I first became aware of the possibilities of pirated software when I was living in The Hague in the 1980s. It was the time of the Atari 800 and games at a shop were hard to find and very expensive. But, as an alternative, there was “the list”.
The list contained a large selection of software titles, and a telephone number. Call the number and a shady character would arrive at your door under cover of darkness; a little like a drug dealer. In fact he probably had a second job as a drug dealer; but we knew him as the man who provided cheap software for cash.
Once we moved to Kuala Lumpur; things became a little easier. The local malls were stuffed with illegal software, so much so that it was well-nigh impossible to purchase anything original. By this time The Son had moved away from gaming and needed graphics development software that cost five thousand pounds in the UK. Considerably less money in KL bought you everything you needed on nine disks. The Son was soon developing clever plug-ins for this software, such that the company concerned called him and asked him if he would like a job as European Development Consultant. Fortunately they didn’t also ask where he bought his software from. So the son dropped the idea of university and instead headed off for a career as a software engineer; hopefully he has used legal software ever since.
Over the years I have gradually reduced my consumption of pirated software; and eventually the only illegal program on my Mac was Photoshop. Instead of paying a huge amount of cash for an original, I pay a couple of hundred baht for CS5 at Tuk Com. This had to be supported by software tools which stopped the program contacting Adobe and asking if it was legal; and of course I never received any updates.
Then along came Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud) and the concept of a subscription model. For 300 baht a month you get the rights to use Photoshop CC and Lightroom; which is a whole lot easier to swallow than a full purchase. After months of pondering, I finally took the plunge and I now have a fully legal Photoshop on my computer (I had already purchased Lightroom). Adobe seem keen to let me know how lucky I am by providing an update almost every day. Haven’t had much time to play with it yet, but the Field Blur tool is pretty cool.
From this:
To this, in a few clicks:
A shame that I had already bought Lightroom; but then a week after I subscribed, they introduced Lightroom for the iPad. An elegant, almost completely functional, touch version of Lightroom, with automatic synching between the mobile device and your computer. Go on a trip and work on your photos on the iPad. When you come home, load your photos to your computer and all the editing you carried out in Lightroom on your iPad will be synched to the computer. Nice.
Best of all, the mobile version of Lightroom is free. But it only works with subscribed copies of Photoshop CC. How self-righteous I feel!
Legal note: Mr. Spike would like it understood that his “fully legal computer” does not extend to any attached removable hard drives which may or may not currently contain 500GB of downloaded movies and TV programmes, including the latest three episodes of Game of Thrones.
Comments 🔗
2014-04-24| Clive saysI have a fully legit edition of CS5… Well, it’s a legit upgrade to a legit edition of CS4, on account of Adobe releasing the former 2 weeks after I purchased the latter… I thought about upgrading to the cloud edition, but the price Adobe want to charge in the UK is more like £15 a month than the £6 equivalent to what you’re paying in Baht. So: Lesson No. 1 would appear to be “If you want a legit copy of Adobe Cloud software, take your laptop with you to Thailand for a holiday and buy it there.” Although I am sure they have figured a way round that.
I shall stick with what I have for now.
What’s really bugging me about Adobe software, however, was the fact that I was recently forced into the purchase of Lightroom 5.5 on account of y purchase of my EM-1. The new camera, despite having a 16MP sensor of the same resolution as my GX1 (which works just fine) has done something to it’s raw file format that CS5 can’t handle.
This is such a con.
At the end of the day no amount of Adobe B.S. Can hide the fact that a raw file is just a dump from the sensor. In other words, it should be some header data, followed by the light intensity data for each pixel. Since pixels are hard-wired to their primary colour there would also be data relating to that. Any half-decent programmer should be able to knock out a chunk of code that could produce a generic raw file handler in a day or so.
The fact that camera companies insist on tweaking their raw files and nobody bothers to sit down and agree a template is nothing short of a con.
No? How come the JPEG guys did it? How come MPEG movies work perfectly? How come even the raw files all support the Adobe sRGB colour space?
The only valid reason I can see for this is to force you into upgrades. Such a con.
2014-04-24| Barry saysI can’t see the appeal of pirated software these days. There is free software for nearly every task, although I’d guess it might be difficult to match what CS can do. Although I was a member of an office photography group when I worked for BT (we developed our own b&w photos and had models in etc), I deliberately avoided becoming too engrossed in the medium as I knew with absolute certainty that it would take over my life, me being a bit artistic, like, and it would take up all my time and money (sound familiar?).
Anyway, back to the beginning. I also can’t understand people buying pirated movies/tv shows now, when just about everything can be downloaded for free (so I’m told).
2014-04-24| Tee Set saysIf you want a legal copy of anything in Jakarta then the only way to get one is to encourage a shady character to arrive at your door under cover of darkness; a little like a drug dealer ……..
2014-04-24| Spike saysThe obvious reason is that the various camera companies have no common body that can sit them round a table and force them to come up with a standard. It’s probably not as simple as you describe it. Different sensor types probably present data in a different way; Sigma’s Foveon and Fuji’s X-Trans come to mind. Then you have quirks such as the M4 RAW files containing lens correction data. I suspect this is more camera companies doing their own thing, rather than some secret plan by Adobe to make you upgrade your software. And Lightroom 5 is very good.
2014-04-24| Spike saysNot that you have ever tried…