> You can no longer reinstall Creative Suite 2 or 3 even if you have the original installation disks. The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired.
I always wonder if a situation like this is legal. If I purchased a product and want to keep using it, what right does the seller have to prevent me from doing so x years later?
Can I sue them for not selling me the product they said they were selling me?
Maybe someone can crack the code to not require activation?
You did purchase the software after all, and unless you are illegally distributing it I see it as a perfectly fine thing to do whatever you want within your own private residence.
Modifying the binary is not same as copying .
Also given thay Adobe has failed to their side of the agreement, there is some legal standing.
Ofcourse it has to be tested in court, unlikely Adobe will even sue if they knew. I don't think they care one way or another. And the customer using cs2 still is unlikely to sue as it's not going to be a large enterprise.
This is just laziness from Adobe , older servers take effort to maintain. They could be using keys that have expired to be signing the auth request for example.
What hardware are you running that old crap code on anyways? If you are in the video world today, those old versions of software can't even handle HD let alone 4K/8K. I couldn't even imagine trying to run RAW video without GPU support. Why are people so clinging on to software that only allows work from 10-15 years ago? Times have progressed. The old software doesn't support anything I need it to today (maybe I could get by with an old version of PS except for today's RAW formats would bring it to its knees).
Nonsense. The disks are your property and you're entitled to use them as you see fit (except when that use is illegal e.g. copyright infringement - and note that copyright does not cover the transitory copies made as part of running the application).
I run my life by morals, not by law, but with a risk tolerance bounded by the effects of law.
That said, my moral interpretation of closed-source software is that I can do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not distributing it to others without permission. Anything that enters my private residence, whether it be a CD I may have bought, or a very long byte array that got transmitted into my internal LAN in return for a payment, is fair game for me to do anything I want with, as long as it doesn't reach anyone outside.
...does anyone? Is that humanly possible to read through without a law degree? What do you do if you want to negotiate? The answer, of course, is piracy: reject all terms.
The terms of the CS6 license pertaining to activation don't indicate one way or the other what happens if the server was intentionally disabled by Adobe's choice. The only stated requirement is internet access; there's an implied requirement that no firewall is in place to prevent the software from communicating with the Adobe server.
The CS6 license [1] has a 90 day limited warranty in section 6, which, for most goods, means the items will work as intended for at least 90 days, otherwise you can return it for a full refund. It it fails after 90 days, then you generally cannot.
Also, did CS6 stop working? The only stories I see are CS2 and CS3.
No, I have no reason to believe CS6 stopped working, that's just the only terms I have on my local and I couldn't find an obvious archive of Adobes terms for previous versions.
Are the terms unreasonable? If the terms were a limited license rather than an infinite guarantee to provide activation servers, then it’s not likely legally unreasonable. And it’s not at all uncommon to be the former. I’ve never seen a court rule a license like this to be unreasonable. Have you?
Here’s [1] the CS3 license. It states a 90 day warranty, which is certainly legally a standard warranty. Section 14.8.1 states Adobe can disable the activation server.
So yep, looks like this was covered in the license. I doubt a court is going to rule Adobe must provide a server indefinitely.
There may be some part of the law that prevents you from suing (IANAL), but if it wasn't disclosed before you purchased it, it make intuitive sense to me that you should have grounds to sue.
I felt the same way about the whole Sonos recyling thing too...
I think any competent lawyer would argue that the software was never guaranteed to have infinite lifespan, and Adobe stopped selling CS3 quite a while ago. The EULA explicitly says they don’t warranty anything past 90 days since sale.
But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.
If you sue Adobe over this they will likely settle over the phone. If you really want to be a jerk, don't settle and make them send a lawyer out to your district. I'm not encouraging any fraud here but if you feel ripped off, a small claims case is totally in order, here. And they normally take about 10 minutes to file for online.
Don't forget all the time spent learning the beast that is CS3 only to have it stripped away.
What is the value of the years it takes to become proficient with such software? Remember, that investment was made on the back of the idea that the software would continue to be usable.
I’m sure there’s a provision that protects them in the EULA you agreed to when you purchased it.
Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it. Ownership is such a convoluted concept in tech, particularly in software.
That’s somewhat sketchy with pre boxed software. Old Nintendo cartridges just worked and presumably had zero copyright issues. If you’re buying/using hardware with software preinstalled, at what point did you agreed to the EULA?
I'm glad you qualified "old", because I tried to run some Switch games from the cartridge when I was at a cottage with no connectivity, and both games forbade me from playing without updating first.
This is what kills me about the xbone, games come on disks, but immediately want to call home before allowing play. Game calls home, and realizes it needs a 8GB patch! Proceeds to download patch at 500Kb/sec on my 100's of Mbit/sec internet connection.
Then despite probably "authenticating" itself to the xbone, won't actually run unless the disk is in the drive.
(don't get me started on how bad the UI is, I really haven't any idea why gamers love those little machines so much, they are mostly just trash).
Why are they running physical servers for this anyways? Why not just host in the cloud right next to their current servers authenticating recent rental software?
What if you have assets that can only be opened by that version of the software? What if these assets are worth more to you than the cost of the software?
I’m also not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing, at least in the US. Downloading/distributing abandonware is still piracy, it’s just much less likely anyone will care.
I remember The Internet Archive celebrating the fact that the "do not tamper" clause was no longer legal for abandonware (as they host tons of abandonware that has been cracked, e.g. Win 95).
That's not how the DMCA works. Circumventing these measure is completely illegal. It's just that doing it on your own software is very unlikely to have anyone find out.
But it's a problem for researchers, who generally want to publish their findings (or at least was the last time I was really paying attention to the law in the early to mid 00s).
> Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works
> Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
This reminds me of the old ESO servers for age of mythology/empires. Microsoft bought ESO, eventually I think in the late 00s they shut down the online multiplayer servers. But they weren't really shutdown, the certificate had actually expired. If you started up fiddler2 and did a little tinkering you could actually get connected to the servers through the game again.
I discovered this at the start of lockdown when our hackspace got donated some older iMacs and full copies of CS3. Apparently if you got in contact with them when they first announced the retirement they were giving out activation-free installers to people who could prove ownership. It'd be lovely if someone has these archived somewhere for those of us that weren't quick enough.
