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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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I personally switched to Gimp, which took its time, but now that I'm used to it, it is ok.
1: https://affinity.serif.com/de/photo/full-feature-list/
Gimp... Never liked it, sort of the opposite of Blender's Open Source success story.
I kind of preferred the aesthetics of its interface too.
Context: https://youtu.be/U2vq9LUbDGs?si=CJr7wXNQnpmpstyr
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.
Er, have you tried processing RAW photos? Even CS6 is painfully slow compared to more recent versions, with the lack of parallelization etc.
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.
[1] photopea.com
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.
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.
Nowadays I just open up Photopea in the browser. No installs and it just works very well
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.
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.
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.
Photoshop V6 or Photoshop CS6? There’s a pretty big difference between Photoshop 6.0 and Photoshop CS6 :p
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.
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.
I'm still bitter that they killed it off.
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
Also their is protondb which tracks game compatibility:
https://www.protondb.com/