I rarely use Photoshop, but I do have the CS5 version in place.
Most of my photo editing is pretty primitive, and I normally do it in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10, a vintage 2001 app. I am very familiar with its user interface, which has some aspects I consider desirable beyond the fact that I am vary familiar with them. (Other can see no reason I find them desirable, since Photoshop doesn't offer them and those guys are still breathing.)
It has no layer capabilities. Some work in that vein can be conducted by creating objects, whose stacking order can be changed, and which can be separately made susceptible to any kinds of adjustments (curves, etc). But in fact it is not easy to make certain things into objects, and I have had to develop various ploys to let me do that. And in any case it comes far from Photoshop's elaborate layer structure.
Every couple of years, I decide I should begin moving to Photoshop. Various of you (Asher and Bart in most particular) have been very helpful in leading me to understand the layers structure, much of which makes a lot of sense, but some of which is just there! (And of course it all now makes immense sense to those who have learned, by familiarity of use, to master it, the pains of childbirth being ephemeral. It's a little like having a bathroom sink in which the cold faucet is on the left. We tell others that it is perfectly sensible)
But for all kinds of reasons, those "movements" on my part always just dissipated, and I went back to ignoring Photoshop.
When we converted the main systems here to Windows 7, I thought it was all over for Picture Publisher 10, but I was able by supernatural work to give the old cat one more life.
The same was not true for its "vector illustration" counterpart, Micrografx Designer 7. At a colleague's urging, I have there gone to CorelDRAW 6, which is in fact very nice, and much better behaved in many ways. (And it imports extremely well my immense library of illustrations in Micrografx Designer format, a result of Corel having bought the Micrografx products when Micrografx collapsed, although it euthanized them shortly thereafter.)
But of course I miss a number of nice user interface features of the Micrografx applications. (I had by the way been a beta tester on them for a while.) But I have come to realize that such is the nature of "progress".
I don't know what's in the future for me with regard to photo editing. But this latest turn of events at our Adobe hacienda serves to illuminate one important fact: we cannot rely on nesting to get us through all of life.
I should probably switch to some more "modern" editing app (and, at my age, nothing remains "modern" for very long!) Perhaps I will embrace PS CS5, and hope that it will run in Windows 9 when the time comes.
Best regards,
Doug
