Replacements For Adobe Creative Suite 3 Apps?

Gilmoure writes "With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6, I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? If the apps can work with the native file formats, all the better but if they provide the same functionality, that's still good. I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades. Especially when Adobe's already working on CS5."

Comments

To edit, or create

[Hadlock]

Are you using these open source apps to edit, or create new files in the native adobe file formats? Creating typically requires more features than a simple editor.

Re:To edit, or create

[Anonymous Coward]

If he's using them at all, it is because he piratebayed them. The entire question is thinly veiled OSS astroturf based on today's tech headlines, the "designer friends" don't actually exist.

Re:To edit, or create

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere, in a basement, a total geeklord surrounded by his linux boxen. The Star Trek red-alert siren beeps from his thriftshop Logitech speakers as his Digg RSS feed is updated. "Oh god", he thinks as his pants turn sticky, "Adobe CS3 is not supported?!? The day has finally arrived for 'The GIMP' to take over the universe!"

Quickly, he draws upon his sexual fantasies of Mac-using deisgners as his best homosexual buddies. Realizing Digg will never vote up his question, he turns to Ask Slashdot, an ugly forgotten relic of when people thought Linux had a chance at the desktop market.

Meanwhile GIMP still sucks ass and nobody uses it.

Re:To edit, or create

[Anonymous Coward]

He piratebayed open source apps? Oh, the horror...

Re:To edit, or create

[Gilmoure]

I've never used any open source graphic apps (am Mac tech at gov't lab). I figure, a lot of web work means editing existing Adobe file formats while new work could be done with new native file formats. What would folks who've used such apps recommend? Also, with Adobe being a bit snarky about things (we haven't even tested CS 3 against 10.6, just buy latest version), it might be time to look beyond their sand box and see what else is out there.

Re:To edit, or create

[Gilmoure]

Sorry about the late reply; I'm not using them but have some designer friends. One's just willing to check out new apps for new projects while the other was wondering if other apps would be able to open Adobe format files. From reading down below, it looks like there's some compatibility but not enough to totally ditch Adobe stuff without redoing entire projects.

Also, seems the rumors about CS3 not playing nice with 10.6 are overblown and this entire question didn't need to be asked. Ah, well.

Don't bother

[kryptKnight]

I've been using the Snow Leopard developer preview for the past couple months, and Adobe CS3 is working fine.

There's a difference between not working and not being officially supported.

Re:Don't bother

[WilyCoder]

works, fine.

supported, no.

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

Re:Don't bother

[Anonymous Coward]

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

If you're a professional, odds are you're not going to be paying to upgrade your business to a brand new, unsupported operating system just because you can. Adobe never said that they were going to stop supporting CS3 for use in OSs it was designed for. This is a non-issue for businesses.

Re:Don't bother

[Holi]

No one supports 10.6 yet, it hasn't been released.

Re:Don't bother

[ColdWetDog]

I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products. They have KB articles which occasionally have something to do with an issue you are having. There are user supported forums which are often useful. But calling Adobe? Writing Adobe? Perhaps if you're some large shop with "Gold Support" (as in you give them the gold) it's more useful. But for normal end users Adobe has been just as unhelpful as everybody else in the business.

There have been dozens of bugs in every version of Photoshop that aren't fixed until the new version comes out - then the come out with NEW bugs.

Re:Don't bother

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Agreed, well maybe it's worse than you state. I found a cross platform bug in InDesign. It would consistently crash on Windows or OS X and made one of their lesser known but advertised features completely useless for a large number of shops. I reported the bug multiple times, in detail and it still persisted through three versions. Heck, it's probably still there, I haven't checked the latest version because I have not bothered to upgrade.

Re:Don't bother

[2short]

They don't support an old version on a not-yet-released OS; so that's hardly shocking.

You correctly point out that some people might, even reasonably, want to run officially supported software.

Taking the original posters question at face value, their concern is that they only want to run officially supported software, and they wonder if there is an open source package they hasn't heard of previously for a not yet released OS that will answer this concern? Assuming, for the sake of argument, the poster is smarter than a turnip, they can figure out the answer is "No." So posting this to Ask Slashdot has some other motivation. I've no idea what.

Re:Don't bother

[Cloud K]

And how many OSS apps have "official support" exactly?

Some projects may be backed by the likes of Redhat, who will let you pay for "support" (basically a piece of paper to keep the company's suits happy), but for most OSS out there you're relying on community forums and wikis like everyone else.

Re:Don't bother

[lawpoop]

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

What particular problems have you encountered that having support was able to dig you out of?

Re:Don't bother

[dhaines]

I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products...

Hell I haven't felt like Adobe supported Photoshop CS3 on 10.5, so I'm sure not expecting anything with 10.6. Even the latest Photoshop on the latest Mac OS seems janky.

Maybe CS5 will have Painty the talking paintbrush. "Hello, it looks like you're trying to add a new adjustment layer..."

Re:Don't bother

[MidnightBrewer]

Perhaps it depends on the professional involved. I've been using Adobe since 1993 and the only time I called up their support was because their DRM had locked me out of running CS2 on a new system (the old system was destroyed in an accident so could not be manually de-authorized). Besides that, I can't think of one reason why I need support from them beyond such unforeseen installation issues. As others have mentioned, if you're using it for business then there's no real necessity to upgrade to 10.6.

Re:Don't bother

[AlXtreme]

but for most OSS out there you're relying on community forums and wikis like everyone else.

Or the developers themselves which, if they take their software seriously, is the best kind of help you can get.

I've had to use various commercially supported server-side products in the past, most of the time "support" entails being read from a script by some guy in a callcenter what you've already tried, after which you're out of luck. There were a couple of products that did have proper support, but you never know what you're going to get.

With open source you either have large projects where forums and wikis are useful enough, or small projects where you can communicate directly with the developers. Being able to talk to the guys who wrote the damn code is always the fastest and most efficient route (after which some beer-money goes their way).

Re:Don't bother

[qamerr]

I had an issue with font rendering in Photoshop 4 and called Adobe support. Other than having a licensed version of Photoshop I didn't have a support contract, the support rep spent a couple hours on the phone and we got the problem resolved.. Of course that was ~10 years ago.

Re:Don't bother

[node 3]

works, fine.

supported, no.

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

In that case, you can buy CS4.

Solutions:

1. Stay with 10.5 and CS3
2. Move to 10.6, use CS3 (which presumably works just fine, but if it doesn't, it's not Adobe's problem)
3. Move to 10.6 and CS4

It seems to me this is a non-issue, other than it's good to be aware of it so you can make the right choice for you. For most people (pros and amateurs alike), option 2 is probably the best.

If you're a Pro and you really want to use 10.6 and really want the peace of mind official support, then you can fork out for CS4.

On the other hand, moving from Photoshop (Illustrator, etc.) to some Open Source program is going to be, for most pros, worse than any of the three options listed.

I don't mean to say that the GIMP or Inkscape or whatever are bad, just that the switchover is going to be more jarring than any of those three options.

Re:Don't bother

[node 3]

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

What particular problems have you encountered that having support was able to dig you out of?

Having someone else to blame.

Re:Don't bother

[cnvandev]

Seeing as how Adobe Photoshop is among the most pirated programs, I'm curious to know how hard not having formal support is really hitting many of the users. Of course, most professionals wouldn't pirate software (of course), and probably have it legally paid for and supported, but a lot of people don't use Adobe support and seem to get along just fine.

Re:Don't bother

[Anonymous Coward]

I use adobe apps in my career, almost daily for, I don't know, 14 years.
I have needed support exactly 0 times.

Perhaps you are having user issues if you rely so much on Adobe support for consumer level apps like Photoshop

Re:Don't bother

[orasio]

I've been using Photoshop since, oh, version 4. Adobe has never had anything resembling 'support' for any of it's products.

I don't agree with you.
I had to call support for an Acrobat OCR product, and a girl with a beautiful CostaRican accent got to read the same manual page for me, several times.
Of course, I ended up just using another product with a less recognized brand, but that did resemble support. Shitty support, but support nevertheless.

Re:Don't bother

[mtmra70]

No kidding. I once called Adobe to activate my new version of Premiere on a machine that wasn't connected to the internet. The person that was on the phone kept telling me to go to a website and do XYZ. I kept telling her over and over again I didn't have internet access on the machine. I eventually just hung up on her because she kept repeating the same script over and over and over.

Re:Don't bother

[stephanruby]

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

Support comes at $120 an hour, and their support people are clueless. I guess this means you've never used Adobe in your career.

Re:Don't bother

[Anonymous Coward]

since version 4? I still have my PS 2.0.1 floppies.

Re:Don't bother

[bcrowell]

Damn straight. Adobe's non-support support and crappy quality control were one of the big impetuses that drove me to open source. Gawd, I remember using PageMaker ca. 1998. Paid good money for it. It constantly crashed and munged its own files. Adobe tech support tried to blame it on the OS.

Re:Don't bother

[im_thatoneguy]

support is a huge thing if you are using adobe in your career.

First of all... when have you EVER gotten support from Adobe?

Secondly, if getting official 'Adobe support' is critical to you then a topic titled "Alternatives to Adobe Creative Suite 3" probably isn't going to be very useful.

Re:Don't bother

[hcbecker]

Everything from Adobe newer than Acrobat 6 (including Acrobat 6 if you count the update feature) is utterly broken on case-sensitive HFS+ file systems. Adobe's solution? "Reformat with a case-insensitive file system." Needless to say, they don't get any more money from me ...

Re:Don't bother

[ristonj]

That could be because Adobe support is required to replicate a bug before they are allowed to even enter it into their bug report system. If they can't replicate it on their own test environment, the bug report goes into the circular file.

Not saying this is a good idea or practice, just saying this is my experience with Adobe.

Re:Don't bother

[Bemopolis]

You missed one solution:

4. Partition your HD with a 10.5 boot partition and CS3, and a 10.6 boot partition and CS3.

If CS3 turns out to be problematic under 10.6, reversion to a working system is easy; the peace of mind alone is worth the cost of a larger HD if needed (1 TB is still cheaper than an upgrade to CS4.)

Re:Don't bother

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

That could be because Adobe support is required to replicate a bug before they are allowed to even enter it into their bug report system.

I gave them detailed instructions. This was not a hard bug to replicate. It happened every time you tried to use a feature in a specific way. As I said, it was even cross-platform because I tried using the Windows version as a work around. Adobe was, and probably is, just horribly unresponsive about fixes in some of their projects.

Re:Don't bother

[Cloud K]

I completely agree - BUT:

* Usually company directors don't see this kind of sense, and are only interested in a signed SLA. Even if, as you say, the 'support' is basically somebody reading from a script in a call centre.

* Whilst most developers are decent this way, there are many who won't reply because it's their hobby and they can't be bothered, or will tell you to RTFBWM (where BW is Badly Written) etc. If you donate to them you might get a better response, but again you're up against the director who signs off the purchase order saying "Hang on.... you want us to voluntarily part with money?" etc.

I agree with what you're saying in that it's logical and sensible - but the discussion from the main article through to the parent post was basically starting to suggest that official support is required in a business setting and that if he can't get official support then he should switch to an open source alternative. It's this which I find illogical, as with a few Red Hat style exceptions, there *isn't* any "official support" (i.e. paid SLA level that business types like to have) so he'd be no better off :)

Re:Don't bother

[Gilmoure]

Suite! Saw on Snowleopard Compatibility List (not Apple affiliated), they have CS 3 as having minor bugs with Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

Re:Don't bother

[Gilmoure]

Actually, I just have some friends who are self employed graphic/web designers who are curious about replacements for Adobe CS3 apps, that provide similar functionality. From various news/rumor sites earlier this week, it was sounding like CS3 was going to have major problems on OS X 10.6. And with Adobe saying "we haven't even tested CS3 on 10.6; just purchase CS4", it made sense to check out alternative applications.

The only place I've ever heard of providing actual interactive support for software was microsoft, if you were a really big company and paid them. All other software support seems to come from users on tech sites.

Re:Don't bother

[Jarik C-Bol]

its because adobe is secretly a windows only company, and the mac versions of their products are ported over by 1 obsessive compulsive code maniac in the basement.

