Adobe - The writing on the wall comes into view

In article , Paul
wrote:


On the one hand, Photoshop was traditionally a high
quality software. I never had any real bugs to speak
of while using it.

it still is very high quality.

(I have two copies on the Mac, one
copy acquired with a scanner purchase.)

that would be elements (or le, if it's older).

But, they have some strange habits, as developers go.

not really, and strange is not necessarily bad.

For example, they made their own memory management
plugin. That's like writing your own malloc.

they did, and it isn't.

what they did is *much* more than a malloc replacement.

Now, is that absolutely necessary? Or is that asshattery?
You decide.

there's nothing to decide.

not only was it necessary, but it *significantly* increased photoshop's
performance as well as reduce the impact to the overall system.

they didn't do it because they were bored one afternoon. they would
have preferred not to (there are more interesting things to do than
write memory managers), but they *had* to.

photoshop knows exactly which parts of the image will be processed,
therefore it can optimize memory management *much* better than the os
could ever could since the os lacks that information, plus the os's
memory management is also tuned for generic apps, not image processing
apps in particular.

also, having its own memory management provided the ability to handle
much larger images than otherwise possible.

Another area they go overboard, is in hardware
acceleration. For example, back when I got a copy of
Photoshop, you could buy a small plugin board with
dual 56K DSP processors. And Photoshop plugins would
accelerate certain image filters, and they'd run
on the 56K processor. They've ported the filters
to a number of hardware solutions.

that sounds like the daystar board, some 25 years ago.

things have changed a *lot* since then.

Not all Photoshop filters are multithreaded. Some
are single-threaded (for "quality" reasons). It's not
like everything is accelerated in the first place.

nope. it's for performance reasons.

photoshop filters are multi-threaded when it makes a difference.

a lot of actions do not benefit from multi-threading, and in some
cases, the overhead makes it worse.

more info he
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12..._photoshop_mul
ti_core.html

On 2018-09-06 09:24, Wolf K wrote:

On 2018-09-05 22:04, B00ze wrote:
[...]
You can always code your own.
[...]

Who's "you"?

:-)

Lol, not me! ;-)

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo And all the Borg Left was this copy of Windoze.

On 2018-09-05 22:38, Neil wrote:

On 9/5/2018 10:04 PM, B00ze wrote:

I wonder how good Elements is bug-wise; hopefully it is closer to
Acrobat DC than to their previous Acrobat versions which were quite
buggy. I find the Reader DC updater does a good job keeping the
product updated - it's too bad Adobe still sells various "versions" of
Acrobat Pro (e.g. Acrobat 2015, Acrobat 2017, etc,) they should sell
only "Acrobat Pro" and that's it, because they need to constantly
update it as it keeps breaking when Microsoft changes things...

I have to say that as one who has used all versions of Acrobat since it
was first introduced, your experience with it doesn't reflect mine. I
have never seen Acrobat fail when dealing with valid PDF files. What I
suspect is that you have run into the myriad of bogus PDF files that
other "pdf creating apps" have made, because no version of Acrobat
accepts them as valid and will often crash when trying to open them.
There's a good reason for that. Acrobat is used to create and proof
documents that are sent to professional PDF devices (offset printers,
etc.) that strictly follow the PostScript language (the PDF format is
based on PostScript). Bogus PDF documents usually fail on those devices,
resulting in significant costs to the users that submit them.

I've had that, where PDF's don't load - the last one was: This document
is using a Korean encoding and I don't support that (Acrobat PRO was not
complaining, but Reader refused to render the document.) However, my
client being a very large organization, we also get issues with all the
various PDF Plugins (in Office or in IE) and these break the minute a
new Office is released. The latest bug with Acrobat Reader is the cursor
- for some reason we do not yet understand, it is sometimes a black
square instead of an arrow when the mouse is inside the Acrobat windows.
And forget about decent error messages - That one with the "Korean
Encoding" is most likely NOT the real issue...

