Adobe Tells Users They Can Get Sued for Using Old Versions of Photoshop (2019)
vice.com
vice.com
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19913362
I use Procreate, Affinity and Figma and all of these tools are cheaper, easier to use, and still support my (often more advanced) use-cases.
Same with Lightroom vs. Capture One.
PS. If you fell for the same "annual but paid monthly subscription" scam with an early cancellation fee, try changing your payment method to PayPal, and then use it to block the payments.
Coincidentally, I just finished a session with Affinity Photo 2 before reading your comment.
I, too, recommend Affinity Photo as a Photoshop replacement for many people. It's probably good enough for 80% of people out there.
I switched to Affinity because I don't do subscription software. But I'm still up to speed with Photoshop because I have to use it at work.
Photoshop is still better than Affinity in a lot of ways, and for all the confusion in its interface, it's still more polished than Affinity.
One of my biggest problems with Affinity Photo is that it can't save files in the background, which wastes a lot of time when you're working with multiple large images.
Worse, though, is that Affinity Photo is just buggy. Affinity Photo 2 is better, but many bugs persist. Things like images loading, but simply not rendering on screen. Or selecting a tool, but the tool has no effect, and you have to quit the program and restart for it to work again.
Unfortunately, Affinity's official forum is not what it should be. I'll be polite and call responses from official Affinity people "brusque." Also, be very gentle in your criticism and reporting of bugs, because they're quick to delete even minor complaints. More than once I've been following a discussion where someone is having the same problem as I am, and I get an e-mail notification containing another person's response. By the time I get to the actual forum, it's all been deleted by the admins. Not a good look.
(It’s now available in v2)
I'd say it's much more similar to the pre- or early Creative Suite (not Creative Cloud) versions. (I'm using AP2)
One aspect gives a red flag though: they implemented internet activation in v2 as opposed to a prior simple licensing model based on license keys. So maybe one day they will start to force "cloud" junk upon the throats of their customers, and at that point I will probably just leave.
Affinity Designer is a very good vector editing app. Switched to it from Inkscape due to performance and UI issues. To me, it's more convenient to use than vector things in Pixelmator Pro.
For photo editing, I don't like Affinity Photo. It seems powerful, but too much for me to learn, so I use Pixelmator Pro for simple photo editing (although I can never remember where the tool I need is). Maybe it's better for pros, though.
For quick pixel editing/cropping I use Acorn — it's fast and the UI is not overloaded.
I've been using Pixelmator Pro a little recently, and I turn to it now for its AI features. Cutting a subject out of its background? It makes the "Magnetic lasso" feel like MS Paintbrush. I had to design a heavily 'shopped Christmas card recently, and those features cut down my work by a lot.
That being said, both products are solid and likely a matter of personal preference or specific feature needs.
-- hobbyist experience
If we're going to turn on the outrage machine, let's at least stick to current news. Not something that happened 4 years ago.
We can't rearsh enough how evil Adobe practices are, they are so evil it is so hard to grasp that even if we knew we need regular remindes.
Adobe might be above Microsoft level. See, people have all forgotten about or don't know.
Anyone please make MS court cases from the 2000s reach the top 50 list. That would be news for the majority of readers, even hackernews' community.
Note the third parties part there.
For example, Adobe's previous license for Pantone colors expired last year ( https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-su... ).
> “As we had shared in June, Pantone decided to change its business model. Some of the Pantone Color Books that are pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign were phased-out from future software updates in August 2022,” said Ashley Still, senior vice president of digital media marketing, strategy, and global partnerships at Adobe in a statement to The Verge. “To access the complete set of Pantone Color Books, Pantone now requires customers to purchase a premium license through Pantone Connect and install a plug-in using Adobe Exchange.”
If you continue to use Pantone colors that were available in an older version of photoshop, a third party (Pantone) may sue you - not Adobe suing you.
So, Adobe will not anymore sue users for using old versions? This is not relevant anymore? Can you provide a link that shows that Adobe retracted of this practice?
And have you heard of this happening in the last four years? I haven't at least.
I just saw it as a non-issue as Adobe isn't threatening to sue anyone
Edit: Found it https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23624328/ford-self-reposse...
Even trying GIMP over multiple years I could never make sense of it's UI but Krita is a breeze and incredibly powerful.
It's free, has the same UI as photoshop so no re-learning hotkeys, and is browser-based.