Re:Don't bother

[Jarik C-Bol]

its called: why try can call support, when you can find the answer you need on the internet in half the time. (for me anyways)

Re:Don't bother

[Cloud K]

Cool. Well that's fair enough :)

The thread was going into the hypothetical situation of big companies, and I guess I started assuming you were part of one. When it comes to them (or even the small/medium size that I work for) they want concepts that they recognise like brand names, CEOs/MDs, invoices etc.

As the developments have show, they have indeed tested it, they're just not signing on any dotted lines "officially saying" so. I had the impression that you knew this at the time of writing.

If it was to *not even work* it was definitely a good alternative to being bullied into an upgrade :)

To answer the question, I find GIMP distinctly lacking in comparison to Photoshop but you may find that with training (is there any out there?) or a lot of self-learning you will end up *more* comfortable with it than PS.

Dreamweaver is very clever; as long as you keep on top of it, it's a very good tool. Though I've been investigating the open-source alternative Aptana Studio and am very impressed. Again, it'll need either some very rare training, or a lot of time self-teaching, but the rewards will probably be good.

Not sure about the other Adobe apps. Illustrator will be a difficult one to beat - the OSS alternatives I've tried are almost up to Corel Draw of 1993 :)

Re:Don't bother

[centuren]

Solutions:

1. Stay with 10.5 and CS3
2. Move to 10.6, use CS3 (which presumably works just fine, but if it doesn't, it's not Adobe's problem)
3. Move to 10.6 and CS4

It seems to me this is a non-issue, other than it's good to be aware of it so you can make the right choice for you. For most people (pros and amateurs alike), option 2 is probably the best.

Option 2 hs a major advantage over 3: it's only $30 and you can move back to 10.5 if things don't work out. I really don't see ANY reason to worry about this until you've determined that there's actually a problem with 10.6 and CS3.

Re:Don't bother

[Haeleth]

With OSS, you can easily see what kind of support is available: just look in the bug tracker to see how quickly issues are resolved. With commercial software, the entire process is normally totally opaque.

With OSS, you get what you pay for. With commercial software, you pay anyway, and then the vendor decides whether you get anything at all.

It boils down to: only choose commercial software when it does the job better. Don't pay for off-the-shelf software under the mistaken belief that it has something magical called "support", because unless you have a signed contract that gives you a guaranteed level of service, you cannot expect to get any help at all from the vendor.

Re:Don't bother

[orasio]

I already knew the solution to all Adobe products: scrap the Adobe product, and use something better.
The issue was that my boss asked a very respected consultant who said otherwise. I was just going through the procedure in order to get permission to go against his opinion.

Re:Don't bother

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/09/04/adobe-revises-snow-leopard-faq-details-creative-suite-3-bugs/

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

How about CS4? :)

Crazy idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

How about cs4?

Re:Crazy idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's all this that I hear about CS4?

DigiKam, Ufraw-GiMP

[Anna Merikin]

I use these all the time for photo processing. These are very effective programs giving many kinds of control over photo images.

Respectively:

[bcmm]

Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus*, Nvu.

*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.

Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).

Re:Respectively:

[bcmm]

These are my suggestions from a Linux perspective; It's possible that not all of these have MacOS ports (and I know Mac people have a fierce aversion to X11 apps).

Re:Respectively:

[smartr]

I'm a big fan of GIMP. I just set up the GIMP on OS X... It's a mess and since X11 treats the separate windows like separate programs so you have to set up options for X11 to enable click-through (then again X11 is already pretty much violating everything under the sun in terms of how OS X user interface works). I'm surprised it doesn't mention on the front page in big letters to enable this setting. If the GIMP was already inaccessible to those new to it given all the right clicking (a mac favorite), the automatic behavior of click to focus, click to draw, click to focus, click to change to gradient tool, click to focus on layer window, click to add a layer, get a window slightly off the screen, move it, click "ok", click to focus on the drawing pane window, click to draw a gradient... If you aren't knowledgeable enough to realize that this extra clicking isn't normal behavior, then figure out to fix it, the GIMP looks like a flaming piece of junk on OS X. If you have used the GIMP significantly, it still makes for an obnoxious hurdle.

Re:Respectively:

[NaCh0]

Interesting post. I've never noticed all of the clicking because I use focus follows mouse.

Re:Respectively:

[gnud]

http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/
Too bad it seems relly alpha-quality.

Re:Respectively:

[gnud]

Oh, and it still uses X11.
I figured it would use something like http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ - that seems like a much better resource.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't mind closed source software, there is a program called Pixelmator that gives PhotoShop a run for its money. Workflows might change slightly, since they company used different names for the menu items. But they keyboard shortcuts are the same. And it is significantly cheaper than Photoshop, while retaining compatibility with Photoshop plugins.

Not an ad. I was just very pleased with it when I tried it.

Re:Respectively:

[ikekrull]

Yeah, I find the GIMP so unusable on OS X i paid for Pixelmator, which is pretty damn good. Its not as feature-complete as GIMP but for 95% of my tasks its pretty good.

Actually, I paid for Pixel32 as well, but that turned out badly, as the developer (Pavel Kanzelberger) is a total dick.

Would be interested in donating to an effort to improve the GIMPs UI, its pretty clear the core developers aren't interested.

Re:Respectively:

[pwnies]

Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively.

Be careful with this. While inkscape does a better job than gimp, both can't import the files fully. Gimp only has VERY basic interpretation of photoshop files. It will import layers, raster layer masks, layer effects, and some layer styles. Beyond that you're SOL. If you use any vector based maps, hue/curves/contrast/etc layers, smart objects, perspective, etc, then gimp will interpret the file incorrectly.
Inkscape is a bit better with .ai files, but you'll have to do without any gradient meshes and some other advanced styling.

Gimp needs a lot of work still. It's great for quick fixes, but for larger scale projects/companies it just isn't worth it. Inkscape is fantastic though. It has some VERY nice vector capabilities. I've used it extensively for icon work, and I have to say that for making straight .svg files I prefer it over Illustrator.

Re:Respectively:

[pz]

Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus*, Nvu.

*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.

Gimp and Inkscape can import the native formats of Photoshop and Illustrator, respectively. There are many alternatives to Nvu, it's just the one I've used. However, I usually just write the HTML myself, for which Kate is very useful and user-friendly, supporting syntax highlighting for HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript and so on (at the same time, if necessary).

I use both Photoshop (under Windows) and GIMP (under Fedora). I use each program for a different reason, and under different circumstances. But this is clear: Photoshop is a serious tool, while GIMP is a not-so-serious tool. Anything that requires more than a cursory manipulation is best done with Photoshop, along with absolutely anything that requires color manipulation, 16 bit depth, or CMYK, no matter how simple.

In other words, while they have overlapping utility, GIMP is not a replacement for Photoshop. Not by a long shot.

Re:Respectively:

[Kamokazi]

Inkscape can have a LOT of issues aith AI and even many EPS files. We have a lot of people who need to view artwork from customers where I work and I tried like hell to get rid of Illustrator...but we had a majority of files that wouldn't work with it.

Other than that, it's a great vector art program.

And if I was doing something wrong witrh Inkscape, please tell me, I would love to give Adobe the boot.

Re:Respectively:

[Blakey Rat]

Nvu is old and unsupported.

Coda might be a better option, although it's commercial and not open source, it really is a very good editor.

(I'm probably going to get chided for this on Slashdot, and it doesn't really answer the question, but I actually like Visual Studio's HTML editor best, if you have access to a Windows machine you can run Visual Web Developer Express for free. Or buy Expression Web, it's pretty affordable.)

Last I tried Inkscape on Mac, it was an X11 app and didn't run natively, and it had extremely basic bugs in it. (i.e. the open dialog couldn't sort alphabetically), which I think were inherited from the GTK+ toolkit it uses. I wouldn't recommend it unless the Mac user has a *lot* of patience for buggy, alien-looking apps. (Most don't.) Unfortunately, I don't know of a better alternative.

Re:Respectively:

[Fallingcow]

Gimp

Note that if you need to open old PS files or deal with new ones from other people, Gimp does not support all of the features of the .ps format. Notably, it's lacking support for some (all?) layer effects, like drop shadow. They'll just disappear when you open the .ps in The GIMP.

Re:Respectively:

[gslj]

For web page editing on the Mac, designers might prefer using Freeway (http://www.softpress.com/). It lets people lay out web pages, do button actions, etc. using a desktop publishing metaphor. I've played with it in the past, and it looked slick, but haven't used it in depth nor recently.

-Gareth

Re:Respectively:

[Planesdragon]

*I haven't actually used Scribus myself.

Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.

Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.

Re:Respectively:

[salted]

You aren't going to find anything that will replace your tools with opensource software.You're a professional and you should be playing with these types of tools if you ever want to do something highly productive. Sure they do the same types of stuff, but if they did everything just as good, had more features, or even worked decently, it would put adobe out of business. Also, the time you will spend attempting to figure out new software is more valuable than buying a pc and all the software you need. Photoshop has a 64 bit version for the pc already and its 32 bit version runs 10-15% faster than on a mac. I've used Gimp at work since they won't buy a copy of photoshop and I have to say that you get what you pay for. While Gimp is great in the way that its free, it does jack compared to anything newer than photoshop 6. Just try to easily adjust drop shadow, transform images and do color adjustments, or work with very large documents. Sorry, but this is what you get for being a mac fan. Just dump the mac and get onboard the pc train.

Re:Respectively:

[Planesdragon]

(I'm probably going to get chided for this on Slashdot, and it doesn't really answer the question, but I actually like Visual Studio's HTML editor best, if you have access to a Windows machine you can run Visual Web Developer Express for free. Or buy Expression Web, it's pretty affordable.)

On a side note, SharePoint Designer -- the middle child of that program -- is free with validation of windows. Think FrontPage done right.

Re:Respectively:

[Guido von Guido]

I've never understood this complaint. You have either 8 bit (256 colour) graphics for the early web, or 24 bit (full colour) for full print-ready work, but 16 bit? Why bother with 16 bit support? Its only usefulness was for monitors/graphics cards in the early 1990s that didn't support 24 bit colour due to a lack of RAM, and this was in the days when a four MEGABYTE graphics card was large. Nowadays we have 512MB cards and higher as standard; the requirement for such low bit depths is long gone.

Looking for 16 bit colour support is like checking a modern car for a crank handle, it's utterly pointless and anyone complaining that Gimp doesn't have it is simply looking for a reason to support Adobe. Brainwashing etc, call it what you will.

I gather you're not a photographer. I'm not aware of a camera on the market that supports 24 bit raw files, including expensive medium format digital camera backs like Phase One. Raw files taken by most cameras are in fact 12 or 14 bits. Converting the file prematurely to 24 bits would increase the file size and the memory used by the image program without any real benefit.

Re:Respectively:

[Miffe]

It's 16 bit per channel, ie 48 bits per pixel.

Re:Respectively:

[vijayiyer]

He's a professional and shouldn't be playing with Windows if he ever wants to do something highly productive.
I work with Photoshop on 500MB images. I wouldn't switch to Windows for 10-15% - I'll lose more than that time elsewhere.

Re:Respectively:

[gullevek]

and PC changes what? If eg cs3 does not work in windows 7 for example, he has the same problem. If you are a professional designer, you are very much locked in to Photoshop, Illustrator, inDesign, etc. There are no alternatives.

And the biggest Problem is the versions, We have have all possible version of everything here at work, from old school os9 photoshop, to cs, cs2, cs3, cs4.

And why does he need to upgrade to snow leopard if he doubts cs3 will be supported there? And as written above, what support? And cs3 works (see here: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/).

And if he thinks he can replace any of the Adobe tools with some open source thing, good luck and happy failure. Gimp will not replace Photoshop at all, not even close. Especially on OS X it is not only a mess, but dog slow. I don't use Inkscape a lot, so I can't say how it holds up to Illustrator, neither can I say anything about Scribus because I have not even tried it.

But when you need to deliver a document to be printed on a offset printer and you tool does not support CMYK and the connected tools for it, you are pretty much very much ultimate screwed.