As for Elements, it is capable of more than most casual users need.
However, there are other apps in the same price range as Elements that
have the capabilities of the full version of Photoshop, but with very
different user interfaces.

My interface of choice was Brilliance, but it was never ported to PC.
Besides, the goal of getting Elements is to learn the PS UI ;-)

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo And all the Borg Left was this copy of Windoze.

On 2018-09-06 09:48, mick wrote:

On 06/09/2018 03:04:45, B00ze wrote:
On 2018-09-05 10:49, nospam wrote:

In article , B00ze
wrote:
it's too bad Adobe still sells various "versions" of Acrobat Pro (e.g.
Acrobat 2015, Acrobat 2017, etc,) they should sell only "Acrobat Pro"
and that's it, because they need to constantly update it as it keeps
breaking when Microsoft changes things...

Still using Acrobat X Pro (2010) here, it's been through Windows Vista,
win 7, win 8/8.1 and now win 10 and it ain't broken once :-)

I wish my customer got rid of that old version, which is still around;
the plugins don't work in newer Offices, so you need to go get the
updated ones from Adobe, unfortunately, this is locked by Group Policy
and not allowed to download manually...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo Scotty's smoking the dilithium crystals again, Jim.

On 2018-09-06 19:00, nospam wrote:

[I've snipped a lot]

Not all Photoshop filters are multithreaded. Some
are single-threaded (for "quality" reasons). It's not
like everything is accelerated in the first place.

nope. it's for performance reasons.

There is a quality aspect depending on what you do - you loose quality
for example when you encode mpeg on 2000 CUDA cores; the way to thread
it makes it so that each thread does not have access to the whole
picture, if you will, so that quality drops a little. All depends on
what needs to be done and how it's split into chunks...

photoshop filters are multi-threaded when it makes a difference.
a lot of actions do not benefit from multi-threading, and in some
cases, the overhead makes it worse.

more info he
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/...

That's somewhat old no? 2006...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo Is there another word for synonym?

In article , B00ze
wrote:

Not all Photoshop filters are multithreaded. Some
are single-threaded (for "quality" reasons). It's not
like everything is accelerated in the first place.

nope. it's for performance reasons.

There is a quality aspect depending on what you do - you loose quality
for example when you encode mpeg on 2000 CUDA cores; the way to thread
it makes it so that each thread does not have access to the whole
picture, if you will, so that quality drops a little. All depends on
what needs to be done and how it's split into chunks...

if quality is being lost, then it's not being done correctly.

photoshop filters are multi-threaded when it makes a difference.
a lot of actions do not benefit from multi-threading, and in some
cases, the overhead makes it worse.

more info he
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2006/12/...

That's somewhat old no? 2006...

yep, however, it still applies.

there's no point in multithreading something only to have it be slower.

On 2018-09-06 10:03, Paul wrote:

B00ze wrote:
On 2018-09-05 10:49, nospam wrote:

In article , B00ze
wrote:

I'm not sure why they are not more flexible, it's certain they make
enough money to support multiple OS versions,

a major reason is because the functionality that they want to offer
that takes full advantage of modern hardware requires something more
recent than win7/8.

You can always code your own. Sure, it becomes simpler to use new
Microsoft APIs as they come out, but it's always possible to support
older OSes, it just becomes hard to keep everything in sync (and
expensive, but Adobe makes lots of money.)

I don't think you know the half of it.

On the one hand, Photoshop was traditionally a high
quality software. I never had any real bugs to speak
of while using it. (I have two copies on the Mac, one
copy acquired with a scanner purchase.)

I've never used it, but those "custom" installers they use for Creative
Suite? Oh, what a horror! I've had them open a totally white window; you
couldn't see anything. The buttons were there, but you couldn't see, and
I had to unInstall 20 different components, one at a time that way, such
fun...

But, they have some strange habits, as developers go.
For example, they made their own memory management
plugin. That's like writing your own malloc.
Now, is that absolutely necessary? Or is that asshattery?
You decide.

