Adobe photoshop CS4 30 day trial--any pitfalls to trying it?

I know someone who wants to give this a try, it's on a Vista 64 bit system. I just wondered if anyone here had tried it and if you have any words of wisdom or warning, such as what happens if you decide NOT to go with the full version? It's CS4 he wants to install, apparently. Aha, thanks to an old thread I found a link for a cleanup tool if things don't go right...:-D (Thanks, Halo! It's from last year, you probably don't remember. )

Hey, what happens to a person's pictures on the HD if one does uninstall Adobe?

 

i have used both CS4 and PSP; the main difference, IMHO, is the same thing that all of Adobe products have; plenty of bloat and a much larger footprint. i have used plenty of Photoshop plugins and tutorials in PaintShopPro with no ill effects. i only have PSP now. actually kept my old Jasc PSP (before they sold out to Corel) because newer isn't always better and Corel probably put some bloat in.

when the CS4 trial ends, you won't lose any saved pics, you'll just lose the ability to continue to use CS4. the saved pics won't go anywhere; you just won't be able to edit them like you could with CS4 or PSP.

you might think about clean freeware IrfanView which has some really awesome features. it's not as expansive as CS4 or PSP, but it's WAY more than MS Paint. IrfanView does thumbnails, too, but i've gotten in the habit of using EasyThumbnails (also clean freeware) for that.

Code:

http://www.irfanview.com/
http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/overview.php

 

Thanks, Cake.

This person (my son) is already downloading CS4 (it's a huge file, of course, one of those things that has to be done overnight for some people. :-D) He'll likely end up installing late tomorrow afternoon sometime, if he does decide to go ahead with it.

I have PSP X myself, but I certainly haven't used it to even a fraction of its potential. I've just played around with it a bit, haven't taken much time to learn it.

My son has used Gimp quite a bit and he had a bunch of addons installed on it on our desktop computer, but now he has his own laptop, and he doesn't seem to want to start all over again downloading and installing brushes and fonts and all that stuff. He's got online friends who like photoshop and that's where he got the idea from. Rather beyond his means financially, though. He tried PSP on the desktop and he didn't really like it. Me, I would take PSP over Gimp any day, but to each his own, I guess.

I used to use Irfanview years ago on our old Windows 98SE machine and I really liked it. I had kind of forgotten about it. I might consider that one for my laptop. I did put Gimp on it but I don't find it user friendly, and Picassa came preinstalled but I find it has limited functions.

My son is still learning about having his own system, and something I'm trying to teach him is to back up his stuff, create restore points, do a lot of reading and asking questions before he installs stuff, always download from reputable websites (and preferably that of the original author) and whatever he does, always make sure he can UNdo it. He has been asking around about CS4, but I just wanted to make sure about the UNdo part. And that CS4 wouldn't get obnoxious and end up insisting on being the one and only program on his system that will open picture files until the end of time.

Thanks again for your feedback.