Re:Respectively:

[JoeCommodore]

GIMP - really cool can even open fully some PST files on it but I don't think it is 100% compatible with PST (Im not a photoshop user so cant say for sure)

Inkscape - Spectacular each version ins getting better then the last, can open most AI files but not all that compatible, has a lousy time with EPS though. Each version is adding some new exciting design feature, just check the website. Really like it, use it a lot in Linux!

Scribus - Use this for producing our agency newsletter, if you used PageMaker/InDesign you will have little trouble getting going with this. They just released 1.3.5 which is a EXCELLENT upgrade - while not having all the features of PageMaker (not much InDesign experience) it is free and has a built-in preflight checker. the new version fixed a lot of bugs from 1.3.3.x and 1.3.4, though Spelling check I think is still absent. But would recommend giving it a spin.

NVU - remember the built in web editor from Netscape/Mozilla? that is what NVU/Kompozer is, right decent but also archaic. Its better then nothing but I wish they'd take Quanta Plus for KDE and revamp it for KDE4 and add in more wysiwyg editing into it, and you would have something spectacular. The site management and other advanced editing tools in Quanta are worth suffering with compatibility hobbled version 3.5 while in KDE4. If I wasn't such a programmer I'd look at Amaya, as that is the W3C supported editor, you might try it though.

Nice think about these is they are Cross Platform, I think each has Windows, Linux as well as Mac versions! Also don't discount Open Office Draw for graphics work.

Re:Respectively:

[BitZtream]

None of those apps are valid replacements for their counterparts.

GIMP has the worst UI known to man. Inkscape produces some of the shittiest SVG files I've ever see, its the IE of SVG, NVU is a joke, might as well use Thunderbirds message compose window and export the source. I've not used Scribus, but considering what you're touting as replacements for the other options I'm going to safely assume that its absolute shit as well. Have you ever used an app that didn't suck ass?

You can not possibly be a professional, sorry if it pisses off the GPL fanboys but reality sucks at times.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp is unusable for the professional photographer because it does not support high enough bit depths.

Re:Respectively:

[CAIMLAS]

Clearly, GIMP needs a complete fork. There are sooo many different partial enhancements, revisions, face-lifts and the like, and none of them actually work all that well/universally. Something like, say, inkscape, which works identically on all platforms (natively, without any hosery) or OpenOffice.org would be pretty damn useful for bitmapped graphics. We've got gimpshop, gimp.app, GimpPhoto, and surely a handful of others I'm not immediately familiar with.

Most of the major functionality is "there" in GIMP, as I understand things. I understand there is (or was until very recently) some problems with it's "professional" color rendering precision or some such thing, and a handful of other things. I'm surprised there hasn't been a concerted effort to fork things to something "new" and more universally accessible instead of the arcane, cumbersome menus.

Personally, I'd love to see a "Photoshop Pro" type UI, or for that matter: I'd be quite happy to have a working Paint.NET or similar.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

And the human eye can distinguish how many of those?

Re:Respectively:

[Anne Honime]

Anything that requires more than a cursory manipulation is best done with Photoshop, along with absolutely anything that requires color manipulation, 16 bit depth, or CMYK, no matter how simple.

I'm not into illustration, but as far as photography goes, you can do a very decent colour management with Cinepaint. Krita is unbearably slow, and Gimp... well, it's no use shooting at ambulances.

Re:Respectively:

[salted]

Well, if you work with 500mb files then you would know that windows has the only 64bit version of photoshop. That means that photoshop can address as much ram as you can fit into your system, and is not limited to only 3.4gb of ram like on the mac.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvu is old and unsupported.

Which is why he should use its fork, Kompozer.

Re:Respectively:

[Anne Honime]

It's not a question of eye, it's a question of maths. As long as digital photography will create colours by interpolation between RGBG values of a matrix, you'll need empty 'holes' to re-create colours and avoid sampling artefacts. Applying filters (sharpening, border sharpening, USM etc.) also needs room to do their magic, otherwise you're accumulating errors that ultimately show as noise. When your postprocessing is done, then you can downgrade to 8 bits / channel without too much loss for printing or display.

Believe it or else, there's a real difference between a 8 bits and a 16 bits workflow; you'd need to try for yourself to be convinced, but for a pro, it's the difference between work or joblessness.

Re:Respectively:

[fatmonkeyboy]

I've never used Illustrator, so I may not know what I'm missing.

I love Inkscape though; what is it about the SVG files it produces that makes them so shitty?

Re:Respectively:

[Drawsalot]

I use both Macintosh and PC with CS4 (Office: Mac, Home Office: PC) and I don't believe I can't be just as productive on my PC as my Mac. I may use the PC outside the norm, but I have identical workflows on each. I really see no difference at all performance-wise from one machine to the other. I don't "play" with Windows and I resent that you assert I can only be highly productive when using a Macintosh.

Re:Respectively:

[Matt_R]

16 bits each for R, G, & B. Not 16 bits total. your 24 bit is what Photoshop calls 8 bit. Photoshop supports 32 bit, which would be 96bit to you.

Re:Respectively:

[RiotingPacifist]

mac supports PAE in 32bit versions so the 3.4gb limit is a windows only limitation!

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

you just fixed my first hate of gimp on mac, that exact behaviour I never understood how to fix, thanks!!!

now gimp is a lot nicer to use, you are a star! really, thanks a lot!!!!

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually bought Creative Suite 2 for InDesign, but for complex book design (even involving free positioning/stacking of drawn objects) I ended up using LaTeX & XeTeX ... Why? The Creative Suite demanded online authetitication each time the system config seemed to have changed, leaving me with a disfunctional system when I had no internet access ... I actually used Scribus for some posterwork earlier on, it really is a great piece of software, but the team will need to work on some papercuts and overall performance before one would use it for bigger business tasks ... creating a lively scribus community would boost development and acceptance, too (look at success stories like drupal.org ...)

Re:Respectively:

[thanasakis]

Don't they have a native (as opposed to X11) experimental dmg on their site?

Re:Respectively:

[tweak13]

You aren't understanding what PAE does. You may be able to have more than the 32bit limit in the system, but each individual program is still subject to the limitation.

Re:Respectively:

[xirtam_work]

I can tell you're not a Photoshop user. .PST files are Microsoft Outlook mailbox (or archive) files. .PSD is a Photoshop document file. No big deal, but pointing it out. Seeing a reference to PST in a Photoshop thread made my eyes jump out on stalks like in a cartoon.

Re:Respectively:

[Kjella]

Because it has so many forks, it needs another. The truth is that it doesn't need a fork, it needs a full workthrough with a new pixel format and workflow abstraction. At least the latter GEGL was supposed to be since 2000 or something now and support for other color spaces than RGB like CMYK, Pantone etc. that is used for printed material is still vastly lacking. If your target is the web alone then GIMP is just fine, but then so is many tools for that job...

Re:Respectively:

[ubrgeek]

Assuming their site was built with their tool, I have some doubts about a product that doesn't render pages correctly with older browsers like IE 7 - Yeah, we know it's not secure, that sites like YouTube, etc. are phasing it out, but they haven't and users still have it. When I was doing design, I don't recall dropping rendering support so quickly for older browsers (hell, the client wouldn't let us.) So sorry, the product may be great, but it seems like it's great in some regards, and in this case, not one that matters.

Re:Respectively:

[Beezlebub33]

Well, it's flamebait, but not a troll.

As the referenced article points out, it really does make a difference when you start doing manipulations / editing to the photo. think about it. With only 8 bits, you have very little dynamic range, so expanding and contracting part of the range (as you do when you manipulate color) will cause serious artifacts. 16 bits means that the manipulations do not cause significant artifacts.

Re:Respectively:

[Beezlebub33]

Seconded. What is bad about the SVG that Inkscape produces? I've never had any problem with it. I did have a problem once where Inkscape would not open up a file produced by Batik, but it turned out that Batik had a bug and didn't have the correct header, and Inkscape was being correct (though pedantic).

Re:Respectively:

[pbhj]

If you've a lot of people who need to view the artwork couldn't you use a view format rather than an editing one, just output to PNG when you create the AI and bobs-your-uncle??

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

mac supports PAE in 32bit versions so the 3.4gb limit is a windows only limitation!

So does windows.

But if I've understood it right the PAE gives the OS ability to use all ram but any individual 32-bit program is still limited to the 32 bit limit. I.e. if I have 4Gb + PAE I can have two 32-bit programs using 2 gb each. But I cannot have 1 program using 4Gb.

Re:Respectively:

[Joe Tie.]

Kompozer is new, supported, and lacks 90% of the features of dreamweaver. It's a good idea which might get there at some point. But for the moment it's primitive to the point where very few people would consider it a dreamweaver replacement. While it might be ok for someone who just wants to whip up a quick and easy html site, going beyond that was painful last I looked into it.

Re:Respectively:

[prozaker]

...which unfortunately has only 2 versions, one 0.7.10 (2007-08-30)) being too old for today standards (think dreamweaver Mx) and the other one too new 0.8 alpha4 (2009-05-12) and carries a warning "Warning: this version is proposed for testing purposes only, not for production use."
:/
i often find wysiwyg html too restrictive and slow for serious web design.

Re:Respectively:

[AliasMarlowe]

Last I checked, Scribus still had a god-awful "no, we won't let you put in bold text. you need to manually change your font to Courier Bold" policy.
Which is a shame, 'cause I was almost excited when the windows native came out.

What exactly is it preventing?
I use Scribus a bit, and it lets me input text in bold etc. Just select the face you want from the Style menu, and start typing (with cursor in a suitable place for text). I have not used InDesign, but did endure PageMaker 6.5 on XP, and I'd rank Scribus on Ubuntu as nicer to work with.

Re:Respectively:

[AliasMarlowe]

GIMP has the worst UI known to man.

Well, the competition for that title is pretty stiff. While GIMP's UI is different to Photoshop's, it is no more so than, say, that of Picture Window Pro (if you don't know it, check it out - it's comparable to Photoshop and had full 16bit image handling before Photoshop did). UI in graphics tools appears to be a matter of preference, with opinions formed strongly by one's first powerful tool.

Inkscape produces some of the shittiest SVG files I've ever see, its the IE of SVG,

Please explain. Inkscape's SVG appears to be as compliant with the standard and certainly does not break anything. What's shitty with that? However, I agree that IE is rather shitty, being noncompliant/subversive with standards among other things.

I've not used Scribus, but considering what you're touting as replacements for the other options I'm going to safely assume that its absolute shit as well.

As you say, you have not used Scribus, so your assumtion is uninformed speculation. I have used Scribus for a few years, and it's a capable substitute for PageMaker, which I have also used. You should try Scribus out; it's quite a nice program.

Re:Respectively:

[TeachingMachines]

A good HTML editor comes directly from the W3C, found here: Amaya.

Re:Respectively:

[Gilmoure]

For design work, rather than applying a bold or italic algorithm to a font, it's better to use the bold or italic version of that. Now, if the app's not changing the font from regular to bold when you high light and click on B or i and is instead making you select the bold or italic font from a menu, yeah, that'd suck.

Re:Respectively:

[Kamokazi]

We have a customer service department of about 20 people, and they each receive a lot of different vector art from customers all day long. We don't have a lot of control over what they send us...if we can't open the file, it's out fault, because it works on their computer...we must be idiots. I have had many headaches because of this...we're on the supplier end of the promotional products industry...branded pens, shirts, coffe mugs and more. Basically an industry composed almost entirely of marketing/sales people. Anyone who has worked IT supporting sales staff surely understands the mental capacity of these people. Or lack thereof.

Re:Respectively:

[Blakey Rat]

Just for laughs I downloaded Amaya and fed it a typical client web page. It gave me "Error(s) in source code" and gave up.

If you have the luxury of writing your own pages from scratch, and you don't mind that horribly blurry OS X-style text smoothing, and if you don't need auto-complete, then maybe Amaya is a good choice. For me, I can guarantee right now it's going to choke and fail on every client web page I feed it, so I'm not going to bother.

On the other hand, Visual Studio can use its "auto-format document" feature even on pages with horrible errors (well, depending on the class of horrible error) and come up with a readable document. Amaya seems to have no such option.