Krita is literally a KDE app
Another aspect is privacy. Medium- and high-caliber professionals are reluctant to share the innards of their work with anyone.
https://archive.org/details/Adobe-CS2
[1]: probably
edit: I've downloaded and installed Photoshop CS2 from the Archive.org link. Activated with the provided key. Works flawlessly on Windows 10. Thanks a lot for this!
edit2: "Adobe has not officially released the CS2 software for free. Instead, it has canceled its CS2 license management servers because of a technical glitch, so for those with existing licenses it is now offering downloads that do not require contact with the licensing servers. While Adobe admits this may be seen as it giving its software away for free, this service is intended for those with existing Adobe CS2 licenses."
The caveat is that you’ll likely need an old OS to run EOL software.
And then this, you would need an old OS to run an old Photoshop.
So where is the truth?
So Adobe was never planning on suing anybody, but any third-party license agreements may have expired. Such as those with Pantone.
Why would this get anybody riled up about Adobe? (also the fact that the article is 4 years old...)
I mean is obvious to me, say you sell me some software, and next week you tell me, "hey sucker, I might have used some third party shit that I should not have, you should stop using the stuff or you might be in danger of lawsuits".
Something like this happened with some video games where they autoupdated and removed some contentment, this should be illegal, you do not change a deal a few years after , this products should not be sold but say clear "rent for 1,2,3 years" and then maybe people might decide that would be worth it to do something like Blender and finance an open project then getting screwed like this.
It's not important whether it was a net good to have Pantone integrated into Adobe products. What's important is that Adobe provided something under a certain set of terms, then changed those terms to the detriment of all their users not because of anything the users did, but because of their own failure to get a perpetual license from Pantone from the start.
As a person who doesn't need to do adobe software, I'd pirate their software just out of spite. Let them fight me.
That said, I understand there is a ton of open source engineering that goes into it, and I have a great respect for the effort.
What is your problem with it? Is it too ugly? My complaint is that it takes too much clicking to do a lot of stuff.
People tend to complain about some so called missing features while they were living happily without them when their favorite software didn't have them too.
If only there was a way to find out?
29 commenters and it would appear that none of them have read the article.
I believe the underlying issue (vaguely mentioned in the article) is that some older versions of some of the Creative Cloud projects had licensed sub-modules which have fallen out of licensing. So continued use of the subscription requires an "upgrade" which might remove needed functionality for some users.
Likewise you comment without actually saying whether it is or not.
Think what you will about Adobe's practices but it seems strange to say they're irrelevant. They're still the industry standard in many industries by leaps and bounds.
This is a laughable idea.
Even if professional artists want to use generative AI in their workflow, it won't be by replacing a tool like Photoshop. It will be by enhancing it.
And if you think the entire art profession will be "eaten by generative AI", then you clearly know very little about human nature.
People will always want to create art. People will always want to see and own art.
Even if some of that latter desire is satisfied by generative AI in the future, I guarantee you not all of it will be. For one thing, there will also always be people who feel that the human touch is more important—that AI art isn't "real" art—and thus, in a world where AI-generated art is ubiquitous, human-created art will become even more prized.
There are a lot of people out there saying things like "soon there won't be any more programmers/artists/writers because we'll be able to get generative AI to do all that stuff" (with, often, an implication of "screw those lazy/hippie art kids" from those talking about the latter two). This is very much what it sounded like you were saying.
You're basing unsubstantiated predictions on top of assumptions to form dubious suppositions about the future of these things to change the topic from your patently absurd assertion that the largest player in most creative industries became "irrelevant," "years ago." You're clearly going to continue pretending personal preferences, based on an incredibly narrow slice experience in this huge collection of creative industries, is generalizable to the rest of it. I'd say there's about zero percent chance you're going to start engaging in this conversation in good faith, so I'll let you finish it by yourself: you don't need my help to try and convince yourself that you know what you're talking about.
To be clear, the statement you're defending is that Adobe became "irrelevant" "years ago" which you backed up by comparing Premier to DaVinci Resolve. To be clear about the conversation you've switched to so you don't have to keep addressing that ridiculous statement:
if you think that anybody with stable diffusion or even the paid options can even approach the quality or efficiency of someone using Photoshop with its current set of tools based on the same technology, but targeted for specific professional tasks you really, really, really don't know what you're talking about. If your business background puts you in a business position leading you to any business decisions that have business consequences about this business then you better get busy hiring a consultant with more up-to-date knowledge.
* Edit: > 'I'll let you finish it by yourself'
I guess I lied.
Good grief. I mistook you for the person who made the initial absurd statement because you responded to the comment for which I responded to them. Who would deliberately misquote someone that can fact checked by moving their eyes 4 inches up the screen?
>I also didn't say anyone can replace Adobe easily, but outlined a path how a motivated company can replace their offering.
