Photoshop, Piracy and Popularity

Open source aficionados are going to love this one – Adobe’s Photoshop does have a whole lot of users, but that’s no reason for the company to break out the champagne. Why? Because more than half of these users have not purchased their copy through legitimate means; in plain English, this means that most users of Photoshop have pirated their software, and that Adobe has lost out on tons of revenue.

I guess it’s easier to justify piracy when the original comes at a whopping $600. But the question still remains – why do people still pirate Photoshop when there are numerous open source alternatives? Some of them like the Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) are almost equivalent to Adobe’s image editor, and the best part is, they’re free. Ok, so the Gimp and other free online photo editing tools don’t offer support for CMYK (except the one from KOffice named Krita) and the RAW digital camera format or license PANTONE, but besides that, they should suffice for all your image editing needs, unless you’re going to use an editing tool for commercial purposes.

But that does not explain why people who want to crop and edit their photos just to impress their friends with their nifty online albums want to do it with Photoshop. What is it that drives them to pirate this program that’s so heavy on features that not many people know how to use the entire package? I guess there’s no easy answer to this question.

Maybe those who pirate the program want other people to believe they own legitimate copies of Photoshop – I mean, who’s to know the difference besides the guys who supply the license? Or maybe they feel they will use all or at least most of the features in Photoshop sometime in the near future and are preparing themselves for that fine day. It may even be a case of turning their noses up at Adobe’s audacity in setting such a high price for the package – see, we can still use your software without paying your snotty license fees.

Whatever the reason, there’s no doubting the fact that Photoshop remains one of the most popular image editing tools ever developed. And if nothing else, Adobe can claim this to their credit.