I do enjoy the mysteiously-named "Save current geometry" button. Good thing there's no in-line or tooltip help.

Re:Respectively:

[NervousNerd]

Yeah, you can get it here. Basically it's Expression Web 1.0 but with some SharePoint stuff added in. Though, SharePoint designer doesn't seem to have syntax highlighting support for PHP.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

Click-through, that's awesome. I never even knew you could do that, I always assumed it was just how X11 worked.

Googled it and found this line to enable it:

defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true

Sure enough, it works like a charm. All that extra clicking was always one of the more confusing parts when showing someone how to use the GIMP.

Re:Respectively:

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss Macromedia's Fireworks.

Re:Respectively:

[lena_10326]

I find Inkscape 0.46 a little buggy when dealing with lots of paths with lots of nodes. It's also pretty slow once you start throwing in blur on a few dozen or so objects. Despite that I prefer using Inkscape instead of Illustator when the project's design is small, sharp, and minimal. I also like how Inkscape starts up faster. My biggest complaints are that text in Inkscape sucks pretty hard, and I don't see that it has any concept of slices or exporting along guides.

I don't get it

[rudy_wayne]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver?

If such applications existed, Adobe wouldn't still be in business.

With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything? Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?

Re:I don't get it

[victim]

No, but Adobe is. They have a long history of doing stupid things, then waiting until the actual consumer release to "discover" that their product has a problem and not fixing it until the next major release thereby preventing their users from upgrading OS.

In this case CS3 may actually work, they just aren't going to promise it so people will pay to upgrade and Adobe doesn't have to do any support on CS3.

Re:I don't get it

[victim]

I should add, my copy of Illustrator for Mac is 5 years old and works like a champ. So, depending what you do with CS you may not even care.

Re:I don't get it

[casualsax3]

Yes, because Linux has put Microsoft out of business.

Re:I don't get it

[erroneus]

Alternatives to expensive commercial apps exist but it requires relearning and retooling. This is not something that individuals or companies are interested in. And when it comes to data sharing and data interchange, these proprietary apps' file formats are defacto standards.

The F/OSS community has been making progress on this though. SVG format is becoming more commonplace and if GiMP were to come up with a similar "open standard format" that would be awesome. (Yes, I know GiMP format *is* technically and open format, but it is not a standard in any larger body of standards for information transmission or interchange such as ISO or W3C.)

Furthermore, there are PATENT roadblocks standing in the way of competition to Adobe Creative Suite. One of the most significant patents are those surrounding CMYK implementation. So the patent system, often cited as the motivation for creativity and innovation, is a big part of why Adobe doesn't have much competition at the moment. Once the patents expire or software patents are outlawed or otherwise brought into more reasonable terms, we will see a lot more competition.

Your ignorance is forgiven, but what you are seeing is largely the effect of vendor lock-in, and not evidence of any superiority of quality.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything? Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?

It's not that it won't run, it's that it's not fully supported. Adobe is supporting CS4 on Snow Leopard and won't devote resources to testing and fixing problems CS3 may have running on the new OS.

See here.

Also, it's part Apple being retarded by not keeping Carbon up to date without working out how Adobe would transition to Cocoa first.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Wha?? Apple releases new version of their OS. They changed/dropped bunch of old APIs which causes problems with older apps. How is that Adobe's fault??

Can you *guarantee* that the app you writing now will run smoothly on a new OS after 5 years?

Re:I don't get it

[rudy_wayne]

No, but Adobe is. They have a long history of doing stupid things, then waiting until the actual consumer release to "discover" that their product has a problem and not fixing it until the next major release thereby preventing their users from upgrading OS.

Since I have Windows apps from 1995 that run just fine on 64 bit Windows 7, I guess I just don't get the concept of a new OS version that breaks existing apps.

Re:I don't get it

[turbidostato]

"Can you *guarantee* that the app you writing now will run smoothly on a new OS after 5 years?"

Surely not. But if I, as a VAR, am testing the new OS releases when still alpha, beta and "for limited distribution only", you can bet I'll be able to anticipate if my programs will run or not on them prior to their public launch.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything? Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?

News flash: Companies actually TEST their software before releasing it or supporting it. "Not supported" isn't the same as "will not run." CS3 was tested, but not on 10.6. The testing of a product the size of CS3 is hardly trivial. Why should they bother, when CS4 is already on the shelves and CS5 is already in development?

If your attitude is "I don't care whether you've tested it, just let me have it," then I don't think anybody is stopping you from trying. Just don't complain when something breaks.

Re:I don't get it

[shippo]

Some really old and depreciated API calls could get dropped in the transition between OS versions. When depreciated these calls will log error messages in the various log files.

Re:I don't get it

[consumer_whore]

If such applications existed, Adobe wouldn't still be in business.

If such vehicles existed, GM wouldn't still be in business. Oh Wait.

Re:I don't get it

[blueforce]

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything?

You're forgiven.

OS X 10.6 is a major shift away from the Carbon (C++) framework to Cocoa (Objective-C) framework. In previous versions OS X supported both frameworks, but with the migration to "complete" 64 bit (the default is still 32, but that's another story) the choice was made to stop supporting both frameworks and Carbon lost. Adobe made a major shift between CS3 and CS4 too by dropping support for PPC and focusing only on Intel + cocoa. That's why the OS version matters.

But then, you could have figured that out Googling it with Bing instead of just using the word Retarded.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/144119/adobe_64bit_photoshop_struggle.html

Re:I don't get it

[pclminion]

Is your app from 1995 supported on Windows 7? I'm impressed.

Re:I don't get it

[vux984]

Since I have Windows apps from 1995 that run just fine on 64 bit Windows 7

Uh huh. But they aren't supported.

I guess I just don't get the concept of a new OS version that breaks existing apps.

Outlook 2002 (from Office XP) is broken on Vista. (Vista removes an insecure security API that Outlook uses to store passwords, so Outlook 2002 in Vista requires you re-enter all your passwords each time you start the program.) There are other hiccups too. That's a pretty high profile break though. Windows users -generally- enjoy much better back-compatibility than Apple users --- Microsofts enterprise customers demand it, and Microsoft has preserved legacy APIs, even legacy defects, just for the sake of back-compat. Apple on the other hand, doesn't have that kind of pressure from its customers, and is generally much more happy to rapidly sever support for old stuff. This is both good and bad... on the upside, it makes the OS easier to maintain, since you aren't dragging all this legacy support around that needs to be tested, validated, and supported... on the other hand, you can't run all that legacy stuff.

Re:I don't get it

[Keen Anthony]

In the Mac world, a lot of things can change in between operating system versions. Numbers like 10.5 and 10.6 don't describe patch levels or minor versions for the same operating system; rather they identify completely distinct operating systems with different SDKs and features.

If you're experienced with Windows, think of this as an equivalent question: Does my software which runs on XP continue to run on Vista?

Re:I don't get it

[dangitman]

In my experience, CS3 doesn't install natively on Mac OS 10.5. It works if you install it on 10.4, then upgrade the machine to 10.5. Adobe didn't release any updated installer - they want you to buy CS4 (with a significantly increased price). I don't think it's Apple's doing.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there are a lot of legacy applications that are still supported on newer versions of Windows, including applications pre-dating Windows 95. Many of these applications have not even been updated. If you are in electrical engineering or banking or medical systems or CNC/Milling you will have probably actually run into or heard of such applications before. More often than not the issue is that it can be easier to support the same software by providing detailed instructions or support on how to run it on newer systems than to actually make a new one.

Re:I don't get it

[Skuld-Chan]

Having supported a lot of adobe apps before they moved a good chunk of their support to India - many updates, patches or new versions of OSX broke little things, and sometimes big things (printing is a good example). Not sure if Apple changed the way api's work or whatever - but it happened. Oddly enough I really can't think of a single version of Windows or Windows updates or service packs that broke any Adobe apps (probably because Microsoft - unlike Apple used to test Adobe apps in their internal QA departments - honestly not flaming or anything, this just happens to be true!).

Anyhow its a moot point. When CS5 comes out - CS3 will be eol'd for ALL Mac/Windows users since they only support current version and one version back (yes - read the support agreement...) - so if it still works - great, if not - they have a pretty good deal on upgrades for current users - even if you purchased in volume.

Re:I don't get it

[EvilIdler]

Adobe are a Windows-first company nowadays, so they could be doing some pretty retarded things on OS X. I don't care, though, since I got Acorn for cheap with the latest MacHeist :)

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. It's called Password Keeper and is from PC-Mag. I've also got another called Cookiecop2 from 98 - HTML help doesn't work but that's not a biggie to me since I never used the help file. Interesting thing is that the copy of Password Keeper that I've got included the source code for it, so if I can ever get around to starting work on programing, I might be able to create a version that'll allow me to use my many passwords on Linux.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

The F/OSS community has been making progress on this though. SVG format is becoming more commonplace and if GiMP were to come up with a similar "open standard format" that would be awesome. (Yes, I know GiMP format *is* technically and open format, but it is not a standard in any larger body of standards for information transmission or interchange such as ISO or W3C.)

The GIMP format is not suitable for interchange as it more or less directly reflects GIMPs internal datastructure.
OpenRaster is a multi-layer format made for this task, and if you care about this I suggest you see what you can do to help its adoption.

Re:I don't get it

[gullevek]

I think if apple would keep carbon forever, Adobe would be in Carbon forever. So they kick Adobe in the balls to finally move all over to Cocoa.

Re:I don't get it

[prockcore]

Except Adobe isn't going to move over to Cocoa, and they probably never will. Apple doesn't either. iTunes is still a carbon app.

Re:I don't get it

[coaxial]

Yes, because Linux has put Microsoft out of business.

No, but Google Apps will.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I have linux, bsd, dos, and windows, apps from 1993 that work just fine on freebsd 7.2. Your point?

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook 2002 probably works in Windows 7 and not Vista because 7 has the XP virtual machine for legacy apps.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver?

If such applications existed, Adobe wouldn't still be in business.

With rumors of Adobe not supporting Creative Suite 3 applications on Mac OS X 10.6

Forgive my ignorance, but what does the operating system version have to do with anything? Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?

I don't get why you tink it's okay to use the word retarded. They actually let 7th graders comment on these blogs. Ugh.

Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[godawful]

I'd read about them not supporting CS3 in 10.6 as well, but I believe they just didn't test against it.. has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work? I guess I'd wait a bit and see if there are actually any problems before giving up ones workflow to try new apps that may or may not work in 10.6.

Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[horigath]

John Nack, on his blog which is the original source, says:

[Update: No one said anything about CS3 being "not supported" on Snow Leopard. The plan, however, is not to take resources away from other efforts (e.g. porting Photoshop to Cocoa) in order to modify 2.5-year-old software in response to changes Apple makes in the OS foundation.]

And also things like:

I'd frankly be shocked if people at Adobe & Apple really hadn't tested CS3 on 10.6. I *think* it's just some corporate conservatism at work here, and Adobe doesn't want to over-promise anything.

So all in all: No Big Deal

Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[MachineShedFred]

I have 10.6 (build 10A421a) and Adobe Creative Suite 3 installed on this MacBook Pro. It works just fine.

Much ado about nothing.

Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[vitaflo]

has anyone come out and said it flat out won't work?

No, and you're right. All Adobe said is they're not going to test CS3 in 10.6. This doesn't mean it won't work, it just means they're not bothering to test whether it does or not. Nobody is really going to know until Friday, but people with dev builds say it runs with some minor bugs. Really though, CS3 is buggy enough I doubt it'll be much of a deterrent.

Re:Not Supported? or Doesn't Work?

[lysergic.acid]

Technically, Adobe Photoshop CS4 64-bit is only supported on 64-bit Windows Vista, but I've been using it on 64-bit XP for over a month without any problems. Adobe's online documentation only states that "Although 64-bit Photoshop CS4 was not thoroughly tested under Windows XP64, and therefore is not supported, it should run." The OpenGL features (mostly minor GUI improvements like smooth zooming) are disabled by default, but you can still enable them in the options. There's also a registry script included with Photoshop CS4 called "AllowOldGPUs_ON" that the documentation says is necessary to enable the OpenGL features in XP64, but I didn't have to run it.

