Adobe Creative Suite 2 ESR (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Creative Suite 2 ESR (2005)

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49 pointsvkaku43 comments

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.

When Adobe shut down its activation servers for CS2, they released a fully offline version of CS2 with pre-activated keys, which they also released.

This is available on the Internet Archive and it could actually help some folks.

This is one of those good things we need to give Adobe credit for.

Is this still available?

>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.

Did you click the submission link?

> 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?

Surprising as those copies are quite easily 'available' with a copy + paste of a certain version of amtlib.dll

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.

amtlib is the verification logic vendor ?

Let's say the 'replacement' dll file isn't very good at verification.

yeah, I was just curious if this was the whole security point in their software.

For now, Adobe is trying out (opt in basis) a more invasive kernel module.

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.

But are people buying at that price? It doesn't mean a great deal otherwise.

I obviously have no data on this question, but there were enough copies around that price to suggest it was roughly the market rate.

You can check on ebay - filter for "Sold items", then untick "Completed items" to see only ones that sold.

There are some selling for around £400, but also some auctions went for around £150.

Thanks - didn't know that was possible.

On ebay.de, seeing a bunch sold between ˜€500 and ˜€700, including one sale of Photoshop (only) for €799...

And to this day that version is like 10 years ahead of gimp.

And to this day, gimp is still free.

Free and open source and being improved upon without a direct expectation of financial compensation from you, the user.

Maybe some day it might even reach the state that photoshop had 10 years ago, who knows. Anything is possible.

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.

Isn't gimp or something else actually open on par with something as old as cs2 by now?

Why even stick to this stuff so hard, working against a company that's working against you instead of just letting them go fly a kite?

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.

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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". )

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.

I got it at the time and still occasionally use Photoshop & Illustrator CS2 on Windows 10, it's great.

"its Creative Suite" doesn't anyone know the possessive pronouns anymore?

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.

> in most other nouns

Yes but it is not a noun

And you don't use it for "his" or "hers" or "theirs"

(So maybe that should be the hint people follow - if you can use "theirs" it's "its", then)

It's autocomplete.

That one is autocomplete and sometimes it's brain fog. (Correct usage happens 50% of the time)

Anyone know if this bad boy will run under wine?

Should work

I'm looking to learn a bit about Adobe Illustrator. Would this be a good starting point?

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.

Best of luck with it!

Yes.

Yes and no—they exclude Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Does this work with modern day MacOS?

No the Mac version (that was PowerPC only) but the Windows version might work with Wine

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