Recently I downloaded a semi-legitimate copy of Photoshop CS3 (from 2007-ish). It made me realize how little the software has changed in the past nearly 20 years, aside from the terrible performance regression.
I'm by no means a Photoshop power user, but the stuff I use (the primary tools, the blending options menu, Image/Adjustments menu, Filters menu) are almost 1:1 feature-wise with the latest CC version.
I haven't tried to open .PSD files from a newer Photoshop, I don't know what the compatibility story is. I haven't ran it on my Linux box either, but I assume it will be easier to get it running than CC 2024.
You'll be missing context aware fill and healing brush. Those are by far the tools I use most in more modern versions of Photoshop. Other than that not much has changed, for moderate users at least.
The healing brush actually came out in 2002 with Photoshop 7. It was a compelling new feature in the pre-subscription days when version upgrades were expensive! https://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/PS7/PS7.HTM
Affinity is excellent although not always intuitive for people used to simpler editing software. It's nonetheless my main photo tool and I'm very happy with it.
Gimp... Never liked it, sort of the opposite of Blender's Open Source success story.
I've heard nothing but good things about Affinity, but their Linux support is just as lacking. I kinda hope that either they or Corel get acquired by Blackmagic and get told to support the penguins.
Like another commenter mentioned, the healing brush tool along with background removal + remove tool + content aware fill/move + object selection tools have improved and make life even for an amateur PS user much easier with the latest versions.
Many graphic design professionals stick with older software, and hardware. I still use CS5 on Win 7, although I'm no longer actively pursuing career in the industry. I know a renowned typographer who still uses FontLab (v5 I think?) on a Power Mac G5. The reason usually being familiarity with your tools. It's very similar to photography: it takes years getting to know your camera to the point when it becomes the extension of your body and brain, despite what marketing people say.
Back in the day, when I was first trying to use Linux as a desktop, we had all these concerns about "Will I be able to do this or that" and "On Windows I got all these features that's not in the word processors on Linux". We never used any of them though. Turns out Abiword was all we ever needed, ever StarOffice was to much.
I get that the required feature set isn't the same for everyone, but I bet that the majority of people and businesses would have had no issues with development of Word or Excel stopping around the 2000s, if stability increased. There is going to be edge cases where a modern Photoshop or Excel will save you hours or days and allow previously impossible workflows, but I doubt that's the majority.
My only issue has only ever been formatting from a DOC or DOCX, and having LibreOffice tell me that the page was actually some horrific table that Word had been hiding behind the scenes and that you can't possibly have margins on a table that small.
Words a trainwreck, but it is mostly a consistent trainwreck when displaying an already created document.
[Edit] You can see it in Word as soon as you try to change something and the whole document reflows in ways you wouldn't expect. Obnoxious.
With the misery of Word being so dominant, I feel like most people are completely unaware that a WYSISYG document editor could be different. Hell, LibreOffice recreates the same terrible decisions as Word. I stay as far away from Word as possible. PDFs and Pages for Mac make my workflow predictable.
This is a good point. People get hung up on feature parity and niche features that they often don't even use. I guess they'd be more comfortable if there were zero downsides to switching to something else, but it's rarely so simple.
Some people also just think they need photoshop to edit images at all, they've convinced themselves all the expensive pro tools are the only thing worth using. We've got people roleplaying as graphic designers, music producers, and movie-makers all at the same time when they don't need much of any of that. I guess it's a convenient excuse to not switch to free software or GNU/Linux and not learn new things. Doesn't apply to everyone, of course.
Personally I use LibreOffice maybe once or twice a year at most. I don't even see a big need for office suites in general. I deal in a lot of plaintext, which I suspect would be fine for many, but they're used to jotting down notes in MS Word and don't wanna change. I also almost never user GIMP or Krita. The biggest usage I used to have for an image editor was cropping screenshots, but now we have screenshot tools that can just select a smaller area to begin with, so I rarely need to do any editing. I'm also used tricks like making a very small floating terminal to place as a black bar censor over things at times.
The chief problem LibreOffice, et al. have is they aren't Microsoft Office.
You have to keep in mind that the main users of Microsoft Office are businesses, both big and small. Not being able to receive or create and send documents perfectly with other businesses can cost A Lot Of Money(tm) if not loss of face and thus trust and thus business.
