I love Adobe, but come on, guys

Just felt like ranting for a bit...

I'm having an issue with Photoshop CS4 on my Mac. I couldn't find anything relating to this problem anywhere online so I decided to call Adobe technical support.

I should mention that my copy is 100% legal and registered.

After almost 40 minutes on hold I was connected to someone that listened to me describing the problem in great detail. When I was done she told me that she'd be able to help me but we'd have to create a support contract and charge me $40. Huh? I told her to look up my serial number. She did and then proceeded to tell me that it's been more than 90 days since the release of CS5 and they no longer offer free support for the previous product.

You've got to be freakin' kidding me??!!

I asked her what would happen if I decided to buy CS5 today and in 3 months they release CS6. She gave me the answer I expected. Unreal. That's the policy, so there would be no support.

I find that so incredibly amazing that they want to charge $40 for a support ticket. I'm sure they have a 'bulk rate' but it's insane.

Booo hooo Adobe. I don't approve.

that is poor service on a fairly big-ticket item. Sorry to hear.

dave

Pretty much typical for adobe.

I was surprised. I wasn't expecting that.

So what was your issue?

YamahaRob wrote in post #12546022
Pretty much typical for adobe.

+1

joedlh wrote in post #12546117
So what was your issue?

I was going to create a separate post, but here goes:

Photoshop CS4 on a 27" iMac. Plenty of memory and hard drive space.

I started noticing a problem when I add an adjustment layer, a mask and then fill the mask with black. Rather than use the Edit > Fill menu I just make sure black is set as my background color and then use cmd-Delete to fill the mask with black.

That has always worked for me with previous versions and until recently with CS4.

Recently I was working on an image and noticed that the black mask wasn't actually black. I could see this because if I did create an adjustment layer, created a mask filled with black using cmd-Delete, and then turned that layers visibility on and off I could see a small difference and that shouldn't be the case.

To further test things I tried filling the layer mask by using the Edit > Fill commands from the menus and it worked fine. The layer was perfectly black and there was no change when toggling the layer on and off.

Going back to the cmd-Delete method was still a problem.

Then, somewhere in all of this, after using the menus as my workaround, I tried using the other method and it was working fine.

Before anyone starts asking... I'm very good with Photoshop and have been using these commands for years and I've double and triple checked myself to make sure that I wasn't just being an idiot or not realizing I had made a change, etc.

This has now happened to me about 3 times and I did notice a pattern.

I have the Imagenomic Portraiture plugin installed in CS4. Every so often I use the plugin for some effects and recently I had Photoshop quit after entering the Portraiture plugin and getting an error. I can't be sure of this but it seems that opening Photoshop after the glitch is when the problem starts.

It seems to stop after a few times of using the Menus to fill the mask.

Beyond that I can't find anything. I know there is no preference for the opacity when filling a layer when you use the command key shortcut.

I haven't removed the plugin but that may be one of the next things to try.

Any insight would be helpful.

That sucks! Switch to Aperture. :p

jdizzle wrote in post #12546409
That sucks! Switch to Aperture. :p

Well. that was helpful.

I imagine that if Adobe still supported CS4 they would ask if you are running any 3rd party plugins, and if so suggest that you remove them and see if the problem still occurs.

hawkeye60 wrote in post #12546474
Well. that was helpful.

I imagine that if Adobe still supported CS4 they would ask if you are running any 3rd party plugins, and if so suggest that you remove them and see if the problem still occurs.

I was joking.

jdizzle wrote in post #12546482
I was joking.

So was I

I will spare you my tale, but Adobe support has gone down the tubes. Completely.

I was an enterprise customer and could not get squat.

To get their errors fixed took 90 days elapsed, about 10 phone calls and more e-mails.

My company has an enterprise licence for Adobe products and we get squat in the way of support from them too!

I'm amazed. I never needed support before so I never realized it was that bad. I love Adobe products but this is insane.

Sorry for your woes with Adobe Robert but, their support isn't exactly top notch.