[XLcommerce]

Photoshop is a classic example of bloatware taken to the extreme. I'm running CS5 and routinely run out of RAM with just a few modest files open. It's ridiculous. I'm going back to CS3 as soon as I find some time to upgrade

[jjcm]

Disagree. Photoshop is a professional level tool. When they're building new features, they aren't listening to the common guy who uses 10-20% of the features every once in a while. They're listening to the design professional who has photoshop open 24/7. They guy who lives in photoshop is their customer. That's the person who's willing to drop $1k on a piece of software - the other common guy is just going to download the trial and block activate.adobe.com. If you think photoshop is bloatware, it's because you aren't using all of its features. Photoshop is vast in its depth. Keeping a thousand states of a high res picture in ram takes a lot of memory. Keeping hundreds of composited layers and transforms in ram is equally hungry.

You can curtail your ram usage if you want it to use less - the default is set to be fairly greedy. For myself though, I have photoshop set to use up to 20GB of RAM (and I routinely hit that mark) with a dedicated SSD for caching, but that's because I use 80-90% of the features in photoshop. If you're only using 10% of the program, consider switching programs.

[XLcommerce]

Yeah that's a fair enough comment. The truth is that I'm probably using more like 2% of the program. I think for someone like me the perfect balance of features/performance was at about cs2/cs3 maybe even cs1, I cant remember. So I most likely will be downgrading.

[Terretta]

Check out Pixelmator or Acorn?

[kamjam]

One of the best feature of CS5 is the content aware fill, I very rarely use Photoshop these days, but that feature made it so so so easy to clean up some images that needed some stuff removed from them without having to resort to a very manual and error prone (for me) task. Totally agree of the bloatware, luckily I now have a really beefy machine!

[XLcommerce]

yeah I'm really starting to realise that I'm using the wrong tool for the job. I only use it for web design, so from my pov all the photo features are bloat.

[cageface]

Fireworks is far, far better for UI design, both for native apps and for web apps. I wished I'd discovered it a long time ago. I hardly ever even launch PS anymore but I use Fireworks all the time.

[bhousel]

I'm one of those casual users who maybe uses an image editing program a few times a year. I also found Fireworks to be a much better tool for these tasks.

Last week was another of those times when I needed to open a graphic and tweak a logo for the web. But I have a new laptop now, and didn't want to pay for Fireworks or go through the install just for something that I use so rarely.

So I decided to try out Inkscape and although it has a klunky X11 interface, I found it does everything that I need. Not bad for free software...

[cageface]

Even Fireworks is overkill if you do these kinds of things that rarely but it's certainly a lot cheaper than Photoshop and it's paid for itself several times over in my work.

[kamjam]

That's funny you should say that, I initially started out using Fireworks when I started as an intern as a web developers. This was back in 2000, and designs were all table based, so Fireworks was great for splicing into the required segments.

I'd have to agree that Fireworks is probably better suited for most web design needs... It used to be real simple to switch between the 2 packages, guessing it is still the same...

[saturn]

Too right. All those photo features are just bloating up Photoshop! In fact, not just the photo features. I use it exclusively for writing essays, so all those image functions are just useless.

To be fair, though, it does a better job with my novels than Autocad does with my taxes. You can be sure that piece of junk got a 1 star review on the App Store.

[twelvechairs]

Funny. But I don't think you tackle the above poster's point.

Photoshop is the defacto standard tool for all kinds of image processing (not just photo-editing), and many (most?) of its day-to-day users actually don't use a significant portion of its features, which just clog up their systems.

I for one use photoshop every second day in my line of work, and 98% of what I need it for I could have done in photoshop 5, 10 years ago.

[warpspeed]

From my experience too many people are using Photoshop for areas where they should be using Illustrator. In collateral such as logos or signage, vector-based files are infinitely easier to work with, yet I can't tell you how many times I've been given .psd files by designers tasked with such projects.

[kamjam]

I'm probably the same as you. I think Photoshop 6 has enough of the features I require (bar the new content aware stuff).

I would be great to be able to switch off a whole bunch of the features and filters and god-knows-what-else-it-loads-at-startup stuff and only load them if I actually need them, or be able to switch them off completely with some sort of custom profile. If i need some hardcore editing then I'll go into advanced mode or something.

[XLcommerce]

hehe touché

[davedx]

Indeed. I do lots of development using Unity and need Photoshop fairly frequently. Unity runs fine, but when I launch Photoshop it's time for a coffee break and to live with my Mac limping along for the forseeable future.

No software is able to cripple my hardware like Photoshop.