Photoshop’s Windows XP Support Ends with Next Version

In what I’m sure comes as a surprise to very few, Adobe has finally announced the end of support for Windows XP – at least on the Photoshop front. Each product at Adobe has its own team, so some products in “CS7” may support the aging OS, but chances are this will be the launch where we’ll see that greatly thinned out.

Recent versions of Photoshop take good advantage of technology in current OSes, and that’s the reason Adobe has decided to pull out – it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with XP’s dwindling userbase:

“Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers.“

I have to admit that I’m a little surprised in this day and age that some professionals would still use a tool like Photoshop on XP, primarily because it’s a 32-bit OS and limits the amount of memory you can dedicate to the application (important when working with many files at once, especially in RAW).

It’s interesting to note also that CS6 doesn’t officially support Windows Vista. Instead, XP and 7 are. Again, maybe this isn’t so much of a surprise, given many either skipped over Vista or readily upgraded to 7 once the option became available.