Adobe Creative Cloud

Through the CU Boulder Adobe license agreement, OIT provides heavily discounted pricing for Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions for both university and personally-owned computers (students, faculty, and staff). Some services in Creative Cloud are available to students and instructors without additional cost.

Please visit the Adobe FAQ for additional information about Creative Cloud licensing at CU Boulder.

OS: MacOS Windows
Access Software 
Affiliation: Faculty Staff Students

Adobe Creative Cloud Features

The Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) suite is a licensed subscription renewed annually. The CC subscription model allows subscribers to receive automatic and continuous feature updates from Adobe, rather than new software versions every year or two. For general information on this subscription model, visit Adobe's Creative Cloud website.

There are two types of licenses: Named User or Shared device.

Services Available at No Cost

The online-only Adobe services available to all faculty, staff and students at no cost includes Adobe Firefly, Adobe Portfolio, Community, Creative Cloud Publish Storage, DC Storage, Fonts, Publish Online, Publish Services.

To access these services, log into your Adobe account at Adobe.com using your IdentiKey.

You can access Adobe Express for free by making a personal account on www.adobe.com/express/.

Software Included in CC Subscription

  • The Creative Cloud suite includes Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Bridge, Dreamweaver, Audition, Flash, After Effects, Stock, and Animate. See the full list of products included.
  • Acrobat Pro is among the Adobe products included in the Creative Cloud suite. Please note that the campus provides Acrobat Pro as a standalone product to all institution-owned computers at no cost.  Learn more about Adobe Acrobat.
  • Adobe Stock is not available on enterprise accounts. Use of Adobe Stock with an enterprise account requires a group subscription and is not recommended for individual users due to the cost it would incur. Please contact oitsoftware@colorado.edu for additional details.

Cost

Adobe CC is available to purchase at the following schedule. All licenses expire June 30th of each year.

  • July 1, 2023 – June 30, 2024: $95
  • January 1, 2024 – June 30, 2024: $65

How to get it

Named User licensing

Shared Device licensing

  • Subscriptions are for labs or multi-user workstations, for university-owned computers only.
  • No concurrent licensing with Creative Cloud.
  • Please note that Adobe licensing terms prohibit Creative Cloud software to be run in a virtual or remote manner; if you intend to use SDL in this way, please see the Creative Cloud FAQ for alternate solutions.
  • Download and set up instructions for Shared Device licenses

Device names

When requesting an Adobe CC Shared Device license, the person with administrative access to the computer should set the device name, and report that name as part of the request. Do not guess at the name; make sure you provide the actual device name, otherwise  the Adobe license for an unrecognized device name may be deactivated remotely by OIT.

Most computers come with no set name or get a temporary name from a local server. Set/change the name to something meaningful and recognizable, and then provide this device name when requesting a shared device license.

Finding a Device Name in Windows
  • Open the Control Panel for System and Security or System
  • View the Computer Name, which serves as the device name
  • Change the Computer Name, if needed, by clicking on Change Settings
Finding a Device Name in macOS

A Mac can have three different names; ComputerName, the HostName, and the LocalHostName. Adobe only uses the HostName. Open a Terminal window and type these commands to see the workstation's current hostname, and to set a new one:

scutil --get HostName
sudo scutil --set HostName newhostname