I can't believe that the storm and arguments about Adobe's CC licensing system haven't blown over yet: It is certainly a topic that gets emotions running high when it comes up for discussion. 

 

I've thought long and hard about it, and I believe it makes sense - or at least it does since they introduced the Adobe Photography Program. 

 

Let's look at your options, as a photographer:

 

At the consumer end of the market there's Elements. Elements 12 retails at £57 on Amazon. There's no upgrade option, so everytime there is a new elements you have to pay the full price.   Elements has a guided mode for snapshot photographers and a full mode for the more experienced. It will handle RAW files but lacks some features in the full Photoshop/Lightroom Camera Raw. 16-bit image support is also not as complete, and there are a few other things missing. Generally speaking there are many plug ins which attempt to patch these holes, like ElementsXXL

 

Next up is Lightroom, currently retailing at £75 on Amazon. Lightroom excels at applying the same treatment to batches of images and managing libraries of images. There are the full image RAW processing tools and the usual collection of adjustment sliders and simple retouching tools. For most people this is enough but if you want to get into serious retouching, you'll need Photoshop.  

 

I will also say that for Mac users, Apple's Aperture is an interesting option to consider: it does much of what Lightroom does but has a better RAW convertor, which at the time of writing, seems able to pull more detail out of the image and look more natural when recovering highlights. 

 

Of course there are some non-Adobe solutions: On the PC, Corel's Paint Shop Pro (£45) has a loyal following and Pixelmator on the Mac (£20.99) gets a five star rating. I can't comment on these as I have no experience of them. 

 

For those of us who need or at least want the full power of Photoshop, Photoshop CC is available as part of the Adobe Photography Program. This includes Aperture and Photoshop CC and costs £8.78 a month including VAT.  That's just over £105 a year and you get Photoshop CC and Lightroom (itself worth £75) together. The CC licensing scheme currently allows installation on two computers at the same time: so if you have a PC and a Mac or a Laptop and Desktop you can use both.  This package also includes Behance Prosite and 20GB of Adobe Cloud storage. 

 

So for a photographer, I think the Adobe Photography Program at £8.78/month looks like a good deal.