Photoshop CS6
dennisgray41
Posts: 823
in The Commons
Is the "new" copy of this for sale n Ebay a legal licensed product? Anyone know a way to tell for sure.?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I read "So anyone claiming to sell keys is likely not legal."
But in Europe it's legal.
"Notice that most of these software vendors on eBay are from the European Union. The Court of Justice of the EU has ruled that the sale of used software is legal."
As far as I know, the only way to know if a copy is legal is to:
1) buy it directly from Adobe or an unopened box from a reputable vendor.
2) know the serial number and write to Adobe and ask if it is a legal copy or currently licensed.
I did a quick search with Google for "CS6 ebay new" and found one copy for a starting bid of $115 ($8 shipping) If that's the one you mean, then there are no bids on it yet. The ad doesn't say "Unopened", it doesn't say "key included" and definitely doesn't say "key unused", and it doesn't say it comes in a box. There's just a straight-on picture that doesn't even look like a box. You might get a real copy of just the DVD with no key (effectively a "trial" version). Also, the seller has only been an ebay member for a couple weeks. Only has 7 reviews, all positive and three of them look like his own replies.
HOWEVER, the auction is about 35 hours away, if no one bids on it then either:
1) no one wants an old copy of Photoshop-CS6 or
2) no one thinks it's legal or
3) you might be in luck. Do you feel lucky? Do you have $123 to find out? But, there is a "Best Offer" button, try that. perhaps if no one bites for the minimum of $115, the seller might consider a lower value. i.e. Bird in the hand... situation.
Check out the vendor?
Amazon.co.uk has "Currently unavailable." on every entry in the catalogue for this item.
OK, Thanks. I guess my options are forget it, or buy the EBay item and check it with adobe. I hate t subscribe to things., especially thingss I do not know how to use and may not use much.
Unless you absolutely need Ps for work there are perfectly good alternatives, like The Gimp, Paintshop Pro and Affinity Photo.
I've used Gimp for several years now. No need to subscibe to software when I can get what I need for free.
True I guess. I just hate having tolearn extra things. I need a school.This is all homework and no classroom.
It's legality is dubious at best.
It's owned by Adobe. They don't sell it any more, only rent.
If it was a legitimate copy it would be somewhere around $1000.
Photoshop Elements I think is still sold as perpetual licence. It hasn't got all the features of the full version, but it's got about 80% f them. You might want to check Adobe's site and check whether it's missing anything you really need.
It does take just about all of the plugins built for the full version, too.
$1000? Used or new?
A fan of Affinity Photo and Designer here!
In Summer 1998 an academic version of Adobe Photoshop 4 when I was taking a class at the University of Texas was a whopping $400+. I still have the CD in fact but Adobe would not issue me a new license when I lost the Bible-thick manual the license was glued inside of.
I sort of doubt it's of much use now that version 4. Today I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 9.0 that came out 10 years ago and I got free with my Wacom Bamboo Create tablet. I'm thinking I will buy the 2020 version of Elements & Premier this winter when they go on Christmas sale again.
Either.
I saw a boxed version for sale a while back with manuals etc. You won't get new.
I still have Paintshop Pro 4. In complains on installation, but still works, but I've got to the stage where I prefer Photoshop, and the one reason I kept Paint Shop 4 I can now do in PS or Filter Forge
Last I remember, a standalone new copy of just PhotoshopCS6 box version was about $700.
The full suite of CS6 products was closer to $2000 though. But my brain is ancient and money isn't what it used to be either.
this is from my register a product page from my adobe account on what the date and price was for cs6 . Keep in mind that this was the Web Premium Suite 6 and not the master collection which was around $2800 at the time
https://account.adobe.com/products
Adobe Web Premium
Version: CS6
Registration Date: Nov 15, 2012
Perpetual license $1800
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx6952
Platform: Windows
Download CS6 {Linked removed}
It's just an opinion, but if you are not a longtime user of Photoshop and used to it's GUI and particular features, just pass on it altogether... As Sevrin noted, there are plenty of options that do a decent job... especially if you are just using it for basic image editing or texturing.
Subcription software is a rent seeking money grab, it's meant to tether one perpetually to that vendor and removes one's freedom to use a software until the consumer deems the current improvements warrant upgrade or repurchase... if it wasn't a money grab, the vendor would still include the option to buy a copy and leave that decision as to the value of "continual bug fixes and product support" to the customer.
It's good faith, that if you make a good product with a good value, you stand by that product and offer the customer the freedom to choose which option suits them best.
