Upgrade fee for retail ? - Page 2

Steven J Lowe · 03-20-2003, 10:09 AM

I cant work out what all the fuss is about. I bought the cd rom version 1.1 last month. I did not really want to hang around for the $5 upgrade so just paid the full price last night . If i buy any other software and they upgrade i dont expect a free upgrade so if i want the latest version i pay for it. Like anything else in life if you expect these people to spend months making a better product then you should expect to pay for it!

feldon34 · 03-20-2003, 10:55 AM

I'll never understand why Jim doesn't like Photoshop.

I've been using it since 2.0 and I feel naked without it.

Oh well. No need for discussion/argument/etc.

Jim Sachs · 03-20-2003, 11:17 AM

Example (just one of a hundred I could give):

Bring up a picture in Photoshop. Zoom in a couple of clicks with the left mouse button. Now zoom out with the right mouse button. What? It doesn't zoom out, it brings up a menu? This program entirely fills most early hard drives, and it can't even do THAT?

Paint Shop Pro does this, at 1/10 the size and price.

feldon34 · 03-20-2003, 12:04 PM

Why would right-clicking zoom out a picture? Is this an Amiga thing?

When I right-click, I expect a context menu to come up offering me the ability to Crop, Feather (soften selection), Fill, Make a New Layer From, Free Transform (rotate, distort, perspective) all without having to switch to other tools.

Maybe this is why I don't use PSP.

As soon as I got a PC, I said "wow, this right-click context menu stuff is great" and it doubled my productivity. It took Apple 4 years to duplicate this feature.

Ok, as far as the zooming,

The Alt key is your friend.

"Alt" means SUBTRACT universally among most Mac and PC software that I have encountered (Strangely, Windows itself uses Ctrl for subtract).

Clicking with the Zoom tool zooms in.
Alt-clicking with the Zoom tool zooms out.

Actually for zooming, I can't be bothered with the mouse.
Ctrl-+ zoom in*
Ctrl-- zoom out
Ctrl-Alt-+ zoom in without resizing window*

*These were switched in PS6, then changed in 7 after public outcry.

Drawing a selection with the marquee creates a new marquee.
Alt-Drawing another selection subtracts that area from the first marquee.
Shift-Drawing another selection adds that area to the first marquee.

I remember when Adobe changed it so a Selection was not automatically married to the graphic underneath. In other words, if you make a selection and then drag the selection, the selection moves without affecting the graphic underneath. For a lot of people, this was strange behavior! They were used to drawing a box, moving the box, and the part of the photo they 'boxed in' came with it!

But I can see why they changed it. Now, selections can work as instant stencils, and you can make one selection and "paint through" just within that selection to multiple layers.

If you are just trying to select a whole layer but only the opaque parts, Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-Up, Ctrl-Down. I know it's a kludge, but it's the quickest way.

Layers allow me to save a document and come back to it 3 days later and still be able to move elements around independantly, and also I can edit text without having to remember what font I used. Starting with PS6, even drop shadows, glows, and other effects can be attached to layers/text without losing the editability of the text.

This program entirely fills most early hard drives, and it can't even do THAT?

Photoshop is a high-end Photo retouching program. It is used every day by hundreds of magazines to produce massive, high-resolution images suitable for press printing. It has industry standard color-matching.

If you are using it for artwork, when installing it, go to Custom Install and turn off all the color swatch libraries, CYMK tools, prepress tools, special brushes, Textures and Styles, and most importantly all the Sample/Tutorial files. etc.

I have to wonder what kind of hard drive space you've got if a 75MB install is "filling most hard drives".

I remember when my main hard drive was 6GB. I still had Photoshop on there.

by the way, Microsoft Office takes 400MB and Windows XP takes 1.2GB.

If you have any other Photoshop questions, please feel free to ask. I taught my roommate PS in a week.

