I bought Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended a year ago and was horrified to find it did not contain a user's manual . . . only an itsy-bitsy user's guide and CD I won't even look at . . .

I need a printed manual for it so I can curl up on the couch and read instead of getting eye-strain trying to study it online . . .

after several hours searching, 1 hour with an Adobe chat person, 30 minutes on hold and then another 30 minutes with customer support, I only found out that I can buy a printed manual for CS4 but they don't handle the manuals for CS3 anymore . . . and another few hours of hunting and searching shows me that there are manuals, but I can't find the Adobe manual because I don't know the name of it . . .

Can someone PLEASE tell me where I can buy the OFFICIAL manual for CS3?  A phone number? name? author? anything???

I can buy a manual for CS4 but I can't afford to upgrade . . .

I don't know about a printed manual, but they do have the user guide in PDF format; you could print it yourself or possibly have it printed at a print shop or office store. In the hopes that it might be of help, the English version of the CS3 guide is at http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Photoshop/10.0/photoshop_cs3_help.pdf. It's about 43 megabytes in size and 680 pages long.

that's the help file that is in the program help folder . . .  I want the printed manual that they use to include in their package years ago . . . funny how their price hasn't gone down, but the printed manual disappeared . . .

key is a book, not a printout . . .

but thank you . . .

ByHeart, I use "Photoshop CS3 Bible" by Laurie Ulrich Fuller & Robert C. fuller, Wiley Publishing, Inc (ISBN: 978-0-470-11541-1) $39.99 USA, $47.99 Canadian, £26.99 UK with CD. It covers the extended version.

Sending out printed manuals with software products seem not to be cost effective ANYMORE and cuts into their profits although the price of the software has certainly NOT gone down...perhaps under the guise