Ok, let's take a look.
"their main advantage in retouching, content filling and masking can be now done by any 10-year old with a beefier GPU at the same or better quality. Even ridiculously bad GIMP can now get the same state-of-art tools Adobe has..."
a) False. b) Sure sounds like you're saying that a 10 year old or Gimp can replace Photoshop functionality easily. Pretty precise word slicing there, but ok.
> so inevitably its value proposition will be only appealing to existing "legacy" customers and dropping everywhere else.
So... their fading into irrelevance as a legacy product isn't being "easily replaced?" Yeah, ok.
> If somebody offers better UX (and there are many options to do better than PS), lowering the switching costs in required training, then it can happen fairly quickly.
The entire format of the generative AI tools is designed for amateurs to make "gee whiz" images without needing any discernible useful skills but the interface fundamentally abstracts away the repeatability and specificity needed for professional communication work. Meanwhile, Adobe started rolling out generative neural network based tools specifically targeted to professional use cases 3 or 4 years ago. Things might change, but this is not a close competition right now, and won't likely be for the foreseeable future. If you see Photoshop as a static target, you simply don't have current knowledge of the space.
> Beside being a former pro photo/cinematographer, I also worked for one Adobe competitor and invented a bunch of new geometric and image processing algorithms, then went on to study Deep Learning at Stanford, so maybe I know what I am talking about, or maybe I am just a fallacious idiot who doesn't get it.
Well, it sure sounds like you don't know much about the current state of the image manipulation tools I work with on a daily basis, which is what the conversation is about. You could be the former CEO of Adobe with a PhD in ML concentrating in image generation and a wing dedicated to your artwork at the Met and still be too out of touch with current image manipulation tooling to make useful predictions about it. In fact, I'd say nearly everybody I've encountered that's really into AI image generation and says it'll soon best the current professional toolkit couldn't list 5 significant ways Photoshop has changed in the past 10 years. And Photoshop is the most vulnerable too in their kit, by far. The prospect of it replacing InDesign anytime soon is absolutely laughable.
This was a good one, I love it!
My SWengineering background tells me that many of the tools Adobe has are tedious to replace but doable by many algorithmically gifted folks. Some need some investment to get to pro level like color calibration and correction. Some need camera manufacturer support like initial sensor RAW processing. The ones that were causing awe like their famous patented content aware fill based on complicated differential equations was out of reach for most. So were their precise selection/masking tools and a few more. Now we suddenly can select objects/background/hair fairly easily and reliably using ClipSeg or Segment Anything, removing the masking obstacle. To fill/replace content, we simply select the area and let stable diffusion hallucinate options until we are happy. To simulate puppet tool, we can use ControlNet with stable diffusion though implementing ARAP is also fairly easy. So a dedicated company that wants to get to the parity with Adobe in their most advanced tooling suddenly has a clear road ahead. If they improve UX by e.g. voice or gesture control (plenty of places where Adobe tools are difficult to use for no reason) and do some decent image format compatibility, they can really make a dent in Adobe's market share.
This might sound self-aggrandizing, but given infinite time and energy I alone could replicate most of the CS6 functionality of PS at the same or better quality (and I did create some powerful tools for one of their competitors) and know a few folks capable of the same.
That said, DaVinci is improving at a very impressive pace. Adobe really just has the benefit of nearly 30 years of an ecosystem around it.
I'm actually quite surprised at how stagnant After Effects has become, but perhaps Adobe has some stuff coming down the pipeline.
Krita is good. Gimp is bad. Nothing seems to be as good as Blender is for 3d, but the problem set is undeniably simpler.
Adobe never really cared about non-pros using pirated versions.
"Just pirate it" isn't sensible advice for this software anymore if you care about your machine and its contents.
too much incentive, lots of sophisticated players, not terribly difficult to write something that evades current detection techniques
For a little anecdata: I know at least one person who has encountered this, having his gaming machine encrypted for ransom after installing a copy of a pirated game (luckily for him the machine had nothing on it aside from the games and some media he had copies of elsewhere, and the attack didn't seem to get hold of any credentials (or if it did, no one tried to use them before he got them updated)). There was also apparently a spate of pirated copies installing crypto miners, though I don't know anyone affected by that, and malware disguised as audio/video files was definitely a thing back in the Napster era.
Another place the impression can come from is that some AV tools pick up on parts of the pirated copies as malware even if they aren't. In some cases this will be because they look enough like it (for instance the installer working as usual then patching executables) for heuristics to kick out a false positive), and some claim that commercial products have been paid to include signatures that match common piracy groups' so they get quarantined & warned as malware even though they aren't.