I'm guessing the situation is probably similar with OS X 10.6. It'll probably work fine, but for whatever reason they just don't want to guaranty anything.

Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Holi]

Lets put it this way. Your OS does not make you productive, the applications do. If you rely on certain applications then you should not be an early adopter of an OS, you should wait to see if people have problems. With that being said, what have you heard about CS3 not working in 10.6, personally I have been using it for awhile and I have not seen many incompatibilities, just a couple of issues with parts of CS4 that I don't use.

Oh and the speed boost is not all that drastic. The OS feels snappier, but applications in general feel like they run out of memory after awhile. 10.5 felt like it had better memory management. This goes for Adobe, Office, and all my games (Prey, Sim City, Homeworld 2, etc).

On a side note can they fix the damned text entry fields in Slashdot my mouse only works on like half of it,

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets put it this way. Your OS does not make you productive, the applications do.

Which is why everyone uses Windows. Thanks for clarifying that.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Anonymous Coward]

yup.. shouldn't this be "I'm an Apple fanboi who is going to install the latest operating system update come what may, even if the software I use for a living doesn't work, because Steve Jobs says I should. I don't want to pay to update these other apps, so could the community recommend a whole bunch of open source apps that aren't up to the job, even after installing/trying the 20 or so on recommendations from the community. At no point will i address the fact that trying/learning all the holes in this new software will have a time penalty, which is a cost in itself. And I can't be bothered to weigh that up against the cost of a CS4 upgrade license. I also fail to acknowledge that if there was a FOSS program even nearly as good as photoshop, I would have damn well heard about it by now from a million blogs going 'ZOMG! THROW YOUR PHOTOSHOP AWAY' "

apart from that, its pretty accurate.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[tentimestwenty]

You might be used to Windows or Linux upgrades which are typically slower and more feature laden than their predecessors. In this case I'd agree, the OS does very little to increase productivity if you have specialized needs like graphics creation. However, OS X is generally getting faster with each release, the OS gets "smarter" and by nature the multi-window-one-toolbar orientation of OS X lends itself to some nifty interface advantages for people who have 20 or 30 windows open and active at a time across multiple programs. I would say each OS X release has given me 5% more productivity because of speed and window management/file management features they've added. The #1 reason I want Leopard is for this same reason. It's supposed to be faster, require less disc space and the new UI advancements will save me lots of time, maybe 30 minutes a day if you calculated it.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs have games? When did that happen?

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[evilbessie]

But you have an Apple, only the cool kids have those, and you have to be on the bleeding edge all the time otherwise you are not cool.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[stokessd]

Well, we have photoshop...

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Holi]

but I also have a windows box so that cancels out my shiny shiny

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Holi]

Macs have always had games, now they are just starting to get games people actually want to play.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Holi]

As you have obviously not used the other major OS's I am taking your comment with several grains of salt. I find that it depends on what you are used to. If you know the keyboard shortcuts for most applications then you could see massively increased productivity, but I don't see any advantage to using OS X over XP when using the same apps, and I do use the same apps on both. I find that the limiting factor is the application, if it is designed with increased work flow in mind then it will have various shortcuts that beat any menu system you can think up. Not having to enter the menu to do standard tasks makes things much easier. With that said, Fuck You Adobe for removing the crop shortcut.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[im_thatoneguy]

Your OS most certainly DOES make you more productive.

Many applications use the OS for file management and browsing. Finding that photo from a previous project that you need is the task of the OS.

Also most people run more than one app simultaneously unless you're using a turnkey system like Flame. It's the OS's job to manage the various applications you have open and enable the user to exchange data easily.

An application in a bad OS is like a sports car without any wheels. It might have an impressive feature list but interfacing with other applications and data is a big component of many applications-- a component which many applications rely on the OS to make fast and effortless.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the next release of Slashdot drops support for car analogies.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[ubrgeek]

It will, but it will only support jetpacks. And Snow Leapord ;)

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Gilmoure]

Or, I'm a Mac tech who gets asked a lot of questions when new software versions come out. In this case, rather than tell friends wait and see and stick with corporate app lock in, I figured I ask out at a tech site what others thought. I don't do graphic design and other than trouble shooting some install/font/printing issues, don't use Adobe apps.

From the sound of it, there aren't any credible professional replacements out there for Adobe apps and it appears that CS3 will run ok under 10.6. Cool. My question has been answered.

Re:Nice FUD on the front page editors

[Anonymous Coward]

It's moments like these you need mod points.

Jump the gun much?

[stillpixel]

10.6 has been in developer hands for awhile now with no mention of the CS3 apps not working. Adobe themselves have not said that they don't work, just that they have not tested them. Basically they are trying to spread their own FUD to get you to upgrade to CS4 (inferior in my opinion).

Re:Jump the gun much?

[ColdWetDog]

Here's the most recent blurb from John Nack - basically it's a non issue.

Re:Jump the gun much?

[dgatwood]

If CS4 actually worked, it might be worth it. As long as CS4 won't even install on my machine, not supporting Snow Leopard in CS3 just means my money will go towards supporting one of their competitors like Pixelmator. Adobe, I'll install when the new version of the app is worth installing, which means A. 64-bit, and B. case-sensitive-safe.

OP sounds like astroturfing to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's stir up a scare over nothing!

There are alternatives, but YMMV...

[Anonymous Coward]

Image Editing: GIMP
Vector-based Drawing: Inkscape
Page Layout: Scribus
WYSWYG HTML Editor: Mozilla Composer or KompoZer

There are many others in each of these categories, and these may or may not be available for your platform.

well

[larry bagina]

I consider the money I spent on CS 3 (student discount, $1000) to be a complete waste. Ugly as fuck, slow, lots of bugs and quirks. I use CS4 at work (windows) and haven't seen any reason to upgrade.

Dreamweaver: I prefer Coda. No WYSIWYG editor, but I've stopped using Dreamweaver completely. There's also espresso, which is probably similar.

Fireworks: DrawIt has a few bugs and a few quirks, but I find it more pleasant to use, most of the time.

Photoshop: Acorn. If you're a power photoshop user, it won't suffice... depends on what you're doing. There's also pixelimator

Of course, none of those are open source. Most are the product of one or two people.

Re:well

[Swampash]

Dreamweaver: I prefer Coda. No WYSIWYG editor, but I've stopped using Dreamweaver completely.
Completely agree. I couldn't live without Coda now.

Photoshop: Acorn. If you're a power photoshop user, it won't suffice... depends on what you're doing. There's also pixelimator
Pixelmator is very good for what it costs, which is something like 5% of the sticker price of Photoshop. But like Acorn it won't satisfy you if you need all Photoshop's functionality.

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

Pixelmator is buggy and glitchy as fuck. I *really* want to like it, but I can't.

Re:well

[ben0207]

Yeah I use Acorn pretty much daily, and although it does a good 90% of what I used to do in Photoshop, the 10% forces me to keep CS1 installed (I refuse to update for feature I don't need)

Still no decent Illustrator replacement though.

Re:well

[psydeshow]

I use Pixelmator a lot, and for what I do (web) I can get by without Photoshop.

But man I wish I had Photoshop. Pixelmator is lacking that extra few percent of polish, and in some really stupid places.

I mean, here's a tool which is really only useful for web images. Do they support Hex colors? No, they use the standard lame OS X color picker. There's also no way to see how big your selections or crops are, except to squint at the dark-on-dark rulers.

At least it has layers.

Re:well

[larry bagina]

The OS X system color picker is extendible... if a hex-based picker doesn't already exist, it should.

Broaden the question, please

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think more people would benefit from this discussion if responses also included other commercial and non-GNU/Free applications that are alternatives to Adobe's Creative Suite. If the responder feels it's important, he/she could still mention the license used and the remuneration expected, if any.

Re:Broaden the question, please

[Gilmoure]

My bad. Shouldn't have said "open source" but just "alternatives" to Adobe.

Nothing to see here, move along.

[MachineShedFred]

I am posting from a MacBook Pro running the latest seed of 10.6, and I have Creative Suite 3 installed and running on it.

"We don't support it" â "It doesn't work, ever." My guess, is that they don't support it now as 10.6 is still a beta until Friday.

Re:Nothing to see here, move along.

[BitZtream]

Like it matters. CS4 still doesn't work on case sensitive file systems, and getting anything that could be considered 'support' from Adobe is slightly easier than walking too the sun.

Try these

[nielo]

Hi,
Firstly if you're looking for opensource app replacements you can always try www.osalt.com.

Personally I'd try:
Photoshop: GIMP or GIMPShop or Krita
Illustrator: Inkscape or XaraXtreme
InDesign: scribus
Dreamweaver: KompoZer or Aptana or seamonkey or Amaya or href="http://net2.com/nvu/">NVU

I also found this website which might help: www.thefreesuite.com

Here are the relevant OSalt links:
photoshop
illustrator
indesign
dreamweaver

Re:Try these

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for a useful, plain English, non-aggressive reply. How very refreshing.

Thanks again.

Re:Try these

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time you mention GIMP, God kills a kitteh!

Re:Try these

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but screw Xara. Any "open" program that discriminates against Windows users is not just simply as bad, they're WORSE than people who don't ship for Linux, because they are patently discriminating against a group of people because of the operating system they like, versus not shipping for a low unit widely disparate user base.

Re:Try these

[dreamer_uk]

Discriminates against windows users??
Xara were VERY open about the opensource project. They make money on Xara Xtreeme. It's their bread and butter. They wanted to provide products on OSX and Linux but didn't have the time or the resources to make it happen. They started an Project providing code to devs to assist, and making the results freely available.
As I understand it the lack of take up stalled the project. and while this is a pity you can't expect a small business to give up its revenue stream just because it doesn't suit you.

they tried they failed they moved on.

Xara Xtreeme is a brilliant produce at a great price for windows users. I would have loved it to have been the same cross platform but regardless I have no issues with Xara.

I really think you are confusing discrimination with economics. It was not economic for them to develop on their own the linux version, it wasn't them discriminating.

For those who want to check out the project :- www.xaralx.org

Re:Try these

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp, Gimp, Gimp!

I'm allergic to cats.

Is 2.5 years "...so soon"?

[defstro]

"I have several designer friends that are looking forward to the speed boost of OS X 10.6 but don't want to go through the Adobe upgrades so soon after the CS2 to CS3 upgrades." So soon? CS3 came out in March 2007.

Gimp, Inkscape and Bluefish.

[Anonymous Coward]

Gimp, Inkscape and Bluefish.

I never use Bluefish, I mostly just write it from vi.

Re:Gimp, Inkscape and Bluefish.

[SuperDre]

Gimp might be a substitute, but Inkscape is nowhere near illustrator or Coreldraw (yet, at least the last time I checked it)..

Anyone bought CS3?

[Brian Gordon]

SafeCast overrides operating-system security and safeguards and writes directly to the boot track of the local disk as part of its operation ... Adobe also uses a version of SafeCast for its CS products, and has had similar but less frequent problems, particularly with certain types of disk configurations (RAID, multiple-boot), but continues to use the technology for copy protection.

Photoshop should not be in the boot track of my local disk.

Re:Anyone bought CS3?

[BitZtream]

Yes, I have 4 copies of CS3. SafeCast has never caused me a problem, whatever it does doesn't seem to bother Windows and seems to work fine with our disk imaging tools so while you are write that it shouldn't do it, the fact that it does in and of itself isn't really an issue.

Finally, SafeCast doesn't 'override operating system security and safeguards' by writing directly to the boot track, Windows DOES NOT PROTECT that area of the disk, which has been brought up on slashdot before.

You can sit around and whine about it on principle, the rest of us will sit around and make money then come here to laugh at you whining about it on principal, we'll see who gets further in life.

Re:Anyone bought CS3?

[TheGratefulNet]

yeah, their 'copy protection' is sure worth a lot.

uhuh.

don't ask me know I know.

Re:Anyone bought CS3?

[Brian Gordon]

You can sit around and whine about it on principle, the rest of us will sit around and make money then come here to laugh at you whining about it on principal, we'll see who gets further in life.