Because we're a hackspace so I couldn't risk getting caught doing that. Totally had nothing to do with my failing to find useful OSX installers and cracks for the version we had :)
It will really appreciate if someone has the same but for Windows install. I help a very poor shop and we had the same problem so we are using activators as Adobe won't help anymore.
In general, digital signatures should always be cryptographically verifiable by the receiver without anyone's cooperation - certification by someone may be required to make the signature (especially if you'd want the signature to include a trusted timestamp), but everyone else in perpetuity can verify if a signature was certified by someone even if that certifier does not exist anymore.
The original EULA doesn’t say those things (CS3 was before the era where everything had an arbitration agreement stapled to it), but does say that the software is only warrantied for 90 days and that that is the only warranty you get unless you have a support contract.
Even with arbitration, tons and tons of arbitrations cases can hurt even large businesses.
To be clear though, arbitration where the employer chooses and pays (pays off really) the firm in question seems the definition of a conflict of interest and a one-sided contract that should be thrown out.
EULAs in boxed software were always strange to begin with. You could not return opened software so if you purchased something like CS 2 on disc and didn’t like the terms there was nothing you could do. The agreements were not always enforceable unless the terms were stated on the box or a refund option was provided (which rarely was for fear of piracy).
I just realized that I'm apparently scarred for life by this. I still regularly open electronics boxes from the bottom/back because of those silly little "no returns if broken" seals that seemingly were only on the top of the box.
Just did it couple days ago for a sim for my LTE hotspot.
I guess on the plus side, my returns tend to go smoothly as the boxes tend to look unopened.
On the contrary, I remember reading EULAs that clearly stated that if the user didn't agree with the EULA they could return it to the store where it was purchased for a full refund - regardless of the condition of the box. I think that was in Microsoft's terms mostly?
This is pretty amazing, so glad you posted it. It has layer blending options and shadow/highlights, two feature I can't live without and are often missing in free editors. The menus are exactly like photoshop. And finally an API that lets you save/load PSD/images to and from cloud storage.
Really? To give just one example, if I press cmd-T in PS, I go into an editing mode where I can translate, rotate, and scale a layer with intuitive, contextual mouse controls for each. With GIMP it's broken up into separate commands. I didn't spend so much time with it, but with PS things got guessable very quickly, where with GIMP it felt like the features are just stuffed in there wherever they can fit.
That proves the point, you simply don't know how to use Gimp yet. It is called "Unified Transform", available on the default toolbar or by pressing "shift-t". So the difference is literally pressing shift instead of control, a trivial difference by any standard, and reconfigurable as well.
Yes it does prove the point. So if I look at these docs[0], this tool, not only does it do translate/rotate/scale, which are the most fundamental image transformations in 2D editing, but it also does shearing and perspective transformations which are rarely used by comparison. This tool was clearly designed from an implementation-driven perspective (just put all the affine transformations in one place) rather than a UX driven perspective (no designer places these tools together conceptually).
On top of that, this tool still sits along side other single purpose tools for scaling and rotating, which are the first results if you search "how to rotate in GIMP", so why should I even expect this tool to exist?
This is not intuitive UX which is "trivially different" to PS, this is a mess which can only be learned through laborious trial and error, or reading the documentation like a book.
Many open source projects such as Gimp have a serious UX problem. Software engineers are great at delivering efficient systems. In terms of usability they’re arrogant and inflexible. They’re two different skills and I wish project maintainers understood that.
I want to like it, but GIMP is almost unusable for me. Really hard to do even basics, and have to spend a lot of time googling how to do what I want to do.
You wouldn't expect Photoshop to be immediately usable for a newbie either. I've always been completely stumped by Photoshop, but I haven't spent enough time in it to expect otherwise.
True, but I've been using GIMP a long time - more than a decade. Used it for years longer and years before I used Adobe CS. Taken a number of tutorials on it. Will always be super clunky.
I'm a huge fan of FOSS, but open source products also have to stand on their own merits. The best way for FOSS to succeed is for FOSS products to be as good or better than closed alternatives. Otherwise they will always be relegated to a small audience of a few die-hards.
Significant portion of what kind of users exactly? Professionals upgrade their software and I could bet that 13 years old software is nowhere near of being significant. It’s the same kind of stupidity like shouting that Microsoft EOLed XP. ;-)
I’m no designer, but my previous workflows relied quite a bit on core functionality found in versions of CS going back to at least CS3. I’ve used CS3, CS4, CS6, and more recently CC. I only used CC because CS6 no longer worked on macOS, and I only used CS6 because I couldn’t get a legit older version (also student discount).
I found it to be a treadmill - the prices went up until Adobe decided that you could no longer purchase anything outright and now had to rent it. Newer versions looked prettier, but the performance and stability dropped.
I’d reckon that the vast majority of people using CC would be happy with an older version and just as productive. CC6 and later are resource hogs that are constantly calling home. Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
And I’m using Adobe software from Photoshop 6, and upgraded with each new version to gain features and performance that wasn’t available with previous releases. I wasn’t happy with cloud option, but it’s still cheaper than buying boxed versions of Adobe soft. And no, not even one professional will use CS for anything other, than amusement on old hardware.
> Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
He’s not a designer, his a pirate. If you do a professional work, you pay for tools you use. Simple as that. If you want to say, that they are pricy then use some free alternative (they existed, and are great), or cheaper pro software like from Serif.
I would be willing to bet that less than 1% of adobe users were still using cs2 or 3. Anyone doing it for a living isn't going to blink at the subscription price (if they even had to pay for it personally).
This will be remembered as a dark age of humanity. Anything built or released in the early 21st century will simply become meaningless bytes to future generations.
I had this thought when watching a cold-case show awhile back. The detectives had dug out the original cassette tapes which helped "crack the case" - what are modern police departments doing? Hopefully this stuff isn't just in the cloud somewhere waiting to get lost? In 20 years will we have any ability whatsoever to recreate everything from today?