They might've wanted to standardize - same memory functions no matter
which OS the main software runs on? - or maybe they were supporting real
time OSes with no virtual memory? Not sure of the performance gains of
using your own swap vs the OS swap, it might prevent the OS from
swapping out your code...

If you were to say "Jesus, I get tired when
swimming upstream against the current all the time".
Yes, it's true. It takes a lot of energy to move
against a flow of water. Instead of taking the
easy way, and moving with the water. But that's
the history of Photoshop for you. When they visit
your ecosystem, they slip on their hip waders,
and rewrite the parts where their program "touches"
your OS.

I'm not a huge fan of Adobe code, but I've never examined it in a
debugger. I do know it's all custom, which tends to create issues...

Another area they go overboard, is in hardware
acceleration. For example, back when I got a copy of
Photoshop, you could buy a small plugin board with
dual 56K DSP processors. And Photoshop plugins would
accelerate certain image filters, and they'd run
on the 56K processor. They've ported the filters
to a number of hardware solutions.

If we're on a modern computer, well, what could they
mess with ? Oooh, video card! There are programmable
shaders there. There's CUDA. There's OpenCL. How
can we complicate things ? OK, let's try.

Lol, you know some people MUST've been asking them to support CUDA, even
if it made no real difference ;-)

The thing is, Photoshop never seemed to be hobbled
by the speed of the image processing. It was the
scratch disk and the undo scheme that was "from hell".
If you had your undo set to five levels, you might
do an operation, then wait *one minute 30 seconds*
while your image was paged out to disk, on the
off chance you might choose to use the undo button.
Then, whether the filter operation took five
seconds or six seconds seemed... irrelevant.

Yup. If PS just keeps whole images as Undo, they sure can improve on
that instead of using their own swap file. If they're really really
clever they do not need to keep the entire previous image - sometimes
all one needs are a few numbers to reverse an operation. If they can't
figure out a way to do that, they can keep some kind of custom diff for
that operation; the plugin architecture should require clever undo
support...

In modern times, you don't have to do **** like
this. It's no longer 1990. Processors are "fast
enough". An M.2 drive would make a dandy scratch
(2GB/sec, faster than most software can go
anyway). We can afford a bit more RAM, enough to
do a decent-size picture, plus hold five undos
in memory. I don't really need video card acceleration
at all - if it wasn't available, or if it wasn't
available on Windows 7, I doubt anyone would notice.

I can't see a difference in Firefox, nor can I see one in Paint.NET (as
a matter of fact I have to DISABLE Hardware Accel in FF or bugs appear.)
In those apps, the difference is like doing something and using 1% of
CPU with Accel or 2% of CPU without it...

Not all Photoshop filters are multithreaded. Some
are single-threaded (for "quality" reasons). It's not
like everything is accelerated in the first place.

It's one of those cases where you:

1) Don't want to know what's under the hood.
2) Depending on your hardware setup, you better
be a patient individual.

I don't do a lot of Photoshop, but Photoshop ran
my scanner via the provided plugin that came
with the scanner. And that's how I got some
exposure to it. And full Photoshop has a macro-recorder,
so I could scan a sheet, and after about two minutes,
out would come an image which was noise-reduced
and ready for the rest of the workflow. All with
one click of a button.

I used to use ImageFX (on Amiga) for applying math to images, but I
rarely had to do a lot with it. I don't retouch pictures of girls to
make them look like supermodels, or play with pictures of flowers or
food to make the colors look like they're from Mars, so I don't REALLY
need PhotoShop...

I guess it's a matter of "really needing it",
to appreciate it. It has its own ecosystem.
People will sell you training. And so on.

Yeah. But I tried GIMP and I just don't like it, I figure maybe I'll
like PhotoShop better...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain /
! (o o) Memberavid-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo C Error #009: FATAL! Portable code found!

In article , B00ze
wrote:

But, they have some strange habits, as developers go.
For example, they made their own memory management
plugin. That's like writing your own malloc.
Now, is that absolutely necessary? Or is that asshattery?
You decide.