The multitude of features frankly isn't important, the one feature every business wants is Microsoft Office in Microsoft Office.
Common folks just needing a simple word processor or spreadsheet editor for home or school can't relate because they can't even tell what is incompatible, let alone lose money and business over it.
If you want to avoid Adobe software, but are familiar with photoshop, Photopea [1] is a great choice.
It supports psd files (natively, without any export/import), has similar shortcuts, can import photoshop brushes and overall comes across as a well designed software. Their subreddit has a great helpful community too.
I am not a professional photo editor or graphic designer, but I have been using it a few times every week for last year or so and have yet to come across any bugs.
Photoshop falls into a category where people assume it's the best because it's used by professionals - and so that's what they want to be using. The problem is that people assume professional graphics is just drawing pictures. (Society in general has a pretty low expectation/understanding of what this industry does, this is also fuelling the hyperventilating over AI, but that's a different discussion.)
Using Photoshop without a specific professional objective is a trap: That's like driving a tractor in the city. Photoshop is only the best for specific professional workflows, and to date I'm still to find any alternative that can replace it. (I'm happy to elaborate on that.)
The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious. This is typical for photoshop alternatives, this doesn't make them bad, often it makes the app more useful for casual users by hand-waving away complex, industry-specific concepts.
If you find yourself using Photoshop and it doesn't feel like it's actively helping you achieve your ambitions, then I encourage that you reach out to others in your creative space to learn what software other people are using, like you all are in this thread today.
The graphics market has a litany of apps to serve different graphics objectives. These each have interesting features and workflows that are better suited to different audiences and, as mentioned, they also benefit from removing needless complexity and control.
> The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious.
This did make me curious. What problems did you notice? I know next to nothing about image editing software. However, I always like to understand how someone judges the usefulness of a given thing, assuming he or she has enough background knowledge / experience on a subject.
A non-expert workflow for photoshop is editing images in the CMYK colour mode and handling the use of specials such as pantone colours or custom ink mixes.
Photopea has a CMYK mode, which is great, but despite the document being in CMYK mode the swatches adjacent are RGB. A useful approach would be to automatically convert RGB swatches to the destination colour space, since that's how they look when one uses them.
I also noticed the layer blending modes were undertaken in the RGB colour space rather than CMYK despite the document colour mode setting. This difference produces different results especially if using the transparency modes screen and multiply which behave a fair bit differently in the CMYK colour mode versus the RGB colour mode. A person that opens the Photopea PSD in photoshop would thus see a different result which the Photopea user did not intend.
Next I noticed that the channel management for the CMYK plates and specials provided no ability to set or manage the specials plate. For example when utilising a pantone colour one would need to establish an additional plate and input the LAB value for the ink, there didn't seem to be any way of doing that, however it supported what was already in the sample PSD file I loaded into it.
I didn't delve into colour profiles and control over dot gain, but that is another aspect which is usually absent in Photoshop alternatives.
Also just rehashing that the above is not expert-level, anyone in the industry would be familiar with these concepts and find themselves needing to manage them for production output. This is what I mean when I say to people "you don't need photoshop, get something better", non-industry people don't need to be fussing over whether the document intention should be perceptual or absolute (or seldom used middle-grounds), what is the output LPI, or device pixel requirements, what byte order is supported by the RIP, what their ink weights maximums are, or adjusting screen angles to deter plate mottling.
Hi, you make all excellent points. However they do sound more like comments from 2002, not 2024. With the complete takeover of the web, digital media, and digital photography, just where do you imagine all this cmyk stuff is still happening? Save for the last vestiges of print, it isn't. Most work today goes from rgb, to rgb, and then to rgb. Maybe throw in sRGB as well. So cmyk, nice to have, but not needed for most pro work today. FWIW, 40 years pro work at top NYC ad agencies and pub houses.
>Hi, you make all excellent points. However they do sound more like comments from 2002, not 2024. With the complete takeover of the web, digital media, and digital photography, just where do you imagine all this cmyk stuff is still happening? Save for the last vestiges of print, it isn't. Most work today goes from rgb, to rgb, and then to rgb. Maybe throw in sRGB as well. So cmyk, nice to have, but not needed for most pro work today. FWIW, 40 years pro work at top NYC ad agencies and pub houses.