Just think about the 1990s internet. Geocities is gone, xoom is gone Yahoo pages is gone. There's already a hole of all of the content that existed the. Sure for some people it might just be senseless 13 year olds' pages, but it is a big chunk of history right there.
You need to search for the filenames and direct links. I have an old comment here linking to a different archive that has the original direct links on the page with the serials.
(Adobe is certainly trying to make it hard to find, which I'm not surprised about.)
How is this comment grayed out? I just scrolled past like eight pages of bozos shamelessly talking about pirating Adobe, suing Adobe, and regulating Adobe... before finally finding a comment I can respect, and it's downmodded. I mean, is this Hacker News or is it Russian Hacker News?
And you can no longer use the 2008 version of Gmail. Adobe moved to a subscription model that has allowed them to stay alive as a business without monetizing you as the product like many other ad based businesses. Adobe gets trashed endlessly for this because we had a taste of the perpetual license long ago. But the perpetual license doesn't make sense with cloud based updates and document sync that everyone also expects in modern digital tools. Imagine creating software today with perpetual licenses but no updates or sync across devices. You would laugh it off your machine.
However , their sale terms for cs2 did not say you can pay a lot of money to use till Adobe changrs their mind. Their license agreement said I can use as long as I wanted to
Adobe cannot unilaterally change the rules of a sale they completed in the past. It’s Darth Vader’s “pray i don't alter it further” behaviour - a character built to be the representation of evil.
Updates come via paying the fairly high price to start with, you know, supporting the damned product you paid for.
Document sync is something that is provided via a bunch of other services if you need it - icloud/onedrive/dropbox/etc
But sure, come up with more laughable excuses to justify shitty company practices.
Feature updates just come in new versions, which you pay for.
Monthly payments can still work, many other companies use that model, and after a period of time, you're frozen at the last version you paid for (after a year for example) if you stop paying.
But yeah, screw them now - I used to have a usable paid version, but no longer - there are better alternatives now.
There are special no-activation-required versions of the entire CS2 and CS3 product line!
Adobe killed the product activation servers for CS2 products in 2013, and for CS3 products in 2017. For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This resulted in a bunch of press[0] about it being a /!\ omg completely free Creative Suite /!\, so for CS3's 2017 shutdown[1] they made you register your original serials to your Adobe Account in exchange for an individualized offline serial and the offline installer[2].
I don't know exactly when, but some time around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 they ended[3] the offline installer program for CS3, removed the ability to generate offline serials in my Adobe Account page or even re-access the offline downloads for my already-generated serials, and have seemingly scrubbed their Knowledge Base of any mention that they ever existed.
I am so thankful I got them while I was able to since aside from needing to tweak the high-DPI handling[4] the CS3 apps work beautifully on my Windows 10 x64 machine. All CS3 applications are only 32-bit, but they're also the final versions with traditional UIs before they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS4, so I'm fine with it :)
That was an excellent summary of Adobe's software giveaway.
Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations.
My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago:
How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1]
> But are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized?
Just an assumption because I have two legit OS X CS3 Master Collection serials, got two different replacement offline serials for them, and those serials don't work for the Windows version just like the originals didn't v(._. )v
Oh dear, thank you so very much genuinely for your excellent history. Unfortunately I think this is going to leave me with the loss, since I last backed up my design workstation to tape conveniently the just far enough distant past and (dealing with long-term injury that I am only recently overcome sufficiently for picking up my WACOM pen again) only the last month or so have been planning on restoring.
Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm?
Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?
I’ve noticed a few companies seemingly pricing things higher than you’d think was sensible (the one that struck me recently is Contentful, who’s pricing tiers quickly jump up to “far too expensive for a small company”)... my assumption is they’ve made a decision that they are better served going after the customers who can pay more and leaving the rest to the competitors.
I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more.
But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again.
I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!
Affinity Designer is my best purchase this year. I don't need to use my graphics editor every single week or month, and it does not make any sense to pay Adobe on a subscription basis.
Affinity looks like the most promising replacement for Adobe applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model.
They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings.
But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.
>They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist
Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.
It's mostly just dumb little things. You can transform elements using exact numerical values in some contexts, but sometimes you just get a drag handle and can't be precise. You can put tables in a document as standalone frames, but you can't include them within your text story so they reflow properly. This is basic stuff for graphics and DTP software respectively, yet Affinity can't do them.
But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.
Same. But I switched because I felt that Adobe got very abusive with customers that paid for a $2,000 and had the misfortune of having a serial number tied up in a crashed machine that wasn't deactivated. The interrogations and scoldings were ridiculous. The lack of an online deactivation instead of having to call every time was annoying as hell too. For a company like that, the subscription model was a "no deal" because then they'd have zero incentive to improve. I don't miss Adobe at all.
I believe part of this is because Dolby is suing Adobe, saying they mandate certain pricing requirements in the license agreements, and so Adobe has responded by pulling old versions of their software with support for Dolby file formats.
> For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page.
This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.
> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite
Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway
> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS
Is there a reliable way to view flash files without a browser then? I'm concerned about loosing the ability to occasionally view some flash (games etc) after Chrome removes Flash support this december. And people (I have quite a number of friends who do) already have to use old Windows systems with Internet Explorer to use the Flash app to apply to the US DV lottery (Chrome just offers to save it instead of running it).
We're talking about CS4 here: Flash was basically THE way to build UI back then. I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivating factors for Adobe buying out Macromedia (aside from just quashing potential competition from Macromedia Studio).
Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.
The wonderful pseudo-3D HUD on tye Crysis franchise is made with Scaleform. It's deprecated, and AFAIK, CryEngine doesn't use it anymore, but it made the best GUIs back then.
THE way to build a UI that worked and looked consistently across platforms at the time as well. It was a great time! Even now it still takes some work to achieve the same!
Obviously they can't turn the car off while you're driving, so they'll perform these checks either when you stop the car or when you start it. The solution then is to never ever stop the car. And you may also need to fool the onboard gps and vision systems into believing the car is moving.
So in the future, a crappy old car will need to be left running 24 hours a day, in an augmented reality garage that fools the car into thinking it is on a long journey.
I would like to write a science fiction story from the point of view of a sentient car in that situation. But I have to write my code instead.
