Rather than paying £600 odd for a legal copy, any other options that are free with no nasties?

GIMP

Or you could pay £18/month for the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription that give you access to PS.

We’ve just signed up for the full Design Suite at work, albeit at £38/month + VAT.

mikey74 – does gimp handle raw files, or do you need a plugin?

Would be interested in how good the raw file processing/plugin is, I am still using CS2, with dng converter.

OP, there was a post on here about Adobe making an error online, which gave you an option to use CS2 for free, might be worth checking out.

GIMP is awful to use. Great piece of kit considering it’s free, but an absolute nightmare to get your head around. Especially if you’re used to Photoshop.

Really? I use both and can switch seemlessly between the two.

Ski: It needs a plug-in, but it’s pretty easy to use.

What RAW files do you want to process?

Cool, always looking for different ways to process my RAW files, I am using a Nikon D90 and Ricoh GRD.

If you want to process NEF files then use Nikon View NX2 – It’s free and pretty good. It can’t d high-end processing but can adjust exposure, colour balance, cropping, exporting to other file formats etc.

Have you thought about Lightroom? A few folk I know now use that instead of photoshop now and do any HDR in Photomatix.

I use lightroom 4 and elements 7 but want to use cs5 or cs6.
Mainly more creative photography with layers.
Loads of free links on you tube but don’t like the key gen files or downloading rar files with dll

Become a student and get an educational copy!

That is when I bought into CS, then it has been upgrade costs since then 😉

I think the educational copy is still £250.
But could be an option as that would be 14 monthly payments but obviously run for longer

If you are able to blag the education thing with Adobe, you can get the creative cloud for £15.88 month for 12 months…that allows the use of every program they make (I think).

Link

Why do you want to steal it? If you need it pay up, if you don’t need the advanced features use elements or gimp.

I’m big on lightroom. With Gimp for layers as well there isn’t much you can’t do. Or use the layers in elements

I thought the educational price was &180

oops £190 now

Will CS2 do?

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html