4 ms·
I liked the proliferation of other tools that existed back in the day, things like the Kai's Power Tools plugin for Photoshop. Some products such as Paint Shop
by Theodores 9y ago
I liked the proliferation of other tools that existed back in the day, things like the Kai's Power Tools plugin for Photoshop. Some products such as Paint Shop Pro had the edge on Photoshop with features such as being able to read more images and have a finer control of what gets saved.
In some industries Photoshop was seen as just a toy. If you had an SGI workstation and you paid $40K a year to Avid to run Matador then you didn't look on Photoshop as a serious thing (it was priced at 1% of the price of the pro tools plus you needed a machine that only cost 10-20% of what your workstation cost). Photoshop broke down this barrier to entry as did After Effects.
There were good reasons to run the pirated version of Photoshop even if you owned the paid for version. Before the cut down versions of Photoshop came along you could buy a ridiculously cheap flatbed scanner that came with a legitimate full version of Photoshop. Then you could upgrade that to the next version that came along. That was how I ended up with a legitimate copy of Photoshop for so many years. Then I discovered things like inline SVG graphics and imageMagick. If you are working on the web then there are so much better creative tools to be working with than the desktop publishing applications of the 1990's.
- Keyframe 9y agoI had an SGI and ran Photoshop on it. Weird time to remember, because Photoshop back then didn't have layers even! Last version on IRIX had them, but we were already looking at those sweet Windows boxes. As for seriousness of it - I don't remember anyone not considering it a serious software. Barco Creator was considered serious and Photoshop was disruptive.
- GlennS 9y agoIt's sort of in the opposite direction, but I like Paint.NET as a free Photoshop replacement. It's not nearly as featureful (as far as I know), but it's much faster, crashes less, and is vastly easier to use.
- nasredin 9y agoPaint.NET requires... .NET. Allow me to help you... FastStone Capture AKA FSCapture It is the BEST screenshot capture program (I literally have tried them all) It also includes an image editor that I've used thousands of times. It is small, cheap and portable (keep it on your USB drive). One of the few programs I have bought.
- exodust 9y agoI never heard of cheap scanners bundling full Photoshop. Surely you mean Photoshop LE or Elements.
- Theodores 9y agoYou may be right, however, there certainly was an upgrade path from the scanner edition. This may have been when '4' or '5' ('n') came along, if you owned any version of n-1 then you got the £150 upgrade price rather than the full £450 sticker price as it was back then. So you could get a £100 scanner that was in itself 'reduced' from say £200, with that you could get your nobbled version of Photoshop for free, plus some SCSI card that was 'free'. Then paying a mere £150 to get full and improved Photoshop was not a difficult purchase decision. After getting lured in by the cheap scanner I was on-board, paying for all the upgrades until I discovered that command line image processing was much more fun. At the time there were lots of these pricing anomalies, e.g. ways to get full MS Office starting out with some student edition. I even managed to upgrade Visio from a version provided free on a magazine, before Microsoft bought it. Funny to think how 'clever' I thought I was back then getting 'bargain' software. Odder still is that I now use Microsoft's VS Code with vim keybindings running on Ubuntu totally for free.
- bluedino 9y agoFull version came with our HP scanner back in 1996 or so. It wasn't 'cheap' ($600?) but cheap scanners didn't exist then.
- antod 9y agoI liked Aldus Photostyler back in the day (mid 90s) for it's nice features for cloning between different images etc. But then Adobe bought Aldus and buried it.