Near disaster...

[Shaun Haselden]

About a week ago, my old custom built PC from 2006 gave up permanently with errors beyond my ability to fix. This PC still ran Windows XP and Photoshop CS2 as well as early versions of Colour Efex Pro and Silver Efex Pro. For the short term I have been experimenting with Photopea. These are the results. I now have to rethink everything as there is no way I can just dole out over a grand to replace it all.

 

[Stevenson Gawen]

Lovely images.
Sorry to hear about your PC!

Have you looked at Darktable at all?
Free and very powerful but requires a steep initial learning curve in some ways.

 

[Gianluca Drago]

So sorry, @Shaun Haselden. I hope you had a backup of your beloved and valuable photos.
These new photos you've posted don't seem to be missing yuor usual software. Congrats!
As for a replacement of Photoshop CS2, like @Stevenson Gawen said, Darktable is a powerful and rewarding piece of software. Extremely powerful, though initially challenging to use.

 

[Gary R. Smith]

Talk about squeezing every last drop out of a machine! 20 years is a pretty old computer.

 

[Wes Hall]

I’ll throw the companion software to Darkrsble, Rawtherapee, into the mix Shaun- it’s been my goto for years now- free, capable of pretty much everything including negative processing.

 

[Pete Askew]

Another option might be to find an older secondhand machine and install a XP VM on it and then your old editing software.

Gianluca is right, the new process lacks some of your usual finesse.

 

[Paul Taylor]

CS2 is old enough it may run fine in Linux using Wine. I used to be Linux only until the photoshops got too complicated and sub based forcing me to windows again.

 

[Shaun Haselden]

Thank you for all of your comments you lot. The old PC was a dual core Pentium with it's maximum of 2Gb of RAM, a graphics card with 256Mb of RAM and an Asus motherboard. I was so happy using that old thing. Years of pleasure.

 

[Shaun Haselden]

OK, so some more images from the last few weeks. All done using Photopea on my current Acer desktop which is itself now eight years old. I have been thinking about a dedicated old PC purchase running my old software. I'll wait a bit longer.

 

[Gianluca Drago]

OK, so some more images from the last few weeks. All done using Photopea on my current Acer desktop which is itself now eight years old. I have been thinking about a dedicated old PC purchase running my old software. I'll wait a bit longer.

Excellent set of well thought frames, @Shaun Haselden. Even when in colour and developed with a different software the authorial fingerprint of the artist is quite outstanding.