Pardon my Adobe iggarince, but what is the mobile app for? Doing actual image processing with a 4" screen? Or just looking at your uploaded images?
---------- Post added 01-13-16 at 08:56 AM ----------
Originally posted by PPPPPP42 I always found it a bit odd that at the comical profit margins adobe has, someone else hasn't made essentially the same software for half the price.
Even at half price you would still make so much on each copy that you could afford to hire all the best developers and programmers and still turn a healthy profit.
With supply and demand the adobe monopoly technically shouldn't exist, even Microsoft can't charge that ridiculously much for an operating system that is much more critical to many more people and takes far more development and constant work to boot.
That said I just downloaded a free copy of paint.net for my editing. Subscriptions are for magazines and services, so until they start editing the pictures for you I will take my software in a hard copy that expires when I tell it to, thank you very much.
Also I don't think i have ever taken a picture so important (or so badly shot) that it needs photoshops level of tools. There's a lot of work that's easier to do correctly in pre, than fix in post.
Of course heavily edited images seem to be what buyers of photos expect these days so what do I know.
I think the answers to the questions you ask are several. I've certainly observed and pondered the same over the years. Besides being classicly horribly expensive, the Adobe layouts were never intuitive to me. I failed to get the Adobe gene, I guess. I use no Adobe products, not even the Reader. Oh, yes, Flash because it's the only game for internet video.
I think the first consideration is being first in the game. Although Photo-Paint, now by Corel, was first of the type of program PS is, they failed to get a toe hold in the market. Probably just by dint of presence in the SW world. So, being first, or almost first, starts bring people in. That leads to:
Two. The use of PS (or whatever Big Name Dominates) program spreads. People in the pro or graphics business can justify the mega-$$$ prices for the SW. What really rankles me at this point is that upgrades that use probably 95% of the old code, Adobe charged big fees for that 5%. This leads to:
Three. Since the pro's are using it, I should too. Meaning average people. Which also means increasing pirated software. Which also means that a lot of people start making alternative programs to do the PS job, or maybe not the whole enchilada. More designed for average users. There's a list of both free and proprietary raster image programs here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_raster_graphics_editors
The obvious alternative to PS is The GIMP. You can now set it up as a single screen work space, like PS. There are many much lower priced programs to compete with LR and/or PS like Paint Shop Pro, ACDsee, and others.
There is the, I think, amazing
www.digiKam.org . Think Lightroom plus many PS functions short of working with masks and layers. Open source, Linux based, a not quite perfect port to Windows, which is what I use, and a lesser perfect port to Mac. It has plug-ins that I understand you pay extra for to accomplish the same in PS. No Adobe gene required!
A similar "first in" phenomena happened when Steve Jobs got Macs into many schools. Pretty soon the teachers were buying them for their own use, now they were familiar with them. The students grew up with them, so when they got their own computer, they chose Apple (if they could afford them!)
So, there' my many cents worth of answer to your question!