Play Your cards RIght At The Rental Counter

If you would like to exercise your mind beyond the normal boundaries of time and space you can do several things; read the history of the Byzantine Empire and its succession of rulers, play 8-dimensional chess with Stephen Hawking, or try to understand the Adobe system of products and charges.

Okay, that was all exaggeration, but photographers over the last little bit might be forgiven for a bit of cynicism in regards to the variety and permutations of Adobe software.

Once upon a time you could buy a simple disc to load into your computer that had more things on them than you would ever need, use, or understand. You would then take courses to help you try to make it do something. If you stuck to it like sitting on a vinyl car seat in hot weather you eventually were able to select images and stick them to other images and then desaturate the thing. It was all some wedding shooters needed...

If you had no patience with this sort of thing you could opt for the trimmed version of the program and do pretty much the same things but with simplified instructions - as a bonus you got a cache of trite images to scatter about to liven up printed matter.

It was almost enough to make you relax and enjoy yourself...until the writers of software discovered that they could make new additions and you would pay them the same amount of money...or more...again each year to get that disc...again. I think they took their marketing strategy from the American car makers in the 1950's. Computer programs with tailfins and two-tone paint jobs...

And then...and then...and then they discovered that they could keep the main bits of the computer doin's on their own machines in Mumbai, Minneapolis, and Minsk. And charge you by the month or year to use them. You could enter into plans...

All the above is to sell you two products from the Rental counter - Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 and Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC. CC means creative cloud and that means that they let you do something if you pay them. It is a good something for many people, but you must remember that you are buying a contract to use the goods - you don't own the goods.

Still, no bad thing if the goods do what you want and the annual price is reasonable. The PE14 IS something that you own and can keep on using for jolly ever. I use PE10 and it does just fine for my old computer...and my old computer does just fine for me. Please do not be content with your old camera equipment - this is a shop and we want you to buy new camera equipment.

It won't cost you an arm and a leg to try the PS and LR on a CC basis for one year. If your needs for photoshopping surpass what PE14 can do, this is the way to go. Certainly if your needs are for LR it will be developed far more in the future than its rival Aperture 3 which was abandoned on the doorstep with a tear-stained note.