What did Adobe do and why do I care?

Bottom line - Adobe certainly seem to have dug a huge hole for themselves yesterday! Whilst chatting to other photographers on Twitter yesterday, a link popped up amongst other tweets declaring that Adobe had listed a number of ageing products including Photoshop CS2 as free downloads with fully working serial numbers. No trial versions, no catch. As someone who has worked around Adobe for more years than I would care to admit to, I found that piece of news incredibly hard to believe - after all Adobe are the pass masters of getting their users on the upgrade path, squeezing every last penny out of everyone, and not surprisingly are targeted by pirates across the world as a result. But regardless of what anyone says, their products are high quality and in demand because no one does it quite like Adobe.

For the photographer on a budget, this could change their workflow a lot. I would rather work on a full version of Photoshop any day than use Elements or even Adobe Lightroom which I don't like, so this release by Adobe is very significant for photographers everywhere in my view.

The other thing is I would never personally touch a pirated version of an Adobe product, or any of software manufacturer for that matter (yes, really). My 20 year experience as a Senior IT Service Manager demonstrated time and again how such software is often loaded with spyware, contains viruses and is generally bad news for your PC or you (there is no free lunch in this world) and it's no accident that my machines have never been hacked or someone suddenly has access to my Paypal account somewhere as a result.

So what are Adobe up to? Well according to their user forums it was Adobe's plan to shut down a number of back end product activation servers to save themselves some administration costs on software products which are approaching a decade out of date. So in order to facilitate this, they needed to make available a bunch of standard serial numbers for users who had previously purchased the software to use which didn't require back end validation or activation. What happened next? A software free for all across the world as the message was reproduced on technology forums and websites, Facebook and Twitter that Adobe was just giving it all away for free. Disaster for Adobe or clever marketing? Well who knows.

One thing remains clear - there was no declaration on the download page yesterday that this was not a giveaway, although you needed an Adobe ID and logon to download the software, which I used. Today, probably realising what they have done, rather than slamming the gate shut now the horse has bolted, you no longer even need the basic Adobe ID to download the software...

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

So for the time being, it's currently my personal view that Adobe's tack has changed and they have had no choice but to make it look like their intention is to supply the said software in the list for free, as a sizeable gesture of good will and to get users everywhere interested in their products. Well I guess if you believe that you'll believe anything - this situation remains under review and I will report later if this changes, if indeed it does. One thing though, I doubt very much whether you can use this software to upgrade from, Adobe will have seen to that much, so these are sort of orphan products - use and enjoy them for what they are I say.

But does it work?

There are already early reports floating around that Photoshop CS2 for the MAC doesn't work on the latest Operating System. Too bad. So I decided to give this a test on my PC - I'm only really interested in Photoshop CS2 in their 'giveaway' list, a product that was launched in April 2005 (I needed to check Wikipedia for that one) and that is already very nearly 8 years ago as I write this. The digital photography age was just gathering some real momentum, PC's were positively ancient by today's standards and the Windows Operating System of choice at that time was still Windows XP. In fact the first 64bit version of Windows XP was about to be released so everything we used on a desktop was still pretty much embedded in the 32bit world. Why does any of that matter? Speed. Speed is the name of the game for processing anything and everything. There's a reason why I'm typing this on my 64Bit PC today - I'm running a Windows 7 Dell XPS PC with 3TB of hard drive space and 16GB of RAM. But then again my camera of choice is the 36MP Nikon D800 which creates pretty big RAW files and a 16Bit Photoshop layer that eats up just under 200MB of hard drive space. So surely going back to a piece of software like CS2 will be just a waste of time right? No point? It won't even install on a 64bit operating system today will it? You can't use RAW can you? Your newest PSDs won't open in CS2 will they? You can't use D800 files with it can you? Well let's find out...

Install Experience...

1.  Download the install file and copy the key supplied by Adobe and fire up the install. Enter your username and something in the Organization field and put the serial number into the field provided and click Next.

2.  Just leave the default install folder as it is and hit Next...

 3.  Leave the default file associations and click Next...

4.  Now just click the Install button...

5.  All looking fine so far...

6.  All finished, no errors, ifs or buts...

The Acid Test - Will It Open & Operate?

