Sketchbook Pro massive price increase
interpolator
Note: Over the course of this thread, it was discovered that Sketchbook had actually gone free, and an official announcement was made later. The more expensive version discovered on the Autodesk site is actually the new Studio ("Enterprise") pricing.
The free version for individuals is found here.
I've been off my Photoshop contract for a while, and was looking into something cheap and effective for sketching out concept art. Krita has been nothing but a clumsy mess, and I hate the annual contract Adobe forces on you with Photoshop, combined with what I considered a relatively high cost compared to much of the competition. Even after the year is up, they won't let you cancel without first contacting and arguing with a representative.
I remembered Sketchbook being really nice to work with for drawing along with a low cost, so I looked back into that.
Apparently though, at some recent point they more than TRIPLED the cost from $2.99 a month to $10. It now costs as much as Photoshop, unless you get the annual plan.
I thought this was crazy; who would take a substantially less-used one-trick pony over Photoshop for the same price? But here's where it gets really weird. I tried to look into why this happened, or even when, but I can't find anything on this. Anything.
No discussions, no announcements. It's like it never happened. But if you look at the site, this most definitely did.
Weirder yet, anything I've found elsewhere mentioning the price still lists it as $2.99. Even articles put out this year.
Unless they're a third-party seller, in which case they also list it as the new price.
This seems like commercial suicide.
The free version for individuals is found here.
I've been off my Photoshop contract for a while, and was looking into something cheap and effective for sketching out concept art. Krita has been nothing but a clumsy mess, and I hate the annual contract Adobe forces on you with Photoshop, combined with what I considered a relatively high cost compared to much of the competition. Even after the year is up, they won't let you cancel without first contacting and arguing with a representative.
I remembered Sketchbook being really nice to work with for drawing along with a low cost, so I looked back into that.
Apparently though, at some recent point they more than TRIPLED the cost from $2.99 a month to $10. It now costs as much as Photoshop, unless you get the annual plan.
I thought this was crazy; who would take a substantially less-used one-trick pony over Photoshop for the same price? But here's where it gets really weird. I tried to look into why this happened, or even when, but I can't find anything on this. Anything.
No discussions, no announcements. It's like it never happened. But if you look at the site, this most definitely did.
Weirder yet, anything I've found elsewhere mentioning the price still lists it as $2.99. Even articles put out this year.
Unless they're a third-party seller, in which case they also list it as the new price.
This seems like commercial suicide.
Replies
however, may I ask if you have looked into something like Clip Studio Paint/Manga Studio, Paintstorm, or Paint Tool SAI? They're all very affordable compared to PS, though they lack the same amount of editing and photo manipulation, which may not be a huge deal for you if you're mostly concerned with sketching and concepting. Clip Paint in particular goes on sale a few times a year at around ~$20 or so, and it's pretty widely used for drawing and painting.
or, there's always Photoshop CS2, which is free.. and to be honest there hasn't really been any worthwhile improvements to PS since then anyway
CSP is basically the industry leader for line art, with something like 70-80% of all manga done using it these days.
SAI is basically the 2D equivalent to Silo, extremely simple to use and yet still powerful enough for most tasks.
(Rant done).
So, I'd have to confirm that Clip Paint Studio / Manga Studio is probably the closest you'll get to PS for a flat fee. It is far from perfect - layer manipulation, which one may take for granted coming from PS, can be quite slow in MS ; and the UI can feel a little awkward and glitchy at times compared to how rock solid PS is. But it's still quite good.
Now besides that there might also be the option to (somehow) manage to get an official license for CS5/CS6. Adobe does not sell these anymore, but you could try your luck by contacting one of their listed local retailers. Who knows !
I personally got myself a full CS5 Extended back then, right around the time of the announcement of the future switch to monthly CC subscriptions because there was no way I would get myself locked into that kind of commercial practice, and it has been extremely solid ever since. (I opted for CS5 over CS6 because it showed better performance when doing side by side comparaisons with the same documents). I know that it sounds like something out of the stone age now, but it really is quite a remarkable version - very stable, hardware accelerated canvas, and all the painting and editing features one needs. Also tested it on Win10 a couple months ago and it ran perfectly fine in this environment.
Good luck !
Clip Studio Paint is the best. Very nice brush engine. Has a photoshop-esque feel. And you don't need to perform Voodoo to get your tablet to work (it feels like Photoshop just can't keep this crucial feature working.)
