I worked my way through high school and early college as a graphic artist for a small studio working entirely in Photoshop, starting with version ~3.0, I think, and ending around the time of the "CS" changeover.
The basic operation of the toolset in Photoshop did not change under my hand basically that entire time, with additions to the tools increasing productivity only marginally. The major boost came from the speed of HDD's and CPU's allowing for larger images to load and be worked on quicker- NOT some wholesale improvement of the tools to manipulate the images.
It turns out, for a large amount of work when dealing with graphics, images, photos, etc... what you need is cropping, movining, selection with feathering and growing of selection pool, cut/copy/paste with layering and transparency, basic shifting of the color via hue and saturation, and tools to edit selective color ranges. That covers 95% of use in the 1990's and it actually still does today.
I still have a copy of CS4 for windows that I move from machine to machine and have done so for more than a decade. But for quick things on my M1 Mac where I no longer have Photoshop, I default to Photopea, which cloned the early Photoshop experience nearly 1:1.
I think this says a lot about how important is it to get right the user interface mapping to the toolset (and vice versa), and how the two go hand-in-hand in the creation of great power-user software.
>However in recent years it seems that this version too has disappeared to the sands of time as Adobe attempts to cut costs and can no longer justify hosting a distribution server for a 15 year old version of its software.
Not on official Adobe site. It's available on submitted IA link.
It's mirrored on the link. You can either download the full 7z (on the right side of the screen) of all Mac & PC versions, or expand the right hand box and download each individual application.
> But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.
I randomly happened upon eBay listings for CS6 earlier today. I was slightly staggered to see that a legitimate copy is going for ˜600-700EUR on eBay - that's ˜11-year-old software!
Presumably this is because it's the last version that's non-subscription? I wonder if prices have actually been appreciating?
My assumption was that this would be attractive to businesses who have a need for some of the CSx suite but not the absolute cutting edge, and being a business only want to run legitimate software.
That’s not likely to work out well for the Mac version with how Apple has been steadily working towards removing support for third party kernel extensions in macOS. I wonder what they’ll resort to after that comes to pass.
It’s unfortunate that Adobe doesn’t sell a single purchase ESR version of CS that’s in terms of features roughly equivalent to CS2. If that’s too much of a financial burden they could charge a fifth of the purchase price every 4 years or so for continued updates (which you then don’t have to pay if you don’t need).
For a lot of people CS2 is more than adequate, with most features having been added since not being useful enough to justify losing access to their work if they don’t pay their subscription bill one month.
I have a copy of this. I love the old Photoshop. It does the job well. I tried new Photoshop and it ruined my workflow. It had obscure functionality/features I am not familiar with, and I am too lazy to learn all the newfangled features. I tried it on my friend's computer and they have an Adobe subscription, so it wasn't a 'warez' release. And now apparently they're tacking on AI features which sound good, but possibly over-engineered now.
If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
(Submitted title was "Adobe gave away it's Creative Suite 2 software 11 years ago".
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They also did this for CS3, but one had to create an Adobe account and provide their original serial number to get a new offline serial number and new offline installer.
Alas, no, not so much. This is a very frequent flyer; you have to damn near tackle writers (literally and metaphorically) to stop them from using an apostrophe in the possessive form of the pronoun 'it'.
To be fair, in most other nouns, adding an apostrophe and an s at the end can both be short for "is" and signify the possessive form (e.g., "Tim's a jerk" means "Tim is a jerk," but "Tim's house" means the house Tim lives in).
By analogy, it makes sense for "it's" to both mean the possessive form and to be short for "it is," but instead we spell the possessive form as "its." Since the difference is only in writing, not pronunciation, it makes sense for a native speaker to forget it.
I see the same mistake with "who's" and "whose." The latter is the possessive form (e.g. "Whose phone is this?") and the former is a contraction of "who is" (e.g., "The only kid who's sitting quietly"). I see people write "who's" instead of "whose," for probably the same reason, since relative pronouns also replace normal nouns. Here's a comparison with the word order changed to make it obvious ("who" replaces "Mom" here):
This phone is Mom's.
This phone is who's/whose?
I know the normal word order is "Whose phone is this?" though.
With illustrator, the most important tools are the pen tool, stroke (and the "expand" feature to convert a weighted stroke to a fill shape), the flip tool, basic shapes, pathfinder and align tool.
The basic operation of the toolset in Photoshop did not change under my hand basically that entire time, with additions to the tools increasing productivity only marginally. The major boost came from the speed of HDD's and CPU's allowing for larger images to load and be worked on quicker- NOT some wholesale improvement of the tools to manipulate the images.
It turns out, for a large amount of work when dealing with graphics, images, photos, etc... what you need is cropping, movining, selection with feathering and growing of selection pool, cut/copy/paste with layering and transparency, basic shifting of the color via hue and saturation, and tools to edit selective color ranges. That covers 95% of use in the 1990's and it actually still does today.
I still have a copy of CS4 for windows that I move from machine to machine and have done so for more than a decade. But for quick things on my M1 Mac where I no longer have Photoshop, I default to Photopea, which cloned the early Photoshop experience nearly 1:1.
I think this says a lot about how important is it to get right the user interface mapping to the toolset (and vice versa), and how the two go hand-in-hand in the creation of great power-user software.