Compromising principles and eschewing best practices for monetary gains?

I can tell by your spelling that you never graduated high school, so I suppose your failure to recognize this lesson from history is forgivable.

Re:Anyone bought CS3?

[Skuld-Chan]

CS3 doesn't use safecast - it uses Flexnet (vmware, autodesk etc - use the same tech). Now CS2 did use safecast.

Not that it matters - Flexnet stores security info on track 0 as well. Flexnet is however a bit better because safecast didn't work as a restricted user.

Re:Anyone bought CS3?

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yuck.... we have mandatory full-disk encryption here, and that would totally destroy it's bootleader.

Re:Anyone bought CS3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that boot track space should be reserved for emacs... ;)

What's wrong with CS4

[NekoXP]

CS4 should work. Adobe just won't be releasing patches for CS3 to update compatibility issues with the new OS. Until CS5 is out though (which probably isn't for AT LEAST 8 or 9 months considering Adobe's past release schedule) it'll only be 32-bit but, really, would you care?

Re:What's wrong with CS4

[Anonymous Coward]

If you open images of any size then you'll care. Being able to address 4+ gigs of RAM is important.

Adobe alternatives on the DVD production side

[VVrath]

I have a related, but slightly off-topic question - does anyone know of any decent FOSS alternative for the video production side of the Adobe suite? I'd dearly love to throw my XP partition away, but I can't find anything Free that'll match the combination of Premiere Pro (for video editing) and Encore (for DVD Authoring). In particular, none of the big hitters on the Linux video-editing front seem to offer support for multi-camera editing.

Meh, I suppose I could always save up for a Mac Pro and a copy of Final Cut Pro. Anyone wanna buy a kidney?

Re:Adobe alternatives on the DVD production side

[SuperDre]

I'm also wondering if there is a FOSS alternative to Premiere Pro as I haven't found anything yet..

Re:Adobe alternatives on the DVD production side

[Moldiver]

No FOSS but had a look at FinalCutStudio?

Re:Adobe alternatives on the DVD production side

[SuperDre]

it's not available for windows, and I'm not gonna buy an apple just for that (I'm not gonna buy an apple period)...

Re:Adobe alternatives on the DVD production side

[Moldiver]

Oh though you were on Mac as the origin-post was on Adobe not guaranteeing function for CS3 on Snow Leopard.

Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[Sycraft-fu]

If you think it is, well that tells me you don't know a whole lot about what people do with their computers. There are many reasons why it isn't, a major one would be that not all the apps people need have Linux versions. Supposing Linux was a true replacement for Windows, in that you could take any person using Windows and get them on Linux doing the same thing, no problems, well you wouldn't see so much Windows out there any more. Hard to compete with free.

So while I'm sure you can find apps that are in roughly the same market as the Adobe ones, they aren't replacements. GIMP is an image editor and thus in the same general area is Photoshop and Illustrator, but it isn't a replacement for them. It is not as capable, not as easy to use, not as well documented, and not as integrated with other prepress products. So while GIMP may work if you need an image editor, it will not work if you need Photoshop.

Re:Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[Just Some Guy]

That works both ways. After using a Mac at home, Linux at work and on my netbook, and even an iTouch, Windows has the most constricted, barely-functional desktop around. Most of the software I want to use works poorly, if it all, and you have to buy or download sketchy utilities to do the most trivial things.

I've tried using Windows before, but it's just so lacking in software and basic usability when compared to KDE or OS X (or even the iTouch) that I've never been able to stick with it very long.

Re:Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[DEmmons]

sad but more or less accurate. you can see why it frustrates us who prefer Linux, right? I mean, it's not the fault of the Linux kernel developers, or Red Hat, or Canonical, or anyone else who can fall under the designation of "Linux" that so many of these necessary apps are without a native Linux version. Adobe and others primarily don't port them because of Linux's tiny market share, according to the popular excuse - but Linux's market share is small mostly because of the lack of apps. it's a catch-22. Far more people dual-boot than the statistics show, because the statistics are based on what OS was pre-installed. but if I'm willing to keep windows on my system for the apps, why make a Linux native version?

the whole thing just frustrates us to death, and it's actually even more complicated than that because there is also an entire group of people who refuse to run any non-FOSS on their machine at all. But for a guy who simply prefers to not reboot into an OS i don't personally like just for one app i need, it is at least nice to think that it will ever-so-slowly get better. for example, if Adobe officially supported running Creative Suite apps on Wine, that would be an intermediary that would allow more shops to switch. only a Linux-native version will really be satisfying, but you have to start somewhere. I had been thinking that games (easier to port since they rely less on the OS's UI) would be the first area to really embrace the paradigm of supporting all platforms equally, but Id Software was one of the leaders in that department and some of the recent news from them is worrisome. I've been playing almost all my games on Linux lately and would love to skip buying a copy of Windows for my next computer, but that milestone is probably years off still.

I do think we'll eventually get to a point where everyone can run whatever software they want on whatever platform they want with just a few exceptions. obviously, there are big corporations who won't want that, but I don't think they can prevent it. It will be interesting to me to see how much Linux would benefit from the removal of the "but there's no apps!" barrier. Either way I am pretty sure it will continue to be my primary OS anyway, though.

Re:Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[VGPowerlord]

That works both ways. After using a Mac at home, Linux at work and on my netbook, and even an iTouch, Windows has the most constricted, barely-functional desktop around. Most of the software I want to use works poorly, if it all, and you have to buy or download sketchy utilities to do the most trivial things.

I've tried using Windows before, but it's just so lacking in software and basic usability when compared to KDE or OS X (or even the iTouch) that I've never been able to stick with it very long.

Rather than dealing in generalities, want to name some specifics?

Re:Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[bcrowell]

Uh, the OP didn't ask to replace his Windows OS with Linux. He asked for open-source replacements for applications that he could run on his existing MacOS.

GIMP is an image editor and thus in the same general area is Photoshop and Illustrator, but it isn't a replacement for them.

Uh, no, GIMP works on bitmaps, which makes it like Photoshop. Illustrator works on vector graphics, and the open-source equivalent is Inkscape. Inkscape is one of the best pieces of open-source software I've ever used, and it's multiplatform, so no, the OP doesn't have to switch to Linux to use it. I used Illustrator extensively for about 5 years, and have been using Inkscape for about 5 years after that. At this point, Inkscape does everything I want it to do. For my purposes, it's a 100% replacement for Illustrator in terms of functionality.

Re:Linux isn't a replacement for Windows

[RealRedMist]

So your idea of a replacement for Photoshop and Illustrator is what? Photoshop and Illustrator? They are not replacements either,

Seriously?

[angelbunny]

The speed increase in 10.6 is mainly from the developer end so if you use cs3 and expect it to magically run faster you're kidding yourself.

Wait for cs5 and hopefully it will have a lot of openCL support and 64 bit support. That is when moving from 10.5 to 10.6 should be beneficial, not before.

Honestly, I'm worried cs6 will be the major jump in speed. It feels like years (because it is years) for developers to catch up. What gives?

Re:Seriously?

[ceoyoyo]

It's years for ADOBE to catch up. Other Mac developers manage to use all the new features in many cases before the OS is actually released.

Adobe is so slow because they have a massive codebase that is still using Carbon which is effectively an API for compatibility with Classic. When they finish porting everything over to Cocoa they'll actually be able to use the features Apple introduces, just like everyone else.

Dreamweaver

[QuietLagoon]

Definitely looking for a replacement for Dreamweaver. Since Adobe has owned it, the customer support has been awful.

Suggestions are welcome.

Re:Dreamweaver

[s1lverl0rd]

I heavily prefer Aptana Studio (from http://aptana.com/ ) over Dreamweaver. It's more programmer-oriented than designer-oriented, though, and it doesn't have WYSIWYG, but it has nice FTP support, high productivity and great extendability (there are Eclipse plugins for the weirdest things).

try gimp.app

[Anonymous Coward]

http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/

Opensource as an alternative to no support?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are looking for support for an application, and asking for opensource, I feel sorry for you. I am not a fanboi of ANYTHING no less Adobe or Mac, but, despite running several linux boxes (CentOS,Redhat, and Gentoo) I can safely say, that documentation and support is seriously lacking for anything opensource. The lacking support of Adobe is infinitely times better than anything you're going to find form a free app.

CS5 : Sooner than you think

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe tends to run on 18-month cycles. CS3 was released 4/07; CS4 was released 10/08. So says the smart money.

-birdie

Photoshop 6, Illustrator 9

[Anonymous Coward]

Use old software.
It is less expensive.
It does the job.
No need for costly, time consuming, wasteful upgrades.

What we really need is for Apple to continue supporting old software and not break software every time they come out with a new OS. They destroyed a lot of useful apps with the abandonment of Classic/OS9. There were more educational apps under that than there are under OSX.

Been there

[clarkkent09]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver?

Short answer: You can't. I might get modded down by open source zealots, but the truth is the sooner you forget about the whole idea the better. Using CS3 on an unsupported OS, or indeed switching to a supported OS, not to mention using the latest version (CS4, hello!?), are all infinitely less trouble than trying to do "professional" work with currently available open source tools that could replace it.

Re:Been there

[Anonymous Coward]

How much time do you want to spend trying? If you want to try GIMP, Inkscape et al, it can't hurt and the price is certainly right. But most people who want to make money in this area find it better to just go with the flow and install what everyone else uses.

If you just want to work on images for your own use, the FOSS stuff will probably serve you just fine.

Re:Been there

[Anonymous Coward]

But there should be threads like this kicking the butts of Linux boosters to encourage the further development of the various half-hearted existing efforts to the point that they do work...

Scribus especially is laughably inadequate. Gimp and Inkscape don't seem as bad.

I'm a purely amateur graphic designer. The superiority of windows for that field kept me there for years. When actual programming work and Vista forced me to Linux, I loved it except for the graphics programs, which just sucks. They suck so much I'm angry just thinking about it...

Re:Been there

[risom]

I was wondering what Open Source apps folks would recommend to replace Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver? Short answer: You can't.

It all depends on the stuff you do. I earn money using Inkscape and Gimp on Debian and have no problems at all. Still, I wouldn't blindly advise anyone to do the same (which is sometimes hard, because I am one of those open source zealots ;)). I suppose the poster should have told us the type of work he does to get a more precise answer.

Good luck if you are a professional...

[bashibazouk]

And go beyond the web. The problems with good CMYK implementation has been talked about quite a bit but what I rarely have seen mentioned is Pantoneï. Corporate art departments live on pantone colors and swatch books for anything printed, painted or applied. If the program doesn't have Pantone it's too limited to be a professional app in the print arena. Pantone charges for it's technology, therefore is unlikely to be in Open Source apps.

Now if someone would come up with an open source alternative with printed swatch books...

Re:Good luck if you are a professional...

[dargaud]

That and screen / printer calibrations.

I have Datacolor Spyder3 screen and print calibration devices. They are absolutely essential to get good screen color rendering and good prints no matter what price monitor/printer you have. Those devices are not supported in Linux.

I can create a monitor profile in Windows and use it in Linux with the command xcalib, but without being sure if it's correctly applied. And their monitor profile creation software doesn't run in Wine or even in VirtualBox. And I have found NO linux software that can apply a profile to a print. So I need a virtual XP just to create printer profiles and print !

Those issues have been bouncing around Linux mailing lists for a decade.

Re:Good luck if you are a professional...

[Anne Honime]

And I have found NO linux software that can apply a profile to a print. So I need a virtual XP just to create printer profiles and print !

You didn't looked hard enough. Cinepaint does this perfectly, and even let you smelt any RGB profile into CMYK or XYZ profiles while showing you the relative gamut transformation in OpenGL 3D no less. Or you can display your image in proof mode, etc.

It depends on what you're replacing

[roc97007]

Enh... In the interest of completeness, I'd like to point out the needing Windows, and *thinking* you need Windows, are two separate things. If your requirement is for the OS to be called "Microsoft Windows", then there is literally no alternative. If what you need is a set of resources, and the only solution you're aware of runs on Windows, then you still only have one choice. At least, until you educate yourself further on what choices are available.