Well said. This will happen soon.
Recently I Came across some Honda car ad that mentioned "free subscription to blahblah app for xyz years". That's the step-1 towards conditioning us into accepting that "car features will stop working in xyz years"
The car manufacturers do it by stopping selling parts. That's OK when it's easy for a 3rd party to fill in the gaps but I do wonder how this will pan out with modern EV's.
Given the strength of the second-hand car market and aftermarket repairs, this will most likely turn into a prolonged legal war. Not sure which side will win, but I'm hoping it won't be the car manufacturers.
Yeah, parts don't work for that reason. But cars are increasingly dependent on software, and they can use that. John Deere and farmers wanting but unable to repair their own tractors have been mentioned on HN a couple of times.
No one would still be using CS 2 or 3 if Adobe had reasonable prices on new products. I bought Adobe products since the mid 1990s, but I recently switched to Affinity Photo and Designer because Adobe priced me out. Elements wasn't powerful enough for me. I was surprised how good Affinity software is. It does everything I need and is a very reasonable price without a subscription. I may never buy another Adobe product. Adobe is so foolish for giving their competitors an opening. They are giving away their business.
The old non-Flash Photoshop CS3 UI is really nice and familiar to me, so I still willingly use it almost every day. My needs definitely aren't Pro Tier, but it's great for cleaning up my scans: https://i.imgur.com/WWXiUFI.png
It's cheap for professional use, but it's very expensive for amateurs and occasional users.
I was using Lightroom to manage my catalogue of photos. I'd open up Photoshop and Lightroom maybe a dozen times a year. It was nice to have them available but they were effectively costing me $20 each use. When Adobe products were an upfront payment I could choose to buy a product and keep it through multiple release cycles, which would reduce my cost.
Adobe have switched their revenue driver from improving the product and introducing new must-have features to making churn painful. In fact when I tried to cancel my ~4 year old subscription they decided charged me a penalty fee because it wasn't done immediately before my account's anniversary. Their incentives are now strongly misaligned with building a good customer experience.
I switched from Lightroom subscriptionware to Capture One payment with one included update. Catalogue with 90k pictures, performance might be a tad slower than LR on my iMac 2017 but so far I am happy with the software when it comes to workflow of importing new photos.
Will never go back to Adobe's ransomware/subscriptions again. Just a happy amateur and in periods it could pass weeks/months between starting up the software.
Although, I do miss photoshop a bit but Gimp does the job "good enough" for me.
If using Fuji or Sony, there is Capture One Express, which is a basic RAW transformer, catalogue and the ability to do some basic editing. For a hobbyist it's pretty good - and free!
I switched to Exposure X5. It's super fast compared to Lightroom and handles large catalogues with ease. Editing is not nearly as nice and it has some weird quirks around UI. I also liked Capture One.
I bought Lightroom 3 times (1/3/5?) and used it a bunch, but not professionally. I've got tons of old images in it, from that era, I open it a couple of times a year to find stuff. I've moved on, I don't do DSLR/RAW images anymore.
This version doesn't run on Catalina, and the only upgrade that would keep the develop settings is O(10)/mo. So I'm looking for something that can do the cataloging, and something that can do the processing should I ever do that again.
I have 0 hope that anything will take the develop settings in lightroom and use/improve them, but that would be perfect. (I've got one image in particular that's just at the edge of acceptable quality on LR3 that got dramatically better on LR5)
I think if you're a pro, the $600 is not a huge deal, but it's far from free. $0.30/hr assumes that you're using their products 2000 hours a year, or 40 hours per week. I'd expect that someone like a photographer might use it 1-2 hours per work day, which ends up being $2-3 per hour.
For someone like me that has occasion to use something like Photoshop or Illustrator 3-6 hours per year, the $100-$200 per hour is quite pricey.
$600 a year is cheap for professional full-time use. But if you use it professionally and full-time, then you're going to want the latest stable version anyway. The people using CS2 and 3 are not that target audience. They are the people for whom $600 is a lot of money and who will not give their money to Adobe ever again after this.
> $600 a year isn't particularly expensive (that's for Creative Cloud).
Step out of your high pay bubble. That's a ton of money for the majority of the population. It's fine for corporate professional use but completely inaccessible to most people.
This is a fundamental problem with commercial software. 15 years ago when this software was released the choice to have server authentication essentially was the original sin.
It's a problem that is not limited to Adobe, and is a by-product of their commercial nature. The need for artificial scarcity (in this instance really really artificial) .
See also, Windows and activation. Adding that to XP was where Microsoft began to boil the frog, and now they're slowly doing to Office what Adobe did to CS.
I seriously think this was the last straw for Adobe and I. I just wanted to install an older version of an app (that I've paid for!) on an older computer. I've literally spent thousands of dollars on software that I can no longer use for no reason other than that they will no longer allow me to.
The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they can reinstall their own products only to find they cannot -- and their online searches of adobe-run knowledgebases are just dead ends.
I see people running OSX Lion to run newer CS versions than CS3 because they can’t be installed on operating systems that have gotten security updates in the last five years.
What version of OSX was Lion? Snow Leopard 10.6 was the last one for the original cheese graters, and I know plenty of people running those and Final Cut 7 systems. It ain't broke, so they ain't fixin'. It's older SD tape based work flows that just ingest content from tape all day long, and then places it on the SAN for others workflows.
I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change. And for video, DaVinci Resolve. There might be cases were you’re tied to CS, but the bulk of the work can be done in these apps.
I've also switched to Affinity back in March, because of the fact that Creative Cloud was becoming too expensive for me and my crappy 3rd world income.
Be careful with Foxit software, though. They have a history of doing some very unsavoury things. Their Wikipedia page has some details for those interested.
That, and Adobe Lightroom. I tried to switch and had a mixture of Darktable, RawTherapee, RapidPhotoDownloader and digiKam running. It was unpleasant and years behind Lightroom, unfortunately. Even more unfortunate is that I have a stand-alone license for Lightroom 5, but my camera is too new for it (no support for its RAWs).
Thanks for the feedback, I hadn't thought about replacing Lightroom yet.
