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Comment by jansho | Hacker News Reader

I still miss the time when I didn’t have to subscribe to Adobe Creative suite...

Adobe (accidentally?) released CS2 for free to everyone, complete with working serial numbers, when they shut down their activation servers a short while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754172

Their official stance is that the downloads are only for those with existing licenses, but then posts on the forum that said the same thing were deleted, and they continue to let anyone with a free account get the serials (for a while, an account wasn't even needed and they were just posted on their downloads page), without any verification that they've already paid for a CS2 license...

Despite behind rather old, even CS2 is probably "more than enough Photoshop" for a lot of people.

Edit: here's the actual page archived from Adobe, in case you find this unbelievable:

http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20130108024913/http%3A//www.ad...

> Adobe (accidentally?) released CS2 for free to everyone

My theory is that Adobe lost the ability to generate licenses -- those product activating serial numbers -- for old versions of software, so they just made it all free.

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.

By the way, they released a lot of products for free, not just Photoshop (see userbinator's link above), and most of them still run just fine on Windows up to Windows 7. The Mac serial numbers are much less useful since they were all for PowerPC versions if I recall correctly, so they won't work on any recent Mac.

I had to give up. I got tired of the CC app itself breaking and requiring reinstall way too often. And this is on two different platforms! To uninstall, I had to get an uninstaller for the uninstaller because it broke.

I got the trial for Affinity Photo and bought it after using it for a few days on both Windows and Mac. It doesn't have the pure power of Photoshop, but it's 95% there for my amateur use. Only $50 and I put it on all my home computers for that $50.

The sub for Photoshop is cheap, but all the anti-theft crap they have baked into it makes it a royal PITA to use.

This is the first time since PS 5.0 that I haven't had PS installed on anything at all.

Cool stuff, never heard of Affinity Photo but looks great! You likely created a new customer for them!

/rant I do contract work and it’s ridiculous that some clients specifically request for graphics to be done on Adobe. When there are a myriad of other options now, like Affinity as you suggested, and Inkscape which I happen to prefer over Illustrator. And sometimes ad-hoc methods like online gif generators and filters are all you need for a simple job.

I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simly because it is the standard.

Affinity Photo is perfect for me because it does 95% of what I want, and it has really good .psd support so all those gigs of .psds that I have can still be used. It is the first photo app that I'm happy with instead of using PS.

Sure, it has some warts here and there, and it's not as fast a PS...but Adobe has quite a long lead on them. They've done an admirable job catching up as much as they have, and they are constantly developing it, too.

It has a 10-day trial which is a healthy chunk of time to get used to it. I've been using PS since version 5, and I felt comfortable with Affinity Photo after a few hours. I'm not a professional, nor am I a hardcore PS user, but I am very familiar with it. 0 regrets switching so far.

> I'd stick with PS if I were using it in a professional manner simply because it is the standard.

And it will continue to remain standard until professionals demand the right to choose the program they want to work in.

Seriously, professionals whine all the time about Adobe but they aren't taking the steps to break out of the monopoly.

But what about that remaining 5%?

It reminds me of those that day that an iPad can do 99% of what you need to do. So to me, that says I still need a laptop for that last 1%.

True, iff you use that 1%. Most people never need Photoshop per se.

I def prefer when contractors work in adobe, since then I can easily make tweaks to their work in the future.

I do contract design as well and for some things there really is no competitor. I haven't heard of anybody seriously competing with InDesign since Quark XPress became not-a-thing-anymore.

Are you required to update yearly with Affinity Photo? I was initially bullish about Sketch App for CC replacement but unfortunately their business model isn't really consumer friendly either.

Updating is optional. $50 is a one time purchase, but I don't know how they intend to handle major version pricing. No annual pricing, no subscription...just pay once and done.

Sketch's annual cost gives you updates for a year, but if you don't renew you still have a license to run the app and updates up to a certain date. A professional will pay the recurring cost but most people would be fine paying for Sketch once and running that version for years. I still use Sketch 2 without issues.

If you don't renew Adobe CC, you lose access to everything. I think the difference is important.

No! Not only that, but you will also get updates up to version 2.0

It's on 1.6.x now, so you'll get 1.7, 1.8 and so on.

I just bought the 2 Affinity apps late last week. They are incredible.

What about Corel Photo-Paint?

FYI they still do site licenses for schools(and my teacher said in rare cases businesses). My school has one. It's probably tricky to get get and probably costs similarly. http://www.adobe.com/howtobuy/buying-programs/education.html

I’m still using CS6 for this exact reason... There is literally no new features in CC that interest me, I just want a few tweaks and bug-fixes (little things like Camera Raw’s UI not being retina compatible, etc.)

I've been using Pixelmator, which is pretty nice too, but Affinity looks pretty sweet. I'll wait and download the demo when I have some time or a need to use it.

Thank you for pointing it out!

Just CS6 apps on my machine, and still going strong!

Same here. CS6 was the last release before subscription, and it's solid, with enough features for me, and I do quite a lot of image editing including using the animation timeline and 3D tools in combination with Premiere. If I need 4K video editing, I must use a different video editor though, the only downside, but I mostly edit in 1080p.

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