Jim Sachs · 03-20-2003, 12:25 PM

The Alt Key is NOT my friend. The Alt key requires me to put down my iced tea, take my feet off the desk, move my chair in, and touch the keyboard. That's no way to draw!

PSP is also Layer-oriented. It loads those huge uncompressed Photoshop files and saves much smaller, more efficient files which retain all the layers, masks, alpha-channels, and every pixel of the original with no loss of data.

I did all the box design in PSP.

MS Office and XP are also excellent examples of bloatware.

Tiny Turtle · 03-20-2003, 12:28 PM

Morgan,
It's not an Amiga thing

Jim,
Aren't you being a bit harsh on good ol' P-shop.? Let's say I wanted Word to type my name in neon whenever I pressed F3, does it not doing so make it a bad program? (People, spare me the obvious joke on Word already being a bad program)

Perhaps you want to have a user-definable photo retouching program – I could draw a parallell to some wanting a user-definable Aquarium screen saver...

/Calle

Jim Sachs · 03-20-2003, 12:31 PM

Big difference. One's a tool, the other is a movie.

Tiny Turtle · 03-20-2003, 01:44 PM

OK. – And the part about Word?

Jav400 · 03-20-2003, 01:52 PM

Well I sorta have to fall in the group singing the praises of P-Shop. But I can't fault Jim for what he has done using other tools. He is definately doing something right.

feldon34 · 03-20-2003, 02:21 PM

I just work faster in Photoshop, that's all.

And when almost every edit is nondestructive because of layers, stencils, layer effects (instead of a 'drop shadow' filter which becomes permanent), slices (Photoshop remembers which parts of the image to save as JPEG, which as GIF, what filenames I want, and the quality settings for each individual slice), nearly-unlimited undos, recordable actions/macros, etc. life is good.

Michael Babin · 03-20-2003, 02:36 PM

Originally posted by Tiny Turtle
Let's say I wanted Word to type my name in neon whenever I pressed F3, does it not doing so make it a bad program? (People, spare me the obvious joke on Word already being a bad program)

You mean it doesn't? Or maybe that was Alt-F3 that did that.

(I am, of course, kidding but wouldn't be surprised if you could find some way to get Word to do that and assign a key combination to invoke it).

grape_jellyfish · 03-20-2003, 02:37 PM

I like both photoshop and psp, I love creating graphics in psp but sometimes I save an image as a photoshop document and move it over there, putting text on a graphic is a nightmare in psp but in photoshop you just click on the type tool then click on the image and you get a new layer for your text then you just start typing. I also enjoy retouching old pictures in photoshop that have been damaged and I have gotten pretty good at it but I am still learning new technics. I would not attempt that in psp however, Photoshop rocks! I love it

codgio · 03-20-2003, 02:46 PM

Just to put my own two cents in on the original topic. I think I've said before that when I paid for my original purchase I based it on what I was getting then and not what upgrades I would get in the future, and as such I have no objection to paying some more for future upgrades. However I fully understand why some people are getting a bit annoyed. The policy on upgrades etc. seems to be changing every five minutes.

This is all true, but subject to future revision. My work on the 3D backgrounds and other improvements to the program will be free, but it's concievable that Prolific might throw a ton of new features into the same release. Or they might be separate -- we do have a Key Code system in place which would allow the user to add some features and ignore others.

The above quote from Jim even makes it seem like the 3d background might end up not being free, and this is something that has been promised from the begining.

And while I understand the logic behind rewarding the online buyers, I agree wholeheartedly with the points raised saying that this policy should be made completely clear.

Such a strong disclaimer would not endear us to distributers or retailers. Once the customer has pressed the "Buy Now" button they have already decided to buy online.