I do like Lightroom, but the catalogue speed with 100k+ photos is glacial on my PC. I tried importing 30 years of photos rather than having multiple catalogues, as tagging consistently across all would be useful ("Hey auntie Sally, look at the photos of you aging!").
I use Capture One in Lightroom's place and it really is an excellent tool, its raw processing capabilities are fantastic and the features mean I barely (if ever) have to reach for a more-powerful editor like Affinity.
1. Impeccable Word to PDF conversion
2. Combining, rearranging pages and documents
3. Editing: add/edit/delete text, images from PDFs
4. Form creation (not something we use now, but plan to)
5. Protect PDFs (as much as you can)
That is the majority of what I can remember using in the last 12 months. I have occasionally used:
6. Compare files
7. Redact - though usually I edit the PDF and delete the text directly
8. OCR
9. Comment. But I HATE the PDF commenting experience, as does everyone in the team when we try and pass comments around.
Based on your feature request list, all but the form creation (iirc) is handled well by PDF-XChange by Tracker Software. It's a one time purchase + optional maintenance upgrade model.
The OCR is what keeps me in Acrobat camp, too. And very sadly since this company is outright customer-hostile and the software is absurdly expensive.
I've been trying tesseract but find it lacking -- need a better shape/text/picture region recognition (people are working on it these days), and something which puts it back in tagged PDF form. I also want to try whatever Nuance/OmniSoft is selling these days since I used to be a OmniPage customer before.
I'm in the same boat. I keep a virtual machine with an up-to-date Acrobat Pro license just for the OCR. It's not that the OCR is state-of-the-art any more. It's not as accurate as ABBYY in my experience. But it still generates the most predictable, consistent bounding boxes for text selection out of the alternatives that I've tried.
I'm not sure whether it meets your needs, but in architecture and MEP engineering we use Bluebeam Revu almost exclusively. Personally I find its UI very frustrating, though.
I worked there. It was a greasy and miserable place run by people who should have retired long ago. Everything was waterfall development, and there was a yearly slave-rush to their miserable convention show, where only half the stuff really worked. No one really knew what they were doing. It was like a time machine back to 20 years ago. So glad I left.
Thank you for confirming the things I have suspected for a long time.
Maybe it's the path I took in the industry but I had the displeasure of having to automate the installation of Adobe security updates to tens of thousands of Windows boxes a decade ago right through having to (briefly) write software targeting a customer's Adobe Experience Manager product in the last couple of years. There's a long rant bubbling up about AEM, but I'll resist the temptation and just say a suitable 4-letter word, instead.
Their products cost a fortune and for the privilege of forking over your hard-earned money, the company does things like this. I still own a license for one of the older versions of Photoshop post-Activation. I corrected it in a manner that would probably qualify as "cracking it" before ever activating after having run into grief with the product at my day job (at the time). Anymore, if there's a reasonable alternative, that's the kind of stupid I won't spend my money on.
As a long time user of one of their tools (Illustrator, which I have a strong suspicion is not a prestigious team to work on) I have always suspected something like this. Sigh.
I have officially given up on Adobe after 28 years, too. Even with the new features in Potatochop/Lightroom on image protection. I can't run my old software, or I can't obtain my old software, and CC is just a shitshow of processes permanently running and sucking up battery power.
DaVinci Resolve is amazing. I'm becoming better and better with GIMP. CaptureOne is crappier to use but has much better output. Lightroom iOS works fine for freebie Instagram pics.
> CC is just a shitshow of processes permanently running
I HATE this so much that I have an AutoHotkey shortcut that I run after I'm done using any of the CC programs. It kills everything Adobe. I also have a Windows scheduled task that runs every 15 minutes that deletes any autoruns from Adobe in the registry, deletes any Adobe services, etc., because I found that they obnoxiously fully re-added things whenever I would open CC.
Just use a pirated copy of the software you own. There are plenty of versions out there that don't require any activation, and for the most part, just work. As long as you own a legal copy, I can't see owning a cracked one as being illegal. Definitely not unethical.
You are wrong. Software is generally licensed, not sold. The only person who "owns" Photoshop etc. is Adobe. The rest of us get mere licenses that we are subject to the terms of. Violate the terms, and you're subject to civil and potentially criminal penalties.
In the last month I've returned two pieces of Adobe software and canceled a yearly subscription. I've been seeing ads for the AI features in photoshop all over twitter this week. It's pretty clear what their business strategy is -- just keep working on the tech and assume people will buy their software because it's the only one with the hot tech thing. It's ironic that for a company that caters to designers, artists and product folks, all their products have such poor UI. And there's no incentive for Adobe to care.
The difference between Adobe and Procreate is night and day. It's so clear that Procreate folks use their app themselves and take pleasure in it. I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut.
This definitely has potential. Thanks for the tip.
Continued development may be stalled (patreon currently paused) but hopefully it's just temporary. Would definitely be something I'd want to help crowdfund.
Another Affinity vote here. Basically everything I did in PS, can do in Photo. It’s ridiculously good for a version 1. Also they made 8 updates without paying anything extra.
> It's ironic that for a company that caters to designers, artists and product folks, all their products have such poor UI.
That's not really who they're catering to anymore, though. Not primarily, anyway. If you pay attention to the way Adobe communicates in recent years, it's all about the "democratization" of design tools. They want their new tech to look like magic to regular consumers. It doesn't need good UI. It doesn't need to help professionals work more efficiently. It just needs to help Joe Everyman use content-aware fill to remove the unwanted thing from his next Instagram upload. If they can do something in that vein once a month and keep the subscription rolling, then they're golden.
Do you feel like they are succeeding at that? I've been using Adobe products since the early 2000s. I recently bought Premiere Elements and it was my first time doing any sort of video editing. I found it awful to use. I've switched to Final Cut and it's a ton better. iMovie was better too.
406 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadI always wonder if a situation like this is legal. If I purchased a product and want to keep using it, what right does the seller have to prevent me from doing so x years later?
Can I sue them for not selling me the product they said they were selling me?
You did purchase the software after all, and unless you are illegally distributing it I see it as a perfectly fine thing to do whatever you want within your own private residence.
Err, umm, no. You purchased a license to use the software.
