Creative Cloud is Adobe's bundle: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Media Encoder and twenty more, on one monthly subscription. You know what it is. The question is only whether you still need it.

How I use it

Less than I used to, which is the honest answer. Most of my images now come out of a script or a model, and most of my video cuts are code. Photoshop is where the last ten percent happens: a selection a model got wrong, a label that has to read exactly right, a composite that needs a human eye on the edges. Premiere is for the cut a script cannot describe, and Media Encoder quietly converts whatever odd format a camera or a download handed me. Illustrator opens once a month for a logo file.

What surprised me is how far the generative tools have come. Remove and fill in Photoshop now handle the small fixes that used to take ten minutes of cloning. What annoys me has not changed in years. The suite costs real money every month whether I open it or not, the annual plan punishes you for leaving early, and the Creative Cloud app installs a crowd of helpers that run at login and update themselves whenever they like. Every October a new year's version lands next to the old one, so I now have two Photoshops and two Premieres on disk until I remember to clean up.

Who it is for

Anyone who already knows these tools and works in a field that trades files in their formats. If you touch Photoshop every day, nothing else makes sense. Skip the full suite if you only need one app; the single-app plan is much cheaper. And if you are starting fresh and do not have to exchange files with anyone, Affinity or the free tools will take you a long way.

Related tools