I recently purchased Adobe Photoshop 3.0 Deluxe CD-ROM at a church garage sale. The cardboard sleeve had a serial number of PSW303R1104446, so I thought that there would be no problem but the program doesn’t accept that as a valid SN. Did the previous owner omit something, like a hyphen or alphanumeric character or get something wrong?
your missing some characters…they should be clearly readable from the registration card, or on the back of the floppies…the ones on the box are not complete so that couriers and warehouse workers dont collect huge amounts of working serials.
if its nowhere to be seen, try giving adobe customer services a call, but be aware that you may have wasted your money on a product that may have already been registered and/or upgraded from.
I agree with Ramón — this is probably PhotoDeluxe. Also, there would be a hyphen and three more characters necessary for a valid serial number of this product.
And as progress says, you probably wasted your money. The legitimate way to purchase second hand Adobe software is to obtain the original Adobe CD-ROM (not a dupe) with a transfer of license form (available online from Adobe.com) which transfers the right of the new owner to register the software in your name (and be entitled to upgrades and support, as applicable). You should have also been given the manuals and complete serial number. If you were able to register the software, you could retrieve your serial number from Adobe. If cannot prove title to the software, you’re probably stuck.
Get a refund if you can. This is an old product, anyway. Instead, use your money to buy Photoshop Elements, an excellent novice/intermediate application for well under $100.
1. The product in question "states" on both the cardboard sleeve from Adobe "Adobe Photoshop 3.0 Deluxe CD-ROM" and the silk screening on the CD , so it is not "PhotoDeluxe" and it is not a copy.
2. I’m sorry if posting the SN of a 10 year old product (copyright 1994, requires at least a 68020 with System 7.0, 6MB of RAM (11MB for a PPC), and 20MB of HDD space for VM) on a public forum was a violation of protocol.
3. I’m not going to bother the church for my $5 back. There was only the CD in the original cardboard sleeve, no box (with valid SN), no documentation (with valid SN), and no registration material( with valid SN).
4. I’m planning to contact Adobe customer support and see what they say. I also went to the site with the xfr rules:
To transfer an Adobe license: 1. You must contact Adobe Customer Service by phone at 800-833-6687 prior to submitting the form. Failure to contact Customer Service will result in processing delays. 2. Complete the Transfer of Adobe License form, providing all information requested for both the transferer and the transferee. Please write the case number provided by Customer Service on the form before faxing it to Adobe. 3. Have both the transferer and the transferee sign the Transfer of Adobe License form. 4. Return the completed form to Adobe Systems Incorporated at:
Adobe Systems Incorporated Transfer of Adobe License Adobe Customer Service PO Box 2205 Beaverton OR 97075 Fax: 800-955-1610
By golly, Bruce is 100% right. I did a search on “Photoshop Deluxe” in quotes and got only two hits at the entire Adobe site, both pointing to “Adobe Photoshop 3.0 Deluxe CD-ROM”, only version 3.0.
Confusing name for the product, but Adobe was offering Photoshop 3 on diskettes at the time. The CD-ROM software version could have been an extra-cost "Deluxe" version. The full serial number could have been on the back of the CD-ROM sleeve, or maybe just the registration card at that time, with removable labels to place on the sleeve and/or user manual. The number never would have appeared in full on the outer box (to prevent stealing serial numbers).
Bruce,
In any case, this is ancient software. It should still run on your system, but a lot of currently available features would be either missing or implemented in a different way. There would also be the possibility of file incompatibility with, say, layered PSD files, or embedded type.
If you are just looking for Photoshop basics, then go with Photoshop Elements. It’s a powerful product in its own right, with a number of solid Photoshop features included, and the cost is, well, cheap, brand new. The skills you learn there are easily transferable to full-tilt Photoshop, should you decide you wish to become more deeply involved with Photoshop.
Be aware that full Photoshop is targeted at the pro market and is the industry standard. It is extremely full-featured and has a steep learning curve. To take proper advantage of Photoshop (and unless you only work on very small images or Web images), you benefit most from a fast computer with as much RAM as you can cram into it and huge, fast hard drives.
Neil, Photo Deluxe is actually relatively recent software, much newer than Photoshop 3, maybe 2001. I have a copy of it because it came bundled with my Umax Astra scanner. It remains unopened and currently mislaid, but I can find it if absolutely necessary. The serial was, I think, on clear shrink wrapped plastic printed on a sticky label, easily thrown away. I think Bruce has a genuine Adobe product that was probably never registered anyway.
I have some familiarity with Photoshop and image processing as I was a beta tester of the first windows version and have developed numerous image processing algorithms; one even received US patent number 4,639,769, though it isn’t my favorite or best.
Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!
Related Discussion Topics
Nice and short text about related topics in discussion sections
