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Reviews of photography products that enhance the enjoyment of taking pictures. Published frequently but irregularly.
Adobe Explains CS2 Situation
8 January 2013
News travels fast on the Web, even if it isn't confirmed. Yesterday reports were that Adobe had released Creative Suite CS2 into the wild as a free download with serial numbers to activate it.
Today Adobe clarified the situation on its corporate blog:
Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.
The salient part of that quote is that CS2 doesn't "run on many modern operating systems." That's certainly true of Mountain Lion users who can't even run the PowerPC code under emulation.
We're not sure there's much fun to spoil, though.
A peek back at our August 2005 review of Photoshop CS2 shows the highlights were the introduction of Vanishing Point, Image Warp, Noise Reduction (which has since been dramatically superseded), 32-bit HDR, the Spot Healing Brush, Optical Lens Correction (also significantly superseded), Animation for Web graphics and improved Smart Sharpening.
If you think that's impressive, you should see what the company did with Photoshop releases for CS3, CS4, CS5 and CS6. And you can see that for just $20 a month with a three-month pre-paid Photoshop subscription. And for $50 a month, you can have the entire suite.
Running old software is a bit like trying to fit into old clothes. If we can do it (and we can, we can, with a little initiative), we're awfully proud of ourselves. But, you know, we wouldn't be caught dead in public wearing some of those things.