Back around the time of CS6 I had been saving up my money for a while to purchase 6, as my last version was CS3... I figured when CS7 came out I'd wait a bit and get 6 when it became yesterday's news... apparently I missed the news that Adobe was moving to a subscription model until it was too late... all available copies of 5 and 6 shot up in price and made it not worth the expense. Over time I occasionally check for legitimate copies of CS6 for a reasonable price... so far none have surfaced. I learned to live with the bugs a quirks of CS3 and the improvements in CS6 were not important enough to me to pay an inflated price for... and as far as I'm concerned nothing in the subscription version makes it a value.
Yes, you can use photoshop with Substance and together they are powerful and time saving, but as a hobbyist it's never going to be worth the money to me.
When my copy of CS3 no longer works with my OS, then it's good bye forever to photoshop... Subscription software can rot in the deepest bowels of hell for all I'm concerned.
But that is all just an opinion and nothing more.
Similarly for me. I had been upgrading my version of Photoshop every few years, from the old Photoshop6 to Photoshop7 to PS-CS2 to PS-CS5 and was eyeing PS-CS6 when the hammer fell. I couldn't even find a copy of PS-CS5.5 without paying through the nose. So, I've been happily content with PS-CS5. So far there's nothing that I haven't been able to make it do for me. And far more that it could do for me that I don't ever use. And I can't bring myself to send Adobe money every month for the rest of my life. Actually buying the upgrade every few years was worth it, but renting it forever isn't. Well, not for me anyway. When living on a fixed income, subscription fees are just another hole in your boat.
A subscription model makes sense if you can write it off as a legitimate business expense. Or if you want to never have to pay for an upgrade, since those are always included. If you keep your software up to date the subscription works out to about the same cost. But if yo run a program as long as your OS will support it a perpetual license is much cheaper.
No, you are right. The commerical version of Photoshop 4 in autumn 1998 was between $600 and $700.
I guess that's the extended version? I have the standard version (boxed version, including Lightroom 4), got it for $390 in 2012 (discount offer I got from B&H in US). Didn't expect B&H would sell it to me as Adobe normally demand that if you're en EU you buy from their EU store/resellers at a much higher price, but they let me have it anyway, and Adobe accepted that it was an US version when I activated it. Been considering selling it as I have a subscription also, and CS6 is pretty old now.
Which is why the upgrades to apply to an existing version, costing only $200 was a good deal. Again my memory is fuzzy, but it was in the $200 - $250 range. I got my first copy of the full version of Photoshop6 when it came in the box with a computer DVD recorder drive that I bought back in the dark ages for about $500 which I thought was an outrageous price to pay for a DVD drive but it was when DVDs were still new and a recorder was the bee's knees! I just kept upgrading my Photoshop when I felt justified to spend $200 to keep from becoming too far behind the curve.
I got a full version copy of Adobe Illustrator-CS2 when CompUSA was going out of business. At the time I was poor as a church mouse and would ride my bicycle past the store a couple times a week. I'd go in and drool over the software boxes locked behind the sliding glass doors of the no-stealum cabinet. Then one day there were signs outside saying that CompUSA was kaput and everything was on sale. But that precious copy of Illustrator was still priced too high.
A short time later I checked again and there it was, nearly the last thing left in the no-stealum case and it was marked down to a ridiculous price. I whipped out my credit card and prayed that there was enough slack left on it. Yay, I got it. Lucky for once.
A few years later I was able to upgrade once to Illustrator-CS5. I have two and a half storage boxes of various old Adobe products and manuals. Many of which don't even work anymore in Win8 much less Win10. Things like "Encore1.0", "LiveMotion",& "Go-Live".
I purchased CS2 for $600 directly from Adobe way back when and have never really felt the need to upgrade because of how I make use of it. I've built (and am still building to this day) workflows that are completely automated with Photoshop being an integral part. Expensive - yes, but worth every penny as I still use it everyday.
The 2 features that I rely on most are actions and the scripting API. The actions are so simple and easy to record right in the program, and they are further leveraged by VB scripting run outside of the program to add more control over file I/O, additional logic for decision making, the integration of other applications into the workflow, etc.
I've left my algorithms running for weeks unattended before while I've been off camping in the great outdoors - awesome!
- Greg
They were narrowing the upgrade eigibility even before they switched to rental - I think upgrading from any older version stopped at CS2 at the latest, then it was the previous version or the version before that, and then it was going to be only the previous version (but instead they went rental).
I agree when talking about Adobe's subscription model, but some companies like Jetbrains have a perpetual fallback licence where you can keep an older version of the program if you cancel the subscription after a certain period.
Yeh, I like what they do; love their UI too, but as don't do java I never ended up getting it commercially. For c# I need to integration with power shell that studio has. It's a hastle with jetbrains' version.
If it had a printed manual, it had to be CS2 or an earlier version because CS2 was the last version that included a printed manual.