They tripled the price. That's batshit insane. Just because you can afford something, doesn't mean you should. I could afford to stay subscribed to Netflix if they upped the price to $100 a month, but I wouldn't.
Krita's latest release, 4.0.1, is the one going in the scripting direction. It let's you use PyQT to do a lot of things like custom dockers, colour pickers, a comic book project manager etc.
i've never relied on plugins nor scripts in photoshop so couldn't comment on that but affinity has macro support for what PS calls actions.
As suggested if you extremely frustrated then you will have to find an alternative. Why not just subscribe to Photoshop, unless you are already; get comfortable then down the road if you want to combine workflows between Ps & Sketchbook you can purchase a yearly licence.
I realize I sounded negative on Affinity Photo. But I own a license and I use it for a lot of print work. But when I batch export output I need still need Photoshop.
I'd say by careful with this kind of announcements, especially when they use the phrasing "you can now use X for free" instead of "X is free". There's probably a catch, like a switch to an always-online model or some kind of backwards way to prevent the user from working locally (like they did with Fusion 360). Proceed with caution, it's Autodesk after all. The plot thickens indeed ...
https://www.getleonardo.com/ leonardo looks good, my problem is I trialed it for like 5 minutes then got super busy, so cant attest too much to how well it works.
personally I am using krita for most things but grabbing the new version of gimp thanks to this thread
http://autodesk.blogs.com/between_the_lines/2018/04/sketchbook-is-now-free.html
As always, there is next to the ID another catch; the enterprise licence will still cost money which means that "Free" is not "free", when you want to use this program in a studio, the studio has to buy the Enterprice licence subscription(s).
One of the features is "standard Autodesk licensing". I wonder if the free version isn't supposed to be used commercially. Nothing I've seen clarifies the licensing restrictions, except that Enterprise is "for studios".
From there it's not so much about the subscription being $0 of $85, but rather a matter of deciding whether or not one is willing to trust Autodesk with "coulds". And whether or not once considers it worth it to use an always-on software that will stop working whenever their servers fail. Such failures are rare, but they definitely do happen - there was the example of a CNC shop that got locked out of their Fusion360 work because of exactly that.
I personally wouldn't trust any software provider that puts their own interest over the good working conditions of their users.
Admittedly this doesn't really apply to a casual use of the program. But personally, I wouldn't recommend committing to any software that doesn't put the work of the user first and foremost. Hence I would rather suggest to look for a solid open source solution elsewhere, supporting it with donations, and so on. But again that's really just a personal philosophy/stance - partly rooted in specific beliefs about software design, and partly because of bad experience with AD in the past.
Also, If the files are cloud-only and their servers happen fail ... then one can definitely end up being locked out
Now you can see why companies are desperate for outsourcing.
some bits of info - which may or may not be related to your post, since it can be interpreted in many different ways - that may help you structure an actual point :
1) salaried artists working full time at studios don't pay for their own licenses
2) for a studio's dev budget, if the cost of licenses increases and tips the budget over a certain red line, the first port of call is not to remove those licenses altogether by shifting the work to remote outsourcers, since that would just increase costs elsewhere. You'd generally talk to your reseller, find alternatives, or suck up the increase through contingency.
3) decent studios don't go out of their way to find ways to pay trusted contractors/freelancers less and screw them out of a few quid, they value their work and they value keeping them on side. If a freelancer needs to increase their rate to account for software costs rising, it's usually in the studios best interest to meet this
For everyone's sake, I hope this is true. I could post sources, but for privacy reasons I wont go into it.
/ontopic :
- I am really bothered again by the "free" aspect of it like Pior said, if you use it at home its fine but if you start implementing it in your workflow and want to use it at the studio then it will be hard to justify a 300% increase in price for the photoshop subscription.
Since this is a little on-topic (y'know, yelling about money and all that), I just saw this advertised and I can't say I'm happy to have seen it. "Earn rewards" is not the same as "Get paid", maybe some of you have seen similar examples of how well that kind of support network actually works.
My big question about this is where these "experts" will fit into support, and if their current support is going anywhere. Now I have no idea what Autodesk's budgeting looks like, but knowing that this is/will be going on has me a little worried.
Subscription models are actually a benefit as you're not forced to lay out 5-10k on licenses just to start up any more.
Fwiw my pay has been going up every year since I started working.. If its not you're probably doing something wrong
I imagine they get a mountain of support requests, and this seems to be an attempt to weed out all the "How do I open the outliner" type requests from people who don't know how to use Google.