If you have the disks, you bought a copy of it, just like you bought a copy of a book, not a license to read it's pages.
Ofcourse it has to be tested in court, unlikely Adobe will even sue if they knew. I don't think they care one way or another. And the customer using cs2 still is unlikely to sue as it's not going to be a large enterprise.
This is just laziness from Adobe , older servers take effort to maintain. They could be using keys that have expired to be signing the auth request for example.
I guess you can use them as frisbees.
That said, my moral interpretation of closed-source software is that I can do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not distributing it to others without permission. Anything that enters my private residence, whether it be a CD I may have bought, or a very long byte array that got transmitted into my internal LAN in return for a payment, is fair game for me to do anything I want with, as long as it doesn't reach anyone outside.
Also, did CS6 stop working? The only stories I see are CS2 and CS3.
[1] https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/licenses-terms...
That actually doesn't matter if the terms are unreasonable.
Courts commonly understand that one-sided unreasonable licenses are unenforceable when litigated.
Here’s [1] the CS3 license. It states a 90 day warranty, which is certainly legally a standard warranty. Section 14.8.1 states Adobe can disable the activation server.
So yep, looks like this was covered in the license. I doubt a court is going to rule Adobe must provide a server indefinitely.
[1] https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/photoshopcs3.html
I felt the same way about the whole Sonos recyling thing too...
But regardless of that, your damages would be limited to what you spent on the license. So definitely not worth your time.
But it could be a class action suit, and if you're the class representative you can get larger compensation.
Class action perhaps? Or small claims at the other end?
What is the value of the years it takes to become proficient with such software? Remember, that investment was made on the back of the idea that the software would continue to be usable.
Isn’t it a moot point anyway because nobody ever “buys” software, they just obtain a license to use it. Ownership is such a convoluted concept in tech, particularly in software.
Then despite probably "authenticating" itself to the xbone, won't actually run unless the disk is in the drive.
(don't get me started on how bad the UI is, I really haven't any idea why gamers love those little machines so much, they are mostly just trash).
Well, depends on the country. In Germany that's not a thing because contract law doesn't allow it. Either you buy software or you rent it.
The devil is in the details.
Followed by learning Krita.
If it's worth that much, buy a new piece of software. Adobe isn't responsible for your 13 years of failure to make backups.
Cry me a river - Adobe can't afford to keep an old server running?
At least be honest about the motivation.
But I could be wrong.
But it's a problem for researchers, who generally want to publish their findings (or at least was the last time I was really paying attention to the law in the early to mid 00s).
> Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works
> Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
https://www.copyright.gov/1201/2006/index.html
A typical crack is likely just a few bytes to change. Maybe in multiple places.
You know... just in case!
See https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=firecall in an incognito browser window.
You have the potential to make a couple of our more creative members extremely happy :)
1) Customers "agree" to binding arbitration
2) Adobe reserves the right to terminate your ability to install the software at any time
If the above are not true, however, this seems like a nice target for an entrepreneurial class action lawyer.
Of course, what we really need are some vastly better digital consumer protection laws.
https://labs.adobe.com/technologies/eula/photoshopcs3.html
To be clear though, arbitration where the employer chooses and pays (pays off really) the firm in question seems the definition of a conflict of interest and a one-sided contract that should be thrown out.
Just did it couple days ago for a sim for my LTE hotspot.
I guess on the plus side, my returns tend to go smoothly as the boxes tend to look unopened.
On the contrary, I remember reading EULAs that clearly stated that if the user didn't agree with the EULA they could return it to the store where it was purchased for a full refund - regardless of the condition of the box. I think that was in Microsoft's terms mostly?
The problem with piracy is that it still ends up with more people knowing the proprietary software, and thus helps it keep the position cemented.
Anything to pull from PS's dominance is good though!
Most of what I do I use Krita or more obscure tools for.
On top of that, this tool still sits along side other single purpose tools for scaling and rotating, which are the first results if you search "how to rotate in GIMP", so why should I even expect this tool to exist?
This is not intuitive UX which is "trivially different" to PS, this is a mess which can only be learned through laborious trial and error, or reading the documentation like a book.
[0]:https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-tool-unified-transform.ht...
That depends on which version you use. IIRC the version in the Ubuntu/*buntu repo's have a patch to bring the UI closer to PS, at least in appearance.
There are also some functions which you have to do differently in GIMP vs PS.
I found it to be a treadmill - the prices went up until Adobe decided that you could no longer purchase anything outright and now had to rent it. Newer versions looked prettier, but the performance and stability dropped.
I’d reckon that the vast majority of people using CC would be happy with an older version and just as productive. CC6 and later are resource hogs that are constantly calling home. Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
> Today, I’d be hard pressed to choose CC over a pirated copy or other alternative, and I’ve known a few designers that stuck with cracked copies of CS.
He’s not a designer, his a pirate. If you do a professional work, you pay for tools you use. Simple as that. If you want to say, that they are pricy then use some free alternative (they existed, and are great), or cheaper pro software like from Serif.
https://www.cnet.com/news/adobe-releases-creative-suite-2-fo...
However it looks like this download is not available anymore.
(Adobe is certainly trying to make it hard to find, which I'm not surprised about.)
How is this comment grayed out? I just scrolled past like eight pages of bozos shamelessly talking about pirating Adobe, suing Adobe, and regulating Adobe... before finally finding a comment I can respect, and it's downmodded. I mean, is this Hacker News or is it Russian Hacker News?
How is this relevant? Gmail has always been a remotely hosted service. This is about Photoshop CS, not CC.
And I do not expect old software to do cloud updates/document sync. I expect it to keep working as is.
I also can't stand the endless "Needs connectivity" and "Set up syncing now" in modern software.
Gmail has always been a hosted service - not software that runs entirely on your own machine. Apples and oranges.
> Imagine creating software today with perpetual licenses but no updates or sync across devices. You would laugh it off your machine.
You mean like any number of extremely popular software packages like IntelliJ that offer perpetual licenses?
Adobe cannot unilaterally change the rules of a sale they completed in the past. It’s Darth Vader’s “pray i don't alter it further” behaviour - a character built to be the representation of evil.
