium, I upgraded Photoshop CS2 to Production Studio Premium CS2, anticipating the free upgrade to CS3 when it’s available. Of course that means that I upgraded Photoshop CS2 to a bundle with Photoshop CS2, but at least it paves the way to CS3 Extended when my future bundle arrives. And for what it’s worth, the route through CS2 includes the Audition sound application as well as CS3’s Soundbooth.

Oddly enough, I can not even use CS3 in 30-day trial mode. It steadfastly refuses to run in demo mode on my system. Even after freshly installing Windows XP and nothing else. A day on the phone with Adobe Customer Support left us all perplexed.

But my shiny new CS2 bundle will tide me over.