So, first go... it certainly initialises:

You then get greeted with a Registration Prompt - I clicked on Do Not Register...

Then the Welcome splash...

And finally to check for updates - not surprisingly there weren't any to apply...

So all good so far. No complaints from my PC, no immediate crashes. It's genuinely going better than I thought it might. Now to open a file. Now many of my PSD files (Photoshop format files) have been created in version CS5 or later so my first concern is whether CS2 will even be able to open one of these...

Result, a CS5 PSD file opens straight away:

The interface looks and feels a little dated next to the latest version and sure one or two functions are missing as you'd expect, but it's functional and working very nicely. It's certainly stable and although it's working in 32bit mode, the hardware in my PC is certainly working well with it, in fact it positively benefits from it. So what next? Lets try to install Silver Efex Pro 2 over it so I have at least the one filter I can't work without...

After a quick check with on the Nik Software website, it seems that Silver Efex Pro 2 will indeed work with Photoshop CS2. Sure enough, five minutes later, Silver Efex Pro 2 is installed and working with CS2. That's even more significant now because this 'back end' capability and significant part of my processing is also accessible...

So I now have a fully working version of Photoshop with Silver Efex Pro 2 installed, and it opens the latest PSD files. Interesting. The price of this setup so far? The price of Silver Efex Pro 2 - a bargain at around £125 for the full version ($199 US).

But What About The Front End For Opening The Latest RAW Files?

Surely this is where the plan for a cheap high quality workflow falls apart? The Nikon D800 was released less than a year ago, there's no way CS2 will open the RAW files. Well, yes and no. It's true that I made the investment some time ago in Nikon's Capture NX2 as my RAW converter of choice because Nikon's .NEF files are a proprietary format. In simpler terms that means it's a locked down file format - Adobe merely reverse engineer the files to offer RAW support in Photoshop so using the manufacturer's own software is always the way to go in my view. But software like Capture NX2 is another additional expense, and we can work around it even with D800 files for FREE...

How? Another free piece of Adobe's software - the DNG converter. OK, it's not quite the same as using the power of Capture NX2 or the latest RAW interface in Photoshop CS6 but you want this for free right? This is the best cheap (see FREE) method to release the power of RAW files and allow us to process them as 16bit files even in Photoshop CS2. Firstly go to the following link and download the latest version for PC, which is currently v7.2, it's another 100MB file, thank the Lord for broadband:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=106&platform=Windows

Once installed, open the Adobe DNG interface, select the folder with your RAW files in, alter any preferences as you want them and convert the RAW files you want to work on to DNG format...

The DNG format is a Digital Negative File format. DNG files are designed to be transferable and readable at a more generic level and in this case I'm expecting that even though we've just converted a Nikon D800 NEF RAW file to DNG that Adobe Photoshop CS2's RAW interface will now be able to open it, even though the D800 came to market 8 years later than this software was created. Let's see...

Boom! A Nikon D800 NEF to DNG converted RAW file opened up in Photoshop CS2's RAW interface to play with. Now I can edit it in 16Bit mode, make all manner of adjustments I want in Photoshop CS2 and convert to mono in Silver Efex Pro 2. The cost to all of this? The price of a Silver Efex Pro 2 license.

Don't tell me that Digital Photography needs to be expensive - it certainly makes the cost of processing film look even more outdated to me. Who wouldn't be happy with this?

Conclusions...

Yes, in truth I won't be changing my current workflow because I like it and I'm used to it. But even after only 20 minutes the CS2 interface seemed very familiar again and even the keyboard shortcuts I've used for a long time also work. You have the power of layers and those essential tools which don't seem to have changed much for the last 8 years and it's all perfectly stable on my Windows 7 PC. On the whole if you're on a budget you certainly won't be missing much next to the latest and greatest software, and the workflow I've demonstrated here shows you can still use a RAW file for the latest of cameras and even convert to mono with the latest interface in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2. That is awesome, awesome value for money from my point of view - let's just hope Adobe don't bring down the shutters. My advice is grab it now...