Tag Archives: Photoshop

Adobe Kills Creative Suite, Demands Monthly Subscription

Adobe Creative CloudAt the Adobe MAX conference this week, Adobe announced that they will be discontinuing their Creative Suite products (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) in favor of their subscription-based “Creative Cloud” service. Instead of purchasing the software outright, and upgrading at your leisure, the new system involves paying a monthly subscription fee in order to continue using the software. It costs $50/month for access to the Creative Suite products, or $20/month for a single product (e.g. just Photoshop).

If you’re someone like me, who doesn’t purchase every version, waiting years between upgrades, this is a very unpleasant development. (I just moved from CS1 to CS5 during the past year, and the impetus behind that decision was the lack of support for legacy PowerPC software on newer versions of OS X. I upgraded to a newer MacBook Pro, and had to pick up a newer version of Photoshop to go with it.)

The move shouldn’t make huge difference if you already upgrade annually, as you’re basically paying the $600 upgrade fee perpetually, but it’s not great if you prefer to skip versions or buy secondhand.

Existing users for Creative Suite 3 or higher can get a reduced rate of $30/month for their first year, but will have to pay full price thereafter.

Smashing Freebie: iPhone PSD Vector Kit

Smashing Magazine certainly has no shortage of freebie themes, icon sets, and vector images. This particular one could be useful for designers/developers working in the iPhone arena. The iPhone PSD Vector Kit is a set of images that would work well for mocking-up iPhone apps or putting together imagery for an iPhone-oriented website.

iPhone PSD Vector Kit

Get Photoshop For $300

Don’t have Photoshop, but don’t want to pay $650 for the latest version? Luckily you have some alternatives.

  • Amazon currently has several copies of Photoshop CS2 (the previous version) for around $300.
  • Here’s a little secret: You can buy a very old copy of Photoshop on eBay (like Photoshop 7) for under $100. Once it arrives, you have a serial number…which you can use with the $250 Photoshop CS3 upgrade disc. So you buy an ancient copy of Photoshop, and upgrade. I did the same thing with Flash. I upgraded to Flash 8 after buying Flash 3. Unfortunately Adobe released Flash CS3 two months after…

Just thought I’d point this out.

Creating a Favicon

A Favicon, as you may already know, is that tiny icon that sits to the left of a web site’s URL in modern browsers (and in your bookmarks menu). Usually they’re 16×16 pixels in dimensions. Want to learn how to make one for your website?

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Starting a Great Blog Part 7 – Spreading the Word

Welcome to day seven of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial series! Today, the topic is Spreading the Word. It’s less fun to write zillions of posts for your blog if no one’s reading them, so you’ll probably want to pull some extra users in. How? Keep reading.

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Create a Business Card in Photoshop

Why pay someone to make business cards for you when you can do it yourself? All you need is Adobe Photoshop, a printer, and some cardstock (available at Staples or similar stores). This tutorial will teach you how to make a basic business card. This is by no means the only way, and you can alter the design any way you want. Just do whatever you think will look best. Let’s get started.

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