Hi LanceNY from the top NYC ad agency wink wink. I see why you've made a fresh account just to reply to this, because it's quite clear you don't have the experience that you claim, nor even an understanding of basic digital-only principles such as the difference between a colour mode and a colour space.
It also seems you're suggesting that print and manufacturing don't occur in 2024. Classic.
I dare say your experience in this industry is no longer than the time it took you to write that comment.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out! It's so interesting to see exactly where things become tricky once you go from hobbyist to professional -- or from regular hobbyist to fancy hobbyist, for that matter.
Photoshop is the Sisyphus of software compatibility on Wine.
Can play the latest UE5 based game via Proton, still struggles with Photoshop. The funny state of Linux-Windows compatibility.
I get it, not undermining game development - it is a fine art but games are tight code bases that work on a lot of repetitive tasks. Utilities can be exceptionally broad in their scope. Also helps that coders who are gamers can be VERY dedicated to fixing the issues that hold them back from said games.
It is just neat that Photoshop is still this elusive thing that seems to also just be a foot away from working perfectly out of the box. I mean I have seen Wine run all manner of applications and home brew games without an issue.
I suspect a co-evolution in games is at play. In a way that the game developers are nudged by Steam to prefer using compatible features and Steam works together with game engine developers.
It’s just that games are easier to run on wine because they touch a comparatively small portion of the Windows API. Windowing, controller input, file system, networking, audio and directx covers the overwhelming majority of Windows API endpoints that need to be translated by wine. Their interaction with these APIs is relatively simple, open a window, read a few files, open a udp socket. Directx is hard, but the tools have gotten scary good lately (dxvk, vkd3d-proton). Compared to a complex tool like Photoshop which will be touching many more system APIs that need to behave correctly (file locking, codecs, COM).
Arguably a Windows PE executable using Vulkan and run in Proton is a better way to ship a game to run on Linux than building a native Linux executable. It’s actually more portable because the Windows API and environment is more stable and consistent than some arbitrary Linux user space. No glibc versioning BS or dynamic linker path BS or any other number of strange things users can do. Just stable Win32. Valve actually recommends this over a native Linux build currently.
I don't buy Photoshop as a heavy exotic APIs user.
In many ways it's about pure computations involving images represented as data structures. Perhaps there used to be some USB to talk to cameras but that's it.
I believe their Mac version has no COM so why Windows version has to rely on it?
I wonder why Adobe does not make some effort to support Wine, such as testing for this platform.
Absolutely. Nowadays it feels like the best development tools for Linux is the Win32 tool chain. No need for native ports if proton can be the glue between the systems.
Assuming that there is a difference and it's on the "wine side", rather than the original developer having anything/much to do with it...
You don't need Photoshop in the same way that you need a particular game. There's only one piece of software that provides the (e.g.) Death Stranding (strandlike) experience. There's any number of tools you can use to do most of your favourite Photoshop usecases.
Conversely, Photoshop and Illustrator support is often the reason someone maintains for not moving to Linux. I would bet there's a lot of Mac users who would otherwise be Linux users if not for that lack of support, and instead went to Mac. It's the only way to have comfortable Adobe support outside of Windows.
Only a small percentage of the PC user base uses Photoshop. Its visibility in this sort of discussion is all out of proportion to actual utility. This is especially true once you snip out the number who use pirated Photoshop exclusively to do simple operations like cropping and resizing.
Want to have more users work on the stuff that matters to 99% of users instead of nurturing a hope that people might give up their Macs.
For some it's Photoshop, for others its Solidworks, for others it's some other niche software like maybe driving an industrial machine. The niche market is very long tail.
When I had to convince my wife to leave windows for linux, the fact that photoshop was working perfectly fine on wine was a huge point. At that time (windows vista 64 era), I was using photoshop V6. It was launched directly from windows partition. All I needed was a "shortcut" file to launch it.
True, having this as a solution is a good last resort, but it would feel more native if it could run without an extra Windows VM, even though Wine is already kind of a Windows. Currently, I'm running Windows 11 in virt-manager just to use mstsc for a customer who doesn't allow Linux RDP clients. This setup feels a bit excessive. Using Wine for that purpose would be less of a pain. I appreciate the work people do to run things in wine, thanks!
Seems handy but I know if I try this some annoying missing dll or file error will pop up. Having said that I habe had success using Excel with playonlinux. As long as I dont open 2 spreadsheets and try to switch between them I'm ok.