As you so succinctly pointed out, GIMP doesn't fill the bill if you need Photoshop. Some people need Photoshop and really can't do their job without it. Others think they need Photoshop, but really don't use all the features or may not be aware of the features in GIMP. Then, it gets into a grey area. Is the requirement to use Photoshop a company decision, a feature only Photoshop has, some unresolvable compatibility issue? Or is it lack of information on alternatives, wishful thinking on what features one *would* get around to using, or brand snobbery?

Mind you, I use CS3, not GIMP. But I started with GIMP, and I could go back to it if there was some reason I couldn't continue to use Photoshop.

Re:It depends on what you're replacing

[Gilmoure]

For one of my friends, she's been on the Adobe software train since before they purchased Aldus Pagemaker (still has the box and 2 lb manual in her studio). And while it looks like CS3 apps will work under OS X 10.6, she's a bit pissed at Adobe's snarkiness: "We haven't tested CS3 on OS X 10.6; just buy CS4."

Is understandable and once I point her in the direction of of some of the apps listed here, she'll likely try them at least.

I prefer it this way

[Anne Honime]

It's helpful when dealing with serious fonts that come in several subtle variants (like bold oldstyle nums) to reduce the included fonts count. Scribus is not a word processor. The adobe counterpart is no better in this light, as far as I can tell, because I had a helluva hard time dealing with a print shop that insisted on re-creating in InDesign a rough I submitted them in pdf. I had to dig the F* manual on internet to teach the typographer how to switch some caps into the alternate glyph of the face.

It runs just fine

[SuperKendall]

Why wouldn't Adobe CS3 (which isn't all that terribley old) not run on a new release of OSX? Is Apple really that retarded?

No, Apple is not "retarded" - it runs just fine (i've been using CS3 under the SL betas).

Adobe is simply saying they will not test nor issue updates for the platform, if there are issues - because CS4 has been out for some time and I believe has a substantially migrated code base. Basically, it's not worth the pain to maintain.

Note that Adobe said the same thing for CS3 on Vista. Did you also ask if Microsoft was "retarded"?

Re:It runs just fine

[ubrgeek]

> Did you also ask if Microsoft was "retarded"?

Nah. Seemed kind of rhetorical ...

Re:10.5?

[Keen Anthony]

I would say it's the latter: Adobe doesn't want to prematurely guarantee that CS3 will work on Snow Leopard. Furthermore, I'd say Adobe would prefer that customers think they'll need to upgrade to CS4.

What about Leopard is broken beyond repair exactly?

CS3 works...

[PhunkySchtuff]

From what I hear, and my own experience, CS3 works.
There's no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater - Upgrade to 10.6 and keep using CS3.

Problem solved.

If you're unsure about running in a non-officially supported configuration, don't sweat it.
If you have a bit of a look on Google you will actually find that Adobe doesn't support using any of the Creative Suite apps when working off a network volume... Which covers something like >90% of the use of Creative Suite in the real world.

If Adobe don't support something this fundamental to a graphics workflow, merely using CS3 on 10.6 is nothing to lose sleep over.

Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

One day while talking with a Genuis at the Apple store, I mentioned that I was stuck on OS X Tiger because I did not have the $$$s to upgrade my Flash 8 Pro, which Adobe stated was not supported on OS X Leopard. The Genuis' reply was 1. Get Leopard. 2. Install Tiger on a partition since the Leopard allows for that.

I download some of the open sourced apps listed above.

Thanks.

You seem to be slightly uninformed.

[Admiralbumblebee]

You could just use CS3. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/08/pscs3_on_snowleopard.html

Keep an eye on developments here...

[double07]

http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/ I used a few early betas of this and although not free is probably the closet thing to photoshop out there. From the news it looks like a publisher has picked it up and it will be available 'real soon now' in Linux, MacOSX and Windows flavours.

Please

[Wolfier]

> I've never understood this complaint. You have either 8 bit (256 colour) graphics for the early web, or 24 bit (full colour) for full print-ready work, but 16 bit? Why bother with 16 bit support? Its only usefulness was for monitors/graphics cards in the early 1990s that didn't support 24 bit colour due to a lack of RAM, and this was in the days when a four MEGABYTE graphics card was large. Nowadays we have 512MB cards and higher as standard; the requirement for such low bit depths is long gone.
> Looking for 16 bit colour support is like checking a modern car for a crank handle, it's utterly pointless and anyone complaining that Gimp doesn't have it is simply looking for a reason to support Adobe. Brainwashing etc, call it what you will.

I've never understood why people with a half understanding, scratch that, maybe 30% understanding of something but would nonetheless pose like an expert, always post anonymously.

If you think what you said is right, don't be afraid of being mocked and login before you post.

Good for you

[coryking]

The rest of us aren't going to change our entire windowing system because of one ill behaved program.

The price is only right...

[coryking]

it can't hurt and the price is certainly right

The price is right only if your time is free. The price of the entire adobe suite is less than a few days of billable work.

Re:The price is only right...

[im_thatoneguy]

Just finding an app is time consuming.

In Photoshop if I need to stitch a panorama I just launch the tool from the file menu.

If I want an OSS solution I spend an hour looking for a good one online, 30 minutes tracking down all the libraries and packages I need to make it work.

Now that I have it, trying to get it to work as well as the one in Photoshop takes another hour and all told I've charged the client more than double the cost of a Photoshop CS4 upgrade. Rinse and repeat for every "nice to have" feature of Photoshop and you've payed off the whole creative suite in a day or two of screwing around on Sourceforge.

A Photoshop upgrade costs about an hour or two of billable work... that's not terribly difficult to justify every 24 months. It only has to save you about 15 seconds per day to pay itself off.

If an OSS solution only saves 14.9 seconds every day over a previous version of Photoshop then it's costing me money.

Pixelmator

[Confuzzled]

Why has no one suggested Pixelmator?

It's not a complete PS replacement, but it does have enough tools to get the job done most of the time.

Flash flash flash flash

[JimboFBX]

What a coincidence, I've been just very recently trying to design a HUD for Crysis, which uses flash for the HUD element. Without pirating flash CS3 is there any free tools out there that is even remotely helpful? I mean, surely someone said "action script is free, and in theory I could create a graphical application that lets you place pictures on a canvas and then generate action script code for it", and then went out and did that? All i've found are some very basic code samples, a LOT of incomplete code samples that assume you already have flash (i.e. place this object, then click on it and change these options rather than telling how to change those options in action script), some inconvenient documentation that spreads out the info too far, and a GUI online app written by a 14 year old that you would hope would make flash only to find out its for the most part barely functional.

I'm making progress using http://www.actiontad.coms/ samples and FlashDevelop, but its very slow process. For example, I can add a picture, but when I try to resize it, it disappears without any errors to indicate why. Then after doing some development, I find out Crysis needs AS2 and not AS3, which is quite a bit different than AS3. Finding documentation and code samples ("pure code" samples) is even harder for AS2 than AS3 it seems.

Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).

Re:Flash flash flash flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyways, anyone know some GOOD AS2 documentation or GUI tools? It needs to support AS2 (and only AS2 apparently).

I don't know about tools, but O'Reilly has a few books about AS2: Essential ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition.

Now I can't say for sure that they'll meet your needs, but at least you'll have a language reference.

You may also find MING useful, it's a library for coding Flash apps. More info at: Ming Flash Examples and Tutorials.

And I assume you've seen the OSFlash site.

Seashore

[ctachme]

So it depends on what your priorities are. If you care about a breadth of features then GIMP.app is what you need. However, if you're more interested in an open source Photoshop-like app then I'd suggest Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/). It has all of the basic photo editing features that PS has, but does lack some key features (such as CYMK support). However, it's fully Cocoa so it's really more integrated with the OS than even Photoshop (which is all Carbon, at least CS3 and CS4 are, supposedly CS5 will be Cocoa). It's great for all of the basic stuff you need if you want a true Mac OS X experience, without having to use X11.

Adobe is such a pain

[dan325]

Adobe needs to realize that when you regularly release new versions of a hugely expensive software suite, there are going to be lots of people who won't / can't upgrade. It's a slap in the face to their customers that a $2,000 piece of software that was still top-of-the-line less than a year ago won't be supported on the latest operating systems. Heck, I'm still using CS2 with no plans to upgrade any time soon. I'm not made of money and I still haven't seen any feature in CS3 or 4 that even remotely justifies paying Adobe's ridiculous prices to upgrade.

Adobe's only strategy to maximize their profits seems to be ultra-high pricing and increasingly obnoxious DRM. If anyone in Adobe management has taken micro-economics, it might be a good time to remember that a lower price will greatly increase the quantity demanded. If Adobe products didn't cost your first-born child and a kidney, people might actually buy their upgrades.

Who can say what's what with Adobe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tough to tell at this point how well the Adobe apps will run under SL...

There is this enigmatic comment from the usually reliable David Pogue: "I experienced frustrating glitches in various programs, including Microsoft Word, Flip4Mac, Photoshop CS3, CyberDuck and TextExpander,..."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/technology/personaltech/27pogue.html?8dpc

Not sure what he means by "glitch", but that appears to contradict this link from the horse's mouth:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/08/pscs3_on_snowleopard.html

Just don't do anything

[chocobanana]

Adobe may officially not provide Technical support but I'm pretty sure everything works. The only app that is usually problematic with an OS upgrade is Acrobat because of the PDF printer integration (i.e. Vista printer installation is quite different from XP) and in the case of v7, the activation system was a piece of shit and would simply refuse to stay activated. It affected both Leopard and Vista, but I dunno about Snow Leopard (requires 64bit drivers...) All other apps always have survived OS upgrades. Some very occasionally with an easy, one time only workaround. I have friend who's still using Photoshop 7 on Vista, no issues... Your friend is most likely to behave in strange ways when attempting to compare CS3 apps with FOSS replacements so I would advise him to still use CS3 on Snow Leopard and wait for CS5 to upgrade. I can assure you that Adobe uses the "new OS, not tested, unable to support" excuse to scare people and have them upgrade. Oh, and you can find all fixable issues documented out there on the internet!

Re:irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

You must work with open source graphic artists. That would explain the terrible user interfaces on OSS apps.

From the FTA link

[oDDmON oUT]

"...I really get sick of everyone whining when (insert your favorite software company) says they won't officially support a 2 year old product with the latest and greatest OS from a different company...

CS3 has been working fine on SL, its just from a liability standpoint they don't officially support it. I was told CS and CS2 aren't supported for Leopard, but I have many users using both with no problems..."

File under > Horses mouth > From.

sK1

[tonk]

sK1 is an illustration program http://sk1project.org/ that supports CMYK and can import files from Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator.

An amazing tool for vector graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

GhostScript is not really GUI, but despite that it is a really amazing and easy to use creative tool.

Ghostscript is available in OS X by default (part of CUPS), but I'm not sure if interactive graphics mode is available (unless you are really good at visualisation and always know exactly how your picture should look before you create it, you need that). Basically you get one window where your document is displayed and one console window with a command line interface were you write PostScript commands. It's easier to use and faster then Illustrator/IncScape for most everyday tasks.

Once you created your image, GhostScript exports to PDF, SVG, PNG, JPG and a lot of other file formats.

There is also a lot of other useful tools for PostScript manipulation and as it is a text-based format it is easy to create your own (PostScript btw is an excellent all purpose programming language).

IncScape can import and export PostScript. The PostScript code IncScape export is as human unfriendly as SVG, but can still be useful if you don't have to touch it's inner workings.

PostScript don't support semi-transparency. You can fake it, but it is hard. If you really need transparence when you create your vector graphics I recommend IncScape or Xara Xtreme (really good tool, but semi-open and only free of cost in Linux and it's native file format is not usable with any other tools).

IncScapes GUI is rather good (on par with Illustrator) but very artistically limiting (as Illustrator). You can create your own plugins if you miss some feauture and there is some means of automating repetive tasks, but those things is really complicated and limiting compared to PostScript.