This quote referring to a disclaimer stating the merits etc of buying online is appalling -- A customer has the right to know everything about what they are buying regardless of how it will make the retailers feel.

feldon34 · 03-20-2003, 02:49 PM

In an ideal world, our MA2 keycodes would still work with MA3 (2004?), giving us:

-everything we have now
-free fish packs from Jim
-3D background

The key here is that MA2 and MA3 keycodes should not be mutually exclusive. Each keycode should enable or disable different features. There ARE tokens/symbols embedded in the MA2 keycode to accomplish this, right?

codgio · 03-20-2003, 03:13 PM

I don't really care what we do or don't get as a free upgrade (even the 3d background), but it would be nice for it to be clear and remain unchanged.

Jim Sachs · 03-20-2003, 03:25 PM

Nothing in the universe remains unchanged.

feldon34 · 03-20-2003, 03:28 PM

When Jim started, he thought he'd be done with the 3D background, a few of the special creatures, and probably another 20 fish by now.

And Prolific didn't expect to go into the screen saver business except as Jim's publisher.

Jim Sachs · 03-20-2003, 03:43 PM

Not even as publisher.

Jim Sachs · 03-20-2003, 03:55 PM

Somebody mentioned something about MS Word. I don't really use it, I usually use Notepad. Or Word Express, if I want to imbed pictures.

On another note, I think it was TT who mentioned a post getting zapped. This seems to happen to me very often since the big Forum switchover. I'll type out a message, hit Submit Reply, and go to a page that says it can't connect to the Forum. I hit Back to try again, and my message is gone from the Reply box. I exit and re-enter the Forum, find the thread again, and there's someone else's message where mine would be.

It almost seems like if two people hit Submit at the same time, one wins and the other goes into limbo.

feldon34 · 03-20-2003, 04:10 PM

This is very strange. I will investigate.

I have yet to experience this myself, and I do post a lot.

Can you give me the exact error message it gives you when it can't connect?

Is it server too busy? too many connections? or just a standard Server Not Responding?

Does the error immediately come up or does it "time out" after 30 seconds?

03-20-2003, 10:09 AM	#21
Steven J Lowe Blue Angel Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: UK Posts: 45	I cant work out what all the fuss is about. I bought the cd rom version 1.1 last month. I did not really want to hang around for the $5 upgrade so just paid the full price last night . If i buy any other software and they upgrade i dont expect a free upgrade so if i want the latest version i pay for it. Like anything else in life if you expect these people to spend months making a better product then you should expect to pay for it! Steven J Lowe

03-20-2003, 10:55 AM	#22
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	I'll never understand why Jim doesn't like Photoshop. I've been using it since 2.0 and I feel naked without it. Oh well. No need for discussion/argument/etc. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

03-20-2003, 11:17 AM	#23
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,775	Example (just one of a hundred I could give): Bring up a picture in Photoshop. Zoom in a couple of clicks with the left mouse button. Now zoom out with the right mouse button. What? It doesn't zoom out, it brings up a menu? This program entirely fills most early hard drives, and it can't even do THAT? Paint Shop Pro does this, at 1/10 the size and price. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

