Lightroom 2 – Yay!

Well, Lightroom 2 is here. And yes, I’ll be upgrading very soon.

But the upgrade pricing has, again, raised a sore point with me in regard to Adobe’s pricing policies. The upgrade costs $99 in the States and 99€ in Europe (both prices will be adjusted with tax). With the current currency levels this means that the comparable prices are 63€ and 99€. That’s a 36€ difference (about $100).

I can accept the fact that companies need to add some markup to international prices to account for currency fluctuations and other assorted costs. When the markup is around a third of the price I start to lose my understanding and become annoyed.

I’ve aleady found multiple threads online on ordering other Adobe products boxed from the States in order to avoid the insane markups and I will certainly be looking into ordering Lightroom from the States.

Don’t get me wrong, while I am a strong proponent of open-source, I am willing to pay for a good piece of software (latest purchases include E and TextMate). But there is a limit to what I’m willing to suffer.

So now I’ll just wait for the boxed products to start shipping and upgrade then, if shipping and handling costs remain reasonable that is.

P.S. The Photoshop CS3 30-day trial that I installed on Anna’s Mac still reports 30 days of the trial period left (after two weeks of installation). But yes, I’ll still be ordering a licensed version as soon as some client billing comes through.