They might've wanted to standardize - same memory functions no matter
which OS the main software runs on?

that's not why, although they do use their own cross-platform framework
for mac/windows versions.

- or maybe they were supporting real
time OSes with no virtual memory? Not sure of the performance gains of
using your own swap vs the OS swap, it might prevent the OS from
swapping out your code...

the performance gains are *huge*.

as i said in the other post, they didn't do it because they were bored.




I guess it's a matter of "really needing it",
to appreciate it. It has its own ecosystem.
People will sell you training. And so on.

Yeah. But I tried GIMP and I just don't like it, I figure maybe I'll
like PhotoShop better...

probably. its user interface is designed by artists for usability, it
does a lot more than the gimp and it's also *substantially* faster on
the same hardware.

B00ze wrote:
On 2018-09-06 10:03, Paul wrote:

B00ze wrote:
On 2018-09-05 10:49, nospam wrote:

In article , B00ze
wrote:

I'm not sure why they are not more flexible, it's certain they make
enough money to support multiple OS versions,

a major reason is because the functionality that they want to offer
that takes full advantage of modern hardware requires something more
recent than win7/8.

You can always code your own. Sure, it becomes simpler to use new
Microsoft APIs as they come out, but it's always possible to support
older OSes, it just becomes hard to keep everything in sync (and
expensive, but Adobe makes lots of money.)

I don't think you know the half of it.

On the one hand, Photoshop was traditionally a high
quality software. I never had any real bugs to speak
of while using it. (I have two copies on the Mac, one
copy acquired with a scanner purchase.)

I've never used it, but those "custom" installers they use for Creative
Suite? Oh, what a horror! I've had them open a totally white window; you
couldn't see anything. The buttons were there, but you couldn't see, and
I had to unInstall 20 different components, one at a time that way, such
fun...

But, they have some strange habits, as developers go.
For example, they made their own memory management
plugin. That's like writing your own malloc.
Now, is that absolutely necessary? Or is that asshattery?
You decide.

They might've wanted to standardize - same memory functions no matter
which OS the main software runs on? - or maybe they were supporting real
time OSes with no virtual memory? Not sure of the performance gains of
using your own swap vs the OS swap, it might prevent the OS from
swapping out your code...

If you were to say "Jesus, I get tired when
swimming upstream against the current all the time".
Yes, it's true. It takes a lot of energy to move
against a flow of water. Instead of taking the
easy way, and moving with the water. But that's
the history of Photoshop for you. When they visit
your ecosystem, they slip on their hip waders,
and rewrite the parts where their program "touches"
your OS.

I'm not a huge fan of Adobe code, but I've never examined it in a
debugger. I do know it's all custom, which tends to create issues...

Another area they go overboard, is in hardware
acceleration. For example, back when I got a copy of
Photoshop, you could buy a small plugin board with
dual 56K DSP processors. And Photoshop plugins would
accelerate certain image filters, and they'd run
on the 56K processor. They've ported the filters
to a number of hardware solutions.

If we're on a modern computer, well, what could they
mess with ? Oooh, video card! There are programmable
shaders there. There's CUDA. There's OpenCL. How
can we complicate things ? OK, let's try.

Lol, you know some people MUST've been asking them to support CUDA, even
if it made no real difference ;-)

The thing is, Photoshop never seemed to be hobbled
by the speed of the image processing. It was the
scratch disk and the undo scheme that was "from hell".
If you had your undo set to five levels, you might
do an operation, then wait *one minute 30 seconds*
while your image was paged out to disk, on the
off chance you might choose to use the undo button.
Then, whether the filter operation took five
seconds or six seconds seemed... irrelevant.

Yup. If PS just keeps whole images as Undo, they sure can improve on
that instead of using their own swap file. If they're really really
clever they do not need to keep the entire previous image - sometimes
all one needs are a few numbers to reverse an operation. If they can't
figure out a way to do that, they can keep some kind of custom diff for
that operation; the plugin architecture should require clever undo
support...