03-20-2003, 12:04 PM	#24
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	Why would right-clicking zoom out a picture? Is this an Amiga thing? When I right-click, I expect a context menu to come up offering me the ability to Crop, Feather (soften selection), Fill, Make a New Layer From, Free Transform (rotate, distort, perspective) all without having to switch to other tools. Maybe this is why I don't use PSP. As soon as I got a PC, I said "wow, this right-click context menu stuff is great" and it doubled my productivity. It took Apple 4 years to duplicate this feature. Ok, as far as the zooming, The *Alt* key is your friend. "Alt" means SUBTRACT universally among most Mac and PC software that I have encountered (Strangely, Windows itself uses Ctrl for subtract). Clicking with the Zoom tool zooms in. Alt-clicking with the Zoom tool zooms out. Actually for zooming, I can't be bothered with the mouse. Ctrl-+ zoom in* Ctrl-- zoom out Ctrl-Alt-+ zoom in without resizing window* These were switched in PS6, then changed in 7 after public outcry. Drawing a selection with the marquee creates a new marquee. Alt-Drawing another selection subtracts that area from the first marquee. Shift-Drawing another selection adds that area to the first marquee. I remember when Adobe changed it so a Selection was not automatically married to the graphic underneath. In other words, if you make a selection and then drag the selection, the selection moves without affecting the graphic underneath. For a lot of people, this was strange behavior! They were used to drawing a box, moving the box, and the part of the photo they 'boxed in' came with it! But I can see why they changed it. Now, selections can work as instant stencils, and you can make one selection and "paint through" just within that selection to multiple layers. If you are just trying to select a whole layer but only the opaque parts, Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-Up, Ctrl-Down. I know it's a kludge, but it's the quickest way. Layers allow me to save a document and come back to it 3 days later and still be able to move elements around independantly, and also I can edit text without having to remember what font I used. Starting with PS6, even drop shadows, glows, and other effects can be attached to layers/text without losing the editability of the text. This program entirely fills most early hard drives, and it can't even do THAT? Photoshop is a high-end Photo retouching program. It is used every day by hundreds of magazines to produce massive, high-resolution images suitable for press printing. It has industry standard color-matching. If you are using it for artwork, when installing it, go to Custom Install and turn off all the color swatch libraries, CYMK tools, prepress tools, special brushes, Textures and Styles, and most importantly all the Sample/Tutorial files. etc. I have to wonder what kind of hard drive space you've got if a 75MB install is "filling most hard drives". I remember when my main hard drive was 6GB. I still had Photoshop on there. by the way, Microsoft Office takes 400MB and Windows XP takes 1.2GB. If you have any other Photoshop questions, please feel free to ask. I taught my roommate PS in a week. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman Last edited by feldon34; 03-20-2003 at 12:34 PM.*

03-20-2003, 12:25 PM	#25
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,775	The Alt Key is NOT my friend. The Alt key requires me to put down my iced tea, take my feet off the desk, move my chair in, and touch the keyboard. That's no way to draw! PSP is also Layer-oriented. It loads those huge uncompressed Photoshop files and saves much smaller, more efficient files which retain all the layers, masks, alpha-channels, and every pixel of the original with no loss of data. I did all the box design in PSP. MS Office and XP are also excellent examples of bloatware. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

03-20-2003, 12:28 PM	#26
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	Morgan, It's not an Amiga thing Jim, Aren't you being a bit harsh on good ol' P-shop.? Let's say I wanted Word to type my name in neon whenever I pressed F3, does it not doing so make it a bad program? (People, spare me the obvious joke on Word already being a bad program) Perhaps you want to have a user-definable photo retouching program – I could draw a parallell to some wanting a user-definable Aquarium screen saver... /Calle Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

03-20-2003, 12:31 PM	#27
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,775	Big difference. One's a tool, the other is a movie. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

03-20-2003, 01:44 PM	#28
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	OK. – And the part about Word? Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

03-20-2003, 01:52 PM	#29
Jav400 Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Tennessee Posts: 9,725	Well I sorta have to fall in the group singing the praises of P-Shop. But I can't fault Jim for what he has done using other tools. He is definately doing something right. Michael Administrator of Inside:SereneScreen Aquarium Forum, Chatroom, Fan Site & *Gallery* DVD Collection

03-20-2003, 02:21 PM	#30
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	I just work faster in Photoshop, that's all. And when almost every edit is nondestructive because of layers, stencils, layer effects (instead of a 'drop shadow' filter which becomes permanent), slices (Photoshop remembers which parts of the image to save as JPEG, which as GIF, what filenames I want, and the quality settings for each individual slice), nearly-unlimited undos, recordable actions/macros, etc. life is good. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

03-20-2003, 02:36 PM	#31
Michael Babin Mac Development Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Rowlett, Texas Posts: 199	Originally posted by Tiny Turtle Let's say I wanted Word to type my name in neon whenever I pressed F3, does it not doing so make it a bad program? (People, spare me the obvious joke on Word already being a bad program) You mean it doesn't? Or maybe that was Alt-F3 that did that. (I am, of course, kidding but wouldn't be surprised if you could find some way to get Word to do that and assign a key combination to invoke it).

