Like everyone else I was not happy that Adobe moved their licensing to monthly. I had Adobe CS5 Design Standard and I had resisted the upgrade to CS6 Design Standard. The price for the upgrade was $549.00. I use three CS5 programs: Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat. I also use Photoshop Lightroom v4. I love  Lightroom v4 and was thinking about upgrading to v5. The upgrade price is $79.00. since Lightroom v5 is included in Creative Cloud, and the monthly subscription for owners of CS5 was $30/month, I decided to try CC. I'm not sure what I will do next year when the monthly subscription goes up to $49/month. I think the $49/mo is great for people who need the whole set of applications but like I said I only use four of the applications. Deep down this feels like a tax. The only downside is that if I decide not to renew CC next year I will need to buy LR5. 

Deep down I think all most traditional photographers need is Lightroom. LR helps you organize and print your images. It provides all of the basic image manipulation capabilities that most photographers need. You can straighten, resize, tweak colors, remove spots, and so much more. Many Photoshop plugins work with LR. If you want to composite images or remove objects from the photo, then you need Photoshop but many photographers consider that cheating. 

There are a lot of new Photoshop  features like Camera Shake Reduction,  Smart Sharpen,  and Intelligent upsampling; that you can only get with Creative Cloud. I was interested in the following new Lightroom v5 features like Advanced Healing Brush, Straighten tilted images, Highlight and shadow recovery, and Superior noise reduction.

After I signed up for CC, I installed LR, Photoshop, Acrobat, and InDesign. Next I had to figure out how to reinstall my OnOne and Nik plugins. All of them seem to work but it was annoying to have to reinstall them. I also had to reinstall my “Export to Zenfolio” Lightroom Plugin. Unlike the upgrade from LR3 to LR4 it looks like the Develop Presets survived the upgrade and still work. By the way there are lots of free presets available on the Internet. I get most of mine from Lightroom Killer Tips. Ok I'm finally ready to give CC and LR5 a try.