In modern times, you don't have to do **** like
this. It's no longer 1990. Processors are "fast
enough". An M.2 drive would make a dandy scratch
(2GB/sec, faster than most software can go
anyway). We can afford a bit more RAM, enough to
do a decent-size picture, plus hold five undos
in memory. I don't really need video card acceleration
at all - if it wasn't available, or if it wasn't
available on Windows 7, I doubt anyone would notice.

I can't see a difference in Firefox, nor can I see one in Paint.NET (as
a matter of fact I have to DISABLE Hardware Accel in FF or bugs appear.)
In those apps, the difference is like doing something and using 1% of
CPU with Accel or 2% of CPU without it...

Not all Photoshop filters are multithreaded. Some
are single-threaded (for "quality" reasons). It's not
like everything is accelerated in the first place.

It's one of those cases where you:

1) Don't want to know what's under the hood.
2) Depending on your hardware setup, you better
be a patient individual.

I don't do a lot of Photoshop, but Photoshop ran
my scanner via the provided plugin that came
with the scanner. And that's how I got some
exposure to it. And full Photoshop has a macro-recorder,
so I could scan a sheet, and after about two minutes,
out would come an image which was noise-reduced
and ready for the rest of the workflow. All with
one click of a button.

I used to use ImageFX (on Amiga) for applying math to images, but I
rarely had to do a lot with it. I don't retouch pictures of girls to
make them look like supermodels, or play with pictures of flowers or
food to make the colors look like they're from Mars, so I don't REALLY
need PhotoShop...

I guess it's a matter of "really needing it",
to appreciate it. It has its own ecosystem.
People will sell you training. And so on.

Yeah. But I tried GIMP and I just don't like it, I figure maybe I'll
like PhotoShop better...

Regards,


You know that Photoshop CS2 is available "free", right ?
("Free" in the "What were they thinking" sense.)

When Adobe shut down the license server for CS2, they put
copies of the software on a server, plus special license keys to activate it.
The activation server might have shut down Mar2013, on
software issued in 2008, making the software perhaps
ten years old today.

Within the last year, I was still able to find a site offering
a download of one of those. So you can still partake.

That would at least allow you to see what the fuss is
all about - even if a number of the more interesting modern
"chopping" filters are missing. It will at least
give the flavor of the UI (which will be similar
in ways to GIMP).

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/4...uite-free.html

Back when the Adobe server was running, I got this.

PhSp_CS2_English__photoshop_CS2_1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431.exe
356,583,291 bytes
SHA1: 1EDFD80947F4A89A0D80C94AB7CAF3C2BE7224C5

Using the SHA1 in a search, I got this link.
Verify the size and hash.

http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/...S2_English.exe

Paul

In article , Paul
wrote:

You know that Photoshop CS2 is available "free", right ?
("Free" in the "What were they thinking" sense.)

it isn't, nor will it run on any recent hardware.

When Adobe shut down the license server for CS2, they put
copies of the software on a server, plus special license keys to activate it.

it's only for those who have a legitimate license.

it is *not* intended to be pirated.

The activation server might have shut down Mar2013, on
software issued in 2008, making the software perhaps
ten years old today.

Within the last year, I was still able to find a site offering
a download of one of those. So you can still partake.

you can also find a site offering something more recent.

if you're going to pirate, why get 10 year old apps that won't work
particularly well?

In message , Paul
writes:
[]
You know that Photoshop CS2 is available "free", right ?
("Free" in the "What were they thinking" sense.)

When Adobe shut down the license server for CS2, they put
copies of the software on a server, plus special license keys to activate it.
The activation server might have shut down Mar2013, on
software issued in 2008, making the software perhaps
ten years old today.
[]
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/4...uite-free.html

Back when the Adobe server was running, I got this.