03-20-2003, 02:37 PM	#32
grape_jellyfish Registered Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Arkansas Posts: 2,235	I like both photoshop and psp, I love creating graphics in psp but sometimes I save an image as a photoshop document and move it over there, putting text on a graphic is a nightmare in psp but in photoshop you just click on the type tool then click on the image and you get a new layer for your text then you just start typing. I also enjoy retouching old pictures in photoshop that have been damaged and I have gotten pretty good at it but I am still learning new technics. I would not attempt that in psp however, Photoshop rocks! I love it Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass....It's learning to Dance in the Rain.

03-20-2003, 02:46 PM	#33
codgio Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Glasgow, UK Posts: 109	Just to put my own two cents in on the original topic. I think I've said before that when I paid for my original purchase I based it on what I was getting then and not what upgrades I would get in the future, and as such I have no objection to paying some more for future upgrades. However I fully understand why some people are getting a bit annoyed. The policy on upgrades etc. seems to be changing every five minutes. This is all true, but subject to future revision. My work on the 3D backgrounds and other improvements to the program will be free, but it's concievable that Prolific might throw a ton of new features into the same release. Or they might be separate -- we do have a Key Code system in place which would allow the user to add some features and ignore others. The above quote from Jim even makes it seem like the 3d background might end up not being free, and this is something that has been promised from the begining. And while I understand the logic behind rewarding the online buyers, I agree wholeheartedly with the points raised saying that this policy should be made completely clear. Such a strong disclaimer would not endear us to distributers or retailers. Once the customer has pressed the "Buy Now" button they have already decided to buy online. This quote referring to a disclaimer stating the merits etc of buying online is appalling -- A customer has the right to know everything about what they are buying regardless of how it will make the retailers feel. Remember what the doormouse said...

03-20-2003, 02:49 PM	#34
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	In an ideal world, our MA2 keycodes would still work with MA3 (2004?), giving us: -everything we have now -free fish packs from Jim -3D background The key here is that MA2 and MA3 keycodes should not be mutually exclusive. Each keycode should enable or disable different features. There ARE tokens/symbols embedded in the MA2 keycode to accomplish this, right? "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

03-20-2003, 03:13 PM	#35
codgio Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Glasgow, UK Posts: 109	I don't really care what we do or don't get as a free upgrade (even the 3d background), but it would be nice for it to be clear and remain unchanged. Remember what the doormouse said...

03-20-2003, 03:25 PM	#36
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,775	Nothing in the universe remains unchanged. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

03-20-2003, 03:28 PM	#37
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	When Jim started, he thought he'd be done with the 3D background, a few of the special creatures, and probably another 20 fish by now. And Prolific didn't expect to go into the screen saver business except as Jim's publisher. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

03-20-2003, 03:43 PM	#38
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,775	Not even as publisher. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

03-20-2003, 03:55 PM	#39
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,775	Somebody mentioned something about MS Word. I don't really use it, I usually use Notepad. Or Word Express, if I want to imbed pictures. On another note, I think it was TT who mentioned a post getting zapped. This seems to happen to me very often since the big Forum switchover. I'll type out a message, hit Submit Reply, and go to a page that says it can't connect to the Forum. I hit Back to try again, and my message is gone from the Reply box. I exit and re-enter the Forum, find the thread again, and there's someone else's message where mine would be. It almost seems like if two people hit Submit at the same time, one wins and the other goes into limbo. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

03-20-2003, 04:10 PM	#40
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	This is very strange. I will investigate. I have yet to experience this myself, and I do post a lot. Can you give me the exact error message it gives you when it can't connect? Is it server too busy? too many connections? or just a standard Server Not Responding? Does the error immediately come up or does it "time out" after 30 seconds? "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman