I never did get around to writing about Adobe Photoshop’s 20th anniversary back in February. We, as in my company, were not on board from the very start. But the first version we used was 2.0, and we have been using it continuously ever since. Along the way, it evolved from an infrequently used semi-novelty to a critical piece of software that is absolutely essential to the continued existence, let alone the success, of our business. It’s also been an increasingly essential part of my personal computer toolbox (and by that, I mean a legally obtained, paid-in-full personal copy) for about five years now. My particular prepress production area of expertise is typography and page layout, so my Photoshop skills are clumsy at best, but I still love me some Photoshop even for the very basic work I do with it.

Even as a longtime mostly happy user of Adobe products, I still have mixed feelings about the upcoming release of a new version, CS5. This version will no longer work on PowerPC (non-Intel) Macs. Since our small shop still uses quite a few final generation PowerPCs, the upgrade will have a significant financial impact upon us. In this still-shaky economic climate, I am not looking forward to that part at all. Our upgrade timing will be closely tied to that of our clients. Some are small design shops whose financial concerns will be similar to ours. Others are corporations: now that could go either way. Some will not want to do an upgrade over hundreds of machines, and others will have a budget to burn. Guess what I’m hoping for, at least to buy us some time.

I do have to say, though… my feelings for this one new Photoshop feature are not mixed at all. Even though I upgraded from CS2 to CS4 only a year ago, and spent more money than I cared to at the time to do so, I’d consider upgrading to CS5 for content-aware fill alone:

That just blew me away.

(NaBloPoMo | March ’10: 25 of 31)