Imagine requiring set product lifespans in this day and age, you’d get laughed right out of the data centre.
Updates come via paying the fairly high price to start with, you know, supporting the damned product you paid for.
Document sync is something that is provided via a bunch of other services if you need it - icloud/onedrive/dropbox/etc
But sure, come up with more laughable excuses to justify shitty company practices.
Feature updates just come in new versions, which you pay for.
Monthly payments can still work, many other companies use that model, and after a period of time, you're frozen at the last version you paid for (after a year for example) if you stop paying.
But yeah, screw them now - I used to have a usable paid version, but no longer - there are better alternatives now.
Adobe killed the product activation servers for CS2 products in 2013, and for CS3 products in 2017. For CS2, they offered Activation-free replacement installers and generic serial numbers on their support page. This resulted in a bunch of press[0] about it being a /!\ omg completely free Creative Suite /!\, so for CS3's 2017 shutdown[1] they made you register your original serials to your Adobe Account in exchange for an individualized offline serial and the offline installer[2].
I don't know exactly when, but some time around the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 they ended[3] the offline installer program for CS3, removed the ability to generate offline serials in my Adobe Account page or even re-access the offline downloads for my already-generated serials, and have seemingly scrubbed their Knowledge Base of any mention that they ever existed.
I am so thankful I got them while I was able to since aside from needing to tweak the high-DPI handling[4] the CS3 apps work beautifully on my Windows 10 x64 machine. All CS3 applications are only 32-bit, but they're also the final versions with traditional UIs before they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS4, so I'm fine with it :)
[0]: https://nofilmschool.com/2013/01/adobe-releases-creative-sui...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190401002548/https://helpx.ado...
[2]: https://i.imgur.com/ae1SWN5.png (my screenshot!)
[3]: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/locked-photoshop-cs...
[4]: https://i.imgur.com/OjBggBb.png
Are you sure that the replacement serial numbers are individualized? When I tried googling, some of my replacement serial numbers are found on the web, some aren't. This seems to suggest that they are not individualized -- at least for some product & platform combinations.
My own theory about the motivation of the original giveaway is that they lost the ability to generate new licenses for those old versions, so they made it free. A comment[1] from 3 years ago:
How could they lose the ability to create licenses? I can think of many scenarios: The one server that ran the legacy license code crashed, and they had no backups. Or they lost the database of who had which product and serial number, so there was no way to verify anything when someone needed to reactivite an old product or move their license to a different system. Or there was a new bug or incompatibility in their license generator, perhaps due to a server upgrade, but the source code for the licensing software was lost so there was no way to rebuild it.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15732354
Just an assumption because I have two legit OS X CS3 Master Collection serials, got two different replacement offline serials for them, and those serials don't work for the Windows version just like the originals didn't v(._. )v
Completely seriously, isn't Adobe missing out on a significant community of graying designers who would be entirely contented to pay Adobe quintennially for a long term support version with standard menus and hardened fuzzed etc security wash before rtm?
Priced at say 60 percent of the current subscription, and given the opportunity for satisfying this constituency of customers who I am not sure at all would be Adobe customers in the future otherwise, isn't even such a radical branch viable?
I guess maybe this is based on projections about whether (in Adobe’s case) those customers unwilling to pay a subscription are likely to ever buy upgrades, maybe also it’s easier to focus on pleasing a smaller number of more “committed” customers? Not sure really, I’d be interested to read more.
But it’s probably a conscious decision on their part, unfortunately, so I doubt we’ll ever see “one off” purchase software from Adobe again.
I do pay for their Photography package (Lightroom, Photoshop and cloud storage) and actually the cloud storage and iOS versions of Lightroom make it worthwhile for me. I occasionally need a vector editor and would probably pay another £5-10/month for Illustrator, but instead I’d have to jump to paying for full CC, so I use Affinity Designer instead!
The Affinity applications get a lot of things right, and do some things better than Adobe already. And obviously the pricing and permanent sale model are much more attractive than Adobe's subscription model.
They do also have some almost unbelievable limitations, where what you'd expect to be entry-level functionality simply doesn't exist, and they lack any sort of plug-in ecosystem and all the extensibility and customisation that brings.
But saying that, it's not as if Adobe's applications haven't had bizarre omissions over the years, and they've had much longer to fix them. Hopefully Serif can keep up the momentum and community good will it's built for the Affinity suite and in time they'll close the gaps.
Are there any specific examples that come to mind? I recently heard about Afinity and am planning to give it a try next time I need a Photoshop or Illustrator replacement.
But then again, for a very long time very basic search and replace options were missing in InDesign, so as I said before, it's not as if Adobe's software hasn't had its share of bizarre limitations over the years as well.
[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6002319/Dolbyvsad...
This is the only reasonable way it should be done with old software.
> This resulted in a bunch of press about it being a omg completely free Creative Suite
Just write it in bold - something like "it's not free, you are only eligible if you have purchased a license". Whoever wants to pirate will pirate anyway
> they gave everything a shiny new Flash-based UI in CS
Flash?? Seriously?
https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
I'll be damned if I can find a reference, but it's definitely a “non-native” UI, probably using Adobe AIR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR
Hell, a lot of high-budget video games around the same time used a little thing called Autodesk Scaleform. That's basically Autodesk's reimplementation of Flash Player (Adobe was too short-sighted to pursue this market) which game developers could quite easily license and embed into their games.
>>Sir, you are no longer allowed to use your car
>But I paid for it! It's my car!
>>Our aging servers had to be retired
>Can't you just turn off the checking so it won't cost you anything and I can keep using my car?
>>No sir, without the checking people would start pirating the car
> But you don't even sell this car anymore! So much so you don't even want to keep the servers online!
>>I'm sure you'll love the new model we are selling
> I don't need a new car! I already have one, fuck off! I'm just gonna use a crack
>> Sir it's illegal to run unauthorized software on your car
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E
So in the future, a crappy old car will need to be left running 24 hours a day, in an augmented reality garage that fools the car into thinking it is on a long journey.
I would like to write a science fiction story from the point of view of a sentient car in that situation. But I have to write my code instead.
https://jack-clark.net/
(scroll to the bottom of the post for it)
Cars only have replacement parts available for N years.