I still run Dreamweaver 8 under Wine. It's paid for, and I'm entitled to move it to a new machine. Some of my old web sites are maintained with it. They load really fast.
FYI, I have Macromedia Fireworks MX running perfectly under WINE on Fedora (I think the only tweak I did was to increase the font size to cope with modern HIDPI displays). Highly recommend it as a web-friendly image editor (it was what I used before Adobe killed off Macromedia).
People will say that GIMP cannot compete with Photoshop in some use cases, I'm just happy that I don't have to worry about those and it's completely sufficient for what I want to do, same with LibreOffice vs MS Office and other imperfect FOSS projects. They might not always be the best choice out there, but they’re almost always decent.
Most of the areas or things the PS alternatives can't do, are things PS should never have done, like 3d and animation. Krita even has an AI plugin that is great. I'm a pro, and PS has tons of tools I've never needed or wanted.
While I use GIMP for 90% of my use cases, it unfortunately cannot do print at all. For that, it seems Photoshop is still what you need (though the Affinity suite is getting close)
I'm curious to know if you followed a specific guide, or if you had to take any extra steps to get it functioning beyond running the installer?
I run Linux, and dearly miss being able to use Fireworks. My attempts to get it running on Wine in the past (probably a year or so ago, if not more) were not successful, and I haven't been able to find anything that feels like a suitable replacement for working with vector graphics. It is a genuine (perhaps irrational) point of sadness.
Ugh, I wish we could put the adobe suite into the ground.
The company is hostile and scummy, and the tech is only slightly above alternatives in most cases.
It survives today on pure inertia, because everyone knows it. Which feels absurd to me- worst idea wins because it's the one everyone knows. And we'll keep using it so that the next generation only know that one thing.
Great for Adobe's profitability, awful for humanity.
At this point, Windows's application binary interface is something of a common good, at the same level as roads and utilities. Shouldn't we have a piece of legislation that forces Microsoft to offer that binary interface in the same way as utilities sell power?
I love Linux, and I think that Linux desktop is fairly usable, but a bunch of software I rely on works much better on Windows.
Here’s a fun fact that may interest you. There was an attempt in the 1990s outside of Microsoft to make the Windows API an official standard to help other operating systems run Windows software, but Microsoft balked, asserting its IP over the Windows API:
I am always surprised to learn how big Microsoft was by the Windows 3.x era. Bill Gates was already the richest person in the world before the release of Windows 95.
Maybe it's because I am young and I assumed their total dominance emerged in the Windows 98 to XP era with only receiving some pushback with the emergence of Intel Macs in the late 2000s.
Should be required listening in business schools and for anyone thinking of starting a company. Its amazing to hear about all these behomoth companies, how they were once startups themselves, how they often lost there way after success, how they changed and morphed through history!
Each time I listen to an episode about a company I think I won't be interested in I'm blown away.
While I don't regret my career decisions, one thing that always comes back is the thought: What if I had doubled down on the Windows API and C++.
I don't see many job openings for those types of jobs, but I would have had an incredibly stable platform for the past 25 years. If you wrote a service for Windows in the early 2000s, it seems like it wouldn't be that much work keeping it running today. I have seen examples of companies managing to lock their software to Windows Server 2008 by accident, so there is some room for failure, but that might very well just be incompetence.
There's plenty of heavy-hitters on Linux natively now, including DaVinci Resolve (Hollywood's #1 post tool), Bitwig, Studio One, Reaper et al. Even Unreal Engine. Blender perf is much better on Linux too.
Your head canon of software has yet to update to the latest commit.
I applaud this, but wonder how many people will really use this for production. People who buy photoshop probably use Windows or Mac and don’t want to risk an unstable process interfering with work you get paid to do, and people who just freewheel will probably not have an Adobe subscription.
I hope something like this gets figured out for the Affinity Suite. Since I game on a Steam Deck now, the only thing holding me back from having Linux do everything I need is those three programs. Yes I know Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita exist. I just think Affinity does it better.
I'm by no means a Photoshop power user, but the stuff I use (the primary tools, the blending options menu, Image/Adjustments menu, Filters menu) are almost 1:1 feature-wise with the latest CC version.
I haven't tried to open .PSD files from a newer Photoshop, I don't know what the compatibility story is. I haven't ran it on my Linux box either, but I assume it will be easier to get it running than CC 2024.