The inconsistency among SVG tools (like IncScape) is huge and they usually don't create compatible SVG files. But if you stick with one GUI tool and export to some other format for final distribution, then an SVG based tool can fit your needs. SVG is text based, but hand coding SVG is something you don't want to do if you value your sanity. SVG is extremely human unfriendly, long-winded and hard to read, creating anything usually means a lot of repetive, time consuming, creativity killing, absurdly complicated work. There are XML-editors (one exist within IncScape) that take away some of the pain with hand coding SVG, but you don't want to do it if you have any other alternative.

InDesign Replacement

[corigo]

I've been using Adobe since 1991, Windows and Mac before then, and still struggling to be a Linux convert (I'm one year in, but still not Windows free... give me strength my brothers, give me strength!).

Photoshop: Sorry can't stand it. Nor any of the replacements. I keep praying Adobe will make Fireworks open source. Fireworks is just so much easier to use. Adobe, are you listening?

Illustrator: No decent replacement. A very good application though.

InDesign: You know what... I've actually found the OpenOffice is an amazingly capable replacement for InDesign. It nicely fits the 80-20 rule and has some features and capabilities that InDesign still hasn't been able to do in 18+ years (like formatted bullets with spacing.) The only problem with OOo as a replacement is backwards compatability issues in ODT documents between release versions. But then so do Adobe products.

Re:InDesign Replacement

[corigo]

The one InDesign feature that is truly awesome is cascading text. I wish they would build this feature in HTML 5. Then I would never need a document editor again.

Why 10.6?

[Anonymous Coward]

After reading all these posts, my question would be "What compelling feature is in 10.6 that you just can't live without?". I understand not spending money on expensive upgrades (DTP suites cost more than the machine they run on) but CS3 is still viable for today's work.

OSS tools are supported in OSX?

[Anonymous Coward]

If CS ain't supported, is Gimp?

Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[argent]

Adobe has been dragging their feet on supporting OS X since before it was called OS X. I'm not saying I can really blame them for refusing to rewrite their apps for NextStep/OpenStep/Yellow Box (what became Cocoa) in 1997 or so, back when Apple said they were only going to be supporting Mac OS apps in an emulator (Blue Box, what became Classic). But that was over 10 years ago now, and Apple bent over backwards to provide Carbon as a bridge for them.

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[buzzn]

You say Apple bent over backwards to provide Carbon. They were pushed. Hard. By Adobe. You say "dragging their feet" as if it were easy to completely rewrite large portions of a huge application suite. At least when OSX came out there were some user benefits, but users don't really care if an app is Carbon or Cocoa. The only people who care are Apple, who don't want to support both and have their own agenda to pursue. So they foist the issue onto application developers. Naturally, everyone blames the app devs for not doing whatever Apple says they need to, no matter how much it costs them. (Reminds me a bit of No Child Left Behind for some reason.)

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[argent]

You say "dragging their feet" as if it were easy to completely rewrite large portions of a huge application suite.

Between 1997 and 2009? I think they could have managed it.

I don't expect them to have jumped to Yellow Box, right away, and that's not what I mean by "dragging their feet". I mean that Carbon was introduced as a transitional technology from the first, and they have had a decade now to switch at their own pace to Cocoa.

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[buzzn]

What you have not stated is a good reason why Adobe should have spent the year of effort a switch would entail. In 2006, Apple said they were going to bring Carbon to 64 bit. In 2007, they said they wouldn't.

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[argent]

What you have not stated is a good reason why Adobe should have spent the year of effort a switch would entail.

Over a ten year period, between the time Apple announced Yellow Box and the time they discontinued the 64 bit port for Carbon?

I don't care who started the feud, Apple with Yellow Box or Adobe with Display Postscript licensing, but it's been Apple who's had to go through multi-year rework of what became OS X (replacing Display Postscript in Openstep/Rhapsody with Quartz, implementing Carbon and keeping nasty old Mac OS alive through the later versions of OS 8 and into OS 9). Adobe's been calling all the shots up to now.

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[buzzn]

Adobe's been calling all the shots up to now.

Hardly. Apple has had plenty of goodies to bring to the party, including QuickTime, iPhone, <cough>OpenDoc</cough>...

Meanwhile, with the resources to port to Cocoa, Adobe could be testing CS3, porting to Linux, or any of a number of interesting things. It's a good thing that they employ lots of developers like myself who absolutely love converting thousands of dialogs from one platform to another.

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[argent]

Hardly. Apple has had plenty of goodies to bring to the party, including QuickTime, iPhone, OpenDoc...

And these are relevant to the Adobe-Apple relationship how?

Meanwhile, with the resources to port to Cocoa, Adobe could be testing CS3, porting to Linux, or any of a number of interesting things.

I don't think they would have been doing that in 1997, when they first told Apple to take a hike, so Apple created Carbon as a transitional API for the likes of them.

It's a good thing that they employ lots of developers like myself who absolutely love converting thousands of dialogs from one platform to another.

That's what Adobe gets from leaving things until the last minute.

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[buzzn]

Apple has always been in full control of their platform. Adobe as an app dev is subject to the whims of Apple, not the other way around.

That's what Adobe gets from leaving things until the last minute.
Actually, Adobe has been very busy keeping up. Various products have gone 64 bit, and there's always more OSX features to implement.

Now put yourself in Adobe's shoes. Apple tells you they will take Carbon to 64 bit. Do you bother going Cocoa? Of course not. Then when they change their mind...

Re:Adobe-Apple dysfunctional relationship

[argent]

Adobe as an app dev is subject to the whims of Apple, not the other way around.

Apple delayed the release of what became OS X for THREE YEARS to satisfy Adobe. Because Apple needed Adobe more than Adobe needed Apple. Apple *still* needs Adobe more than Adobe needs Apple, if Adobe quit developing Photoshop and the rest of their suite for Mac, Apple would be in deep ****.

Apple tells you they will take Carbon to 64 bit. Do you bother going Cocoa?

Of course not. As long as Apple kept updating their transitional technology for Adobe... creating Carbon, porting Carbon to Intel, and updating Carbon to 64 bit, Adobe has no reason to actually finish the transition.

There is no replacement

[Ilgaz]

Adobe has no rival in the scene so that is why they can do these things, very easily. Basic as that.

Who you should ask is the professionals who actually purchases the products and make money with them, don't ask people who pays $0 and will simply do $0 upgrade to CS4. You know what I mean.

define pro

[pbhj]

I think you must mean a professional billboard illustrator? I work normally for the web, so provided the size:quality ratio is approximately right it doesn't matter if I use 8 or 16 bits/ch/px.

I've also used Inkscape + GIMP for advertising and don't notice any difference in the quality of the final print ad versus those created using Corel or Adobe suites.

Mind you nearly every print publication nowadays seems to have ads with JPEG artifacts or un-replaced watermarked stock images or improper resizing of raster images or something. I guess when you're grafting some stars head [at the wrong angle and size] on to a models body for the front image of your international glossy mag then you need to be sure the colours are good ...

Extreme quality is rarely needed it seems even for pros.

Yes, there are many exceptions.

Re:define pro

[Anne Honime]

My thinking was about fine art or wedding photographers. More generally, it applies when your workflow starts with a RAW picture and you need to squeeze as much informations as possible out of it. If you work on in-camera made jpegs, there's no real need to turn to 16 bits because any postprocessing will be bad anyway. But as soon as you oversize, rotate, correct perspectives, adjust tones, in fact every operation that creates new pixels via an interpolating algorithm based on neighbours intensity, 16 bits is really the way to get a whole range of smooth in-between colours for smooth shades instead of noisy chroma blobs. The more operations you do on your pictures, the more you add rounding errors and the more likely you'll get patches of uniform (and bad !) colours right in the middle of what you expect to be a clean shade (think skin, for instance). Suppose for instance you create a pixel between one which value on one channel (8 bits) is 126 and another which value is 127 ; your algorithm can choose either value, and this new pixel won't be further discriminated from its neighbour in any further calculation. Whereas in 16 bits, your 2 points would have 2016 and 2032 as intensity value, leaving a range of 16 intensity steps for creating a pixel in-between, this pixel being distinct from its neighbours in any further calculation.

Correction

[Anne Honime]

sorry, I didn't checked my maths. In 16 bits, 126 and 127 are 32256 and 32512 respectively, and the number of steps inbetween is 256.

Adobe did test ACS3 on Snow Leopard

[alfredo]

Here's the link: http://www.macrumors.com/2009/08/26/photoshop-project-manager-clarifies-position-on-creative-suite-3-compatibility-with-snow-leopard/ Earlier today, we reported on comments from Adobe Principal Product Manager for Photoshop John Nack pointing to a new FAQ document noting that only Creative Suite 4 will be officially supported on Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system, with Creative Suite 3 and earlier versions reportedly not having been tested on Snow Leopard. Nack has now posted an update after investigating the CS3 situation in which he reveals that Adobe and Apple actually did do extensive testing of at least Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard and found that it is in fact compatible with the new operating system. It turns out that the Photoshop team has tested Photoshop CS3 on Snow Leopard, and to the best of our knowledge, PS CS3 works fine on Snow Leopard. Now I will crawl back into my hole

Re:Adobe did test ACS3 on Snow Leopard

[Gilmoure]

Ding, ding, ding, ding, DING!

Sweet news! From earlier comments on here, beta testers were saying CS3 is good on SL. Nice to hear from Adobe's mouth.

Re:Adobe did test ACS3 on Snow Leopard

[alfredo]

I just cruised the Mac centric sites and there it was.

Support??

[Anonymous Coward]

If your concern is about getting support for the design software you're using, how is moving to open source apps going to help with that?

You aren't going to get support and your users aren't going to have a f***ing clue how to use those apps.

If you need support, upgrade to 10.6 and CS4 at the same time.

Don't understand

[ernst_mulder]

Gilmoure's article almost feels like it was posted just for the heck of it. Or he has very particular designer friends.

How could a switch to some open source alternatives be in anyway better than running a "not officially supported but otherwise proven" version? Every existing file would have to be converted, there would be many conversion issues. If the design friends are working for a design studio it would be MUCH cheaper to just upgrade to CS4. Or to stay with Mac OS X 10.5 for the time being.

Anybody that's making a living on production work using computers should stay away from version .0 upgrades anyhow.

Next time in a forum: "I've voluntarily upgraded to Mac OS X 10.6 and now my Photoshop documents are corrupted. All my customers are angry and I'm loosing a lot of money and all my customers go somewhere else. Sue Apple!"...

Real need to upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first question should be: Do I really and absolutely need to upgrade? Am I doing a specific task that would be improved with a new feature? (Maybe painting 3D textures, or working with ridiculously-stupid-large megapixel images and 64-bit processing) Am I really getting special support by staying up to date?
(If the answer to the first is no, and if support means reading something online instead of getting a tech with real solutions - then upgrading is likely to be a waste of money.)

From my experience, all the important core tools were around since PhotoShop 7 and Illustrator 10. And CS may have added some convienient things. Sticking with old versions really doesn't present a problem. (And for web, the last versions of Flash or Dreamweaver that were still under the Macromedia name weren't that bad.) CS2 and beyond? All the updates by Adobe now are like throwing more and more sprinkles on icecream. Maybe it's cute and they can claim it does more, but it really doesn't do anything to actually improve the product for what it is. For 99% of stuff, the older versions are equally good.

I could see an argument about it being a PITA when working with other shops, but if you make it explicit when dealing with them that they save in backward-compatable formats - then that problem shouldn't be there. Older formats should read ok in the new versions.

A couple of questions

[bgspence]

So, how much support has Adobe given you with 10.5 and CS3?

How many bug fixes have they sent you so far?

If the answer is zero, then how much support are you really losing?

Why not just run for a while and work round any wrinkles.
A much more pain free path then switching to Gimp.

PAINT.NET

[kriston]

Install Mono and use PAINT.NET. There is a Linux version already available for Mono-enabled Linux distributions. Since it is written entirely in Microsoft.NET you can not only use the program but also the plugins for it.
http://www.getpaint.net/

Inkscape AI import sucks

[natobasso]

I tried using Inkscape with an AI file and it failed to save it. In fact, the file got corrupted and I could no longer used it. I wouldn't say Inkscape is an alternative to AI just yet.