PhSp_CS2_English__photoshop_CS2_1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431.exe
356,583,291 bytes
SHA1: 1EDFD80947F4A89A0D80C94AB7CAF3C2BE7224C5

Using the SHA1 in a search, I got this link.
Verify the size and hash.

http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/...2_EOL/PHSP/PhS
p_CS2_English.exe
[]
I got (on 2013-1-15, SHA-1s):
CreativeSuiteCS2Disc1.exe 375,638,402
1538166046E59DB6098F75C3196E84AD9310DEA1
....Disc2... 427,451,410
D06911267603474B43F3F39E4B00029787173962
....Disc3... 346,374,144
54BA48723D657E4A86903ED2C876381488C8F945
CS_2.0_WWE_Extras_1.exe 431,239,168
1C6CC05D49244ED1417B3E2C3136D4FD0B7F57E0
VCS2.zip 470,962,176
ECEDF63053CC0B059B805C296E9047E08E7E81EB

I've never actually installed it (them?), just seemed a good idea at the
time. Is the one you show above included in those, or something
different?
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Diplomacy is the art of letting someone have your way.

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul
writes:
[]
You know that Photoshop CS2 is available "free", right ?
("Free" in the "What were they thinking" sense.)

When Adobe shut down the license server for CS2, they put
copies of the software on a server, plus special license keys to
activate it.
The activation server might have shut down Mar2013, on
software issued in 2008, making the software perhaps
ten years old today.
[]
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/4...uite-free.html

Back when the Adobe server was running, I got this.

PhSp_CS2_English__photoshop_CS2_1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431.exe
356,583,291 bytes
SHA1: 1EDFD80947F4A89A0D80C94AB7CAF3C2BE7224C5

Using the SHA1 in a search, I got this link.
Verify the size and hash.

http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/...2_EOL/PHSP/PhS
p_CS2_English.exe
[]
I got (on 2013-1-15, SHA-1s):
CreativeSuiteCS2Disc1.exe 375,638,402
1538166046E59DB6098F75C3196E84AD9310DEA1
...Disc2... 427,451,410
D06911267603474B43F3F39E4B00029787173962
...Disc3... 346,374,144
54BA48723D657E4A86903ED2C876381488C8F945
CS_2.0_WWE_Extras_1.exe 431,239,168
1C6CC05D49244ED1417B3E2C3136D4FD0B7F57E0
VCS2.zip 470,962,176
ECEDF63053CC0B059B805C296E9047E08E7E81EB

I've never actually installed it (them?), just seemed a good idea at the
time. Is the one you show above included in those, or something different?

The one I show there, would be an "item" on the Creative Suite
disc set at a guess. The tools would be broken out individually
on the original site.

I don't keep mine installed either, as the utility
level is too low to bother.

I use GIMP for quick conversions from PNG to GIF,
maybe a crop, add some text, that sort of thing.

I have other tools more suited to the job, but
they're on machines without a monitor currently
connected.

GIMP comes in various levels of "annoying". I use 2.4.7
if I need to get stuff done. You can certainly install
a 2.8.x version if you want, but floating palettes and
"Export" instead of "Save As" would drive me nuts.
So I choose an older version that won't raise my
blood pressure unnecessarily.

Paul

On 9/6/2018 10:53 PM, B00ze wrote:
On 2018-09-05 22:38, Neil wrote:

On 9/5/2018 10:04 PM, B00ze wrote:

I wonder how good Elements is bug-wise; hopefully it is closer to
Acrobat DC than to their previous Acrobat versions which were quite
buggy. I find the Reader DC updater does a good job keeping the
product updated - it's too bad Adobe still sells various "versions" of
Acrobat Pro (e.g. Acrobat 2015, Acrobat 2017, etc,) they should sell
only "Acrobat Pro" and that's it, because they need to constantly
update it as it keeps breaking when Microsoft changes things...

