A little over two years ago, Adobe announced that it would no longer update Photoshop CS6. Instead, it would concentrate all its resources on the Creative Cloud, its subscription based software. However, to placate CS6 owners, Adobe would continue to update Camera Raw for CS6 for at least the near future. That time came to an end this week.
Adobe announced on Tuesday that the next Camera Raw update would be the last update to Camera Raw for CS6. It then released Camera Raw 9.1.1 on Wednesday. What does this mean?
It doesn’t really change much for users that are doing their raw processing in Lightroom and moving to Photoshop to do the things that cannot be done in Lightroom. It also doesn’t change much even if you are using Photoshop CS6 to process your raw images and do not plan on buying a new camera in the near future. Finally, it doesn’t change the fact that Photoshop CS6 won’t work on some future version of Windows or Mac OS X.
What does change is that future cameras will not be supported in Photoshop CS6. So, if you are using Photoshop CS6 to process your raw images and want to buy the latest Nikon, Canon, or Sony camera, you will need to find another way to process raw images from that camera. You will have two choices: (1) Use Adobe’s DNG Converter to convert the raw image to the DNG format; or (2) Use Lightroom (the latest version) to process your images and then edit them in Photoshop.
This is just one more step in the slow march to obsolesce of Photoshop CS6. Whether you want a feature in Photoshop CC 2015 or Photoshop CS6 stops working on a future version of Windows or Mac OS X, the end result is the same. You will be subscribing to the CC sooner or later.
