Beats me! I don't use PhotoShop or Lightroom, so I'm pretty much immune to whatever Adobe does. I shouldn't think Canon care much either. Photoshop is certainly not the only game in town.

What I use most of the time is Canon's DPP RAW converter, which is pretty good. Canon keep adding features (slowly) and it's regularly updated to support new Canon cameras (any you don't have to pay for it or the updates!). It does pretty much everything I need in a RAW converter

When it comes to image editing I'm still using JASC Paint Shop Pro v.9. That's the last version developed by JASC before Corel bought them out and started messing with it adding "features" you don't need and dumbing it down.

There's also GIMP, which is free and is under continuous development. It's getting better and easier to use with each new version.

As a Lightroom alternative there's the free open source  DigiKam from  http://www.digikam.org/

I've also seen recommendations for Hasselblad Phocus, another free application.

RawTherapee is also a good RAW converter, though I've found it to be a bit unstable on my system.

It's been tough to compete with PhotoShop, despite the outragous price and need for regular expensive updates. I'm not sure Adobe moving to the cloud is going to make it easier for competitors. I doubt that Canon will get into the serious software business, though if you ask them, they say that DPP already is serious software.

Perhaps one should ask "What happens to Adobe when they move to the cloud"? For $50/month which is $600/year, one can dump Adobe and have $6,000 to spend on equipment, paper, inks, etc. over the next ten years. Although I can afford to pay Adobe, I have decided that they can stick it up their computers..... Maybe, if I was earning my living off of photography, but certainly not as an retired amateur. So it's bye-bye Adobe for moi.

I will certainly not be moving to the Photoshop Cloud.  I paid a lot for CS4 and still use it.  My only problem is that it cannot handle RAW files from my 60D.  I now use DPP to convert from RAW to TIFF and let Photoshop work on TIFF files.  Given that Canon are the only folks who actually have the spec for their RAW files that is probably the right way to go.  My understanding is that Adobe have to reverse engineer RAW files to create  their RAW converters.
Ken

What do you feel is lacking in DPP?

I look on it as a RAW converter, not an image editor. I see it as something for easily converting a RAW file to JPEG (or TIFF) with the incidental ability to do some minor editing such as cropping, rotating etc. That's all I want it to do. I don't expect it to be a mini version of Photoshop.

It does the RAW conversion very well. It can work on single image or batches of images. The same correction can be applied to any number of images in a batch process if you need to make the same correction to a whole bunch of images (e.g. if you had white balance set wrong or if you had exposure compensation set wrong).

I've also used RawTherapee, which is very powerful and flexible, but more complex to use and slower than DPP (not to mention being less stable on a 32-bit system and being a real memory hog). I've used Silkypix which I didn't find to be any better then DPP and it ran slower.

Since Corel took over Paint Shop Pro it's just gotten bigger and less focused. It tries to do everything instead of concentrating on being the best image editor. That's the Corel influence. They shut down JASC and closed their offices, so JASC no longer exists, even within Corel.

GIMP is probably the main competitor for Photoshop, but being open source and non-commercial it develops slowly and doesn't always have the best user interface.

There's an excellent Lightroom competitor called DarkTable. Unfortunately it only runs on Linux, though there is now a port to the Mac. It's unlikely to be ported to Windows because it's open source and the main developer just doesn't have the resources (or the inclination) to maintain it in versions for multiple operating systems. Working with the Windows community is a much bigger headache than working with the Linux community and getting things to work with all the various flavors and combinations of Windows is just too much work.

But DPP using RAW files has highlight recovery, unsharp mask and curve adjustments (for each color channel or global), along with the usual adjustments of contrast, saturation, black level, white level, color tone, noise reduction etc. It also has cloning (stamp tool), compositing and HDR as well as image rotation and cropping. Its editing ability on JPEG files is more limited.

I guess the limiting factor when using DPP for image editing is that all adjustments are global, i.e. there is no masking so you can't apply corrections to selected parts of an image.

Otherwise, if your DPP is missing the above mentioned features, it's time to update it to the latest version. I'm running version 3.13.0.1

JASC was acquired by Corel in 2004. In 2007 they closed down the JASC offices and essentially killed off the company.