I have to say that as one who has used all versions of Acrobat since it
was first introduced, your experience with it doesn't reflect mine. I
have never seen Acrobat fail when dealing with valid PDF files. What I
suspect is that you have run into the myriad of bogus PDF files that
other "pdf creating apps" have made, because no version of Acrobat
accepts them as valid and will often crash when trying to open them.
There's a good reason for that. Acrobat is used to create and proof
documents that are sent to professional PDF devices (offset printers,
etc.) that strictly follow the PostScript language (the PDF format is
based on PostScript). Bogus PDF documents usually fail on those devices,
resulting in significant costs to the users that submit them.

I've had that, where PDF's don't load - the last one was: This document
is using a Korean encoding and I don't support that (Acrobat PRO was not
complaining, but Reader refused to render the document.) However, my
client being a very large organization, we also get issues with all the
various PDF Plugins (in Office or in IE) and these break the minute a
new Office is released. The latest bug with Acrobat Reader is the cursor
- for some reason we do not yet understand, it is sometimes a black
square instead of an arrow when the mouse is inside the Acrobat windows.
And forget about decent error messages - That one with the "Korean
Encoding" is most likely NOT the real issue...

One would have to know PostScript and the PDF format to know the actual
problem. On one hand, these have always been standards published by
Adobe. On the other, most users are not programmers. Documents with bad
PDF code are not rare, though, and they can lead to a number of odd
reactions by Acrobat. I've never seen a "black square" replacing the
cursor, so I don't know what the cause may be there other than saying
that cursor styles are typically OS functions and I don't see any access
to cursor styles in Acrobat.

As for Elements, it is capable of more than most casual users need.
However, there are other apps in the same price range as Elements that
have the capabilities of the full version of Photoshop, but with very
different user interfaces.

My interface of choice was Brilliance, but it was never ported to PC.
Besides, the goal of getting Elements is to learn the PS UI ;-)

Regards,

I don't find Element's UI to be all that informative about PS. Both use
a fairly standard menu structure, but the feature sets are different
enough that only a small number of items will have the same menu
locations in both apps.

--
best regards,

Neil

"Paul" wrote

| GIMP comes in various levels of "annoying". I use 2.4.7
| if I need to get stuff done. You can certainly install
| a 2.8.x version if you want, but floating palettes and
| "Export" instead of "Save As" would drive me nuts.
| So I choose an older version that won't raise my
| blood pressure unnecessarily.
|

You can still get Paint Shop Pro from various
old version sites. I still use PSP5 for most things.
I paid $100 for it in '99. I later bought PSP7 but
found that to be bloated and not an improvement.
More recently I bought PSP16. It has slightly more
functionality, like adjustable sharpening. But it's
bloated and the menu items have all been moved
around from PSP5. So I only use 16 when I need to
retrieve maximum quality from a poor image.

If you do much work with images it's worth trying
a trial of PSP and/or maybe Affinity. I've never tried
the latter. It's only recently ported to Windows, and
it won't run on XP. But it seems to be well reviewed.
Each cost about the same as 6 months of PS rental
or 1 month of full CC rental. Paying Adobe might make
sense if your job is to airbrush actress's faces for
Cosmo covers or make fashion models look like they
haven't just come from Auschwitz. Adobe seems to
be tops with special "creative" filters. But for actual
image editing I doubt they offer anything better than
other products. There just isn't much else to offer.

The one obvious drawback with trying these things
is that it takes awhile to really become competent
with an image editor, so it's not a simple job to figure
out how good a given product is.

That's one nice thing about GIMP. I try the major
versions but it never takes me long to decide that
I don't want it.

On 9/7/2018 9:57 AM, Mayayana wrote:

If you do much work with images it's worth trying
a trial of PSP and/or maybe Affinity. I've never tried
the latter. It's only recently ported to Windows, and
it won't run on XP. But it seems to be well reviewed.

I've had Affinity Photo on this Win10 laptop for over a year. It costs
about the same as Elements, and has about as much functionality as
Photoshop. There are nuances, where one app does things the other
doesn't. But when it comes to image editing, the most common tasks are
covered by both, as well as their supporting a broader range of file
formats than Elements.

--
best regards,

Neil