...and for some models, N is closer to half a century than half a decade.
Roughly $0.30 an hour vs whatever wage is being paid to click the buttons.
It's not cheap, but it's not something businesses are going to balk at either. They are showing healthy growth in revenue:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/financials?p=ADBE
So apparently lots of their users are not concerned about their change to the pricing model and increased cost of use?
I was using Lightroom to manage my catalogue of photos. I'd open up Photoshop and Lightroom maybe a dozen times a year. It was nice to have them available but they were effectively costing me $20 each use. When Adobe products were an upfront payment I could choose to buy a product and keep it through multiple release cycles, which would reduce my cost.
Adobe have switched their revenue driver from improving the product and introducing new must-have features to making churn painful. In fact when I tried to cancel my ~4 year old subscription they decided charged me a penalty fee because it wasn't done immediately before my account's anniversary. Their incentives are now strongly misaligned with building a good customer experience.
Will never go back to Adobe's ransomware/subscriptions again. Just a happy amateur and in periods it could pass weeks/months between starting up the software.
Although, I do miss photoshop a bit but Gimp does the job "good enough" for me.
I bought Lightroom 3 times (1/3/5?) and used it a bunch, but not professionally. I've got tons of old images in it, from that era, I open it a couple of times a year to find stuff. I've moved on, I don't do DSLR/RAW images anymore.
This version doesn't run on Catalina, and the only upgrade that would keep the develop settings is O(10)/mo. So I'm looking for something that can do the cataloging, and something that can do the processing should I ever do that again.
I have 0 hope that anything will take the develop settings in lightroom and use/improve them, but that would be perfect. (I've got one image in particular that's just at the edge of acceptable quality on LR3 that got dramatically better on LR5)
For someone like me that has occasion to use something like Photoshop or Illustrator 3-6 hours per year, the $100-$200 per hour is quite pricey.
The €50 a month is sizable. If you're working with it full time and the client requires it, well fine, otherwise it's €50 to save.
Step out of your high pay bubble. That's a ton of money for the majority of the population. It's fine for corporate professional use but completely inaccessible to most people.
The worst part seems to be that they've just killed links and information about this - so you have people presuming they can reinstall their own products only to find they cannot -- and their online searches of adobe-run knowledgebases are just dead ends.
=\",
I’m not sure why you’d run 10.7 instead of either 10.6 or 10.8 (or 10.9) btw. Lion is buggier than the adjacent releases (which are really solid).
Also I got 8 free updates that other companies would have asked money for. At least 2 big performance updates.
That is the one app that keeps me having a Creative Cloud subscription. In a business setting I find it essential.
(not associated with Foxit in any way shape or form nor a user)
I do like Lightroom, but the catalogue speed with 100k+ photos is glacial on my PC. I tried importing 30 years of photos rather than having multiple catalogues, as tagging consistently across all would be useful ("Hey auntie Sally, look at the photos of you aging!").
1. Impeccable Word to PDF conversion 2. Combining, rearranging pages and documents 3. Editing: add/edit/delete text, images from PDFs 4. Form creation (not something we use now, but plan to) 5. Protect PDFs (as much as you can)
That is the majority of what I can remember using in the last 12 months. I have occasionally used:
6. Compare files 7. Redact - though usually I edit the PDF and delete the text directly 8. OCR 9. Comment. But I HATE the PDF commenting experience, as does everyone in the team when we try and pass comments around.
I've been trying tesseract but find it lacking -- need a better shape/text/picture region recognition (people are working on it these days), and something which puts it back in tagged PDF form. I also want to try whatever Nuance/OmniSoft is selling these days since I used to be a OmniPage customer before.
1. https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/
Maybe it's the path I took in the industry but I had the displeasure of having to automate the installation of Adobe security updates to tens of thousands of Windows boxes a decade ago right through having to (briefly) write software targeting a customer's Adobe Experience Manager product in the last couple of years. There's a long rant bubbling up about AEM, but I'll resist the temptation and just say a suitable 4-letter word, instead.
Their products cost a fortune and for the privilege of forking over your hard-earned money, the company does things like this. I still own a license for one of the older versions of Photoshop post-Activation. I corrected it in a manner that would probably qualify as "cracking it" before ever activating after having run into grief with the product at my day job (at the time). Anymore, if there's a reasonable alternative, that's the kind of stupid I won't spend my money on.
DaVinci Resolve is amazing. I'm becoming better and better with GIMP. CaptureOne is crappier to use but has much better output. Lightroom iOS works fine for freebie Instagram pics.
I HATE this so much that I have an AutoHotkey shortcut that I run after I'm done using any of the CC programs. It kills everything Adobe. I also have a Windows scheduled task that runs every 15 minutes that deletes any autoruns from Adobe in the registry, deletes any Adobe services, etc., because I found that they obnoxiously fully re-added things whenever I would open CC.
You are wrong. Software is generally licensed, not sold. The only person who "owns" Photoshop etc. is Adobe. The rest of us get mere licenses that we are subject to the terms of. Violate the terms, and you're subject to civil and potentially criminal penalties.
The difference between Adobe and Procreate is night and day. It's so clear that Procreate folks use their app themselves and take pleasure in it. I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut.
https://maurycyliebner.github.io/ https://twitter.com/enve2d
If I can't run it on a desktop computer, big fat meh.
"I've switched all my work to Procreate, Affinity, and Final Cut."
This is where Apple Silicon and the convergence of macOS and iPadOS sounds useful. Still not convinced it makes up for the losses though.
That's not really who they're catering to anymore, though. Not primarily, anyway. If you pay attention to the way Adobe communicates in recent years, it's all about the "democratization" of design tools. They want their new tech to look like magic to regular consumers. It doesn't need good UI. It doesn't need to help professionals work more efficiently. It just needs to help Joe Everyman use content-aware fill to remove the unwanted thing from his next Instagram upload. If they can do something in that vein once a month and keep the subscription rolling, then they're golden.
Their record-breaking profits for the last few years in a row tell me 'yes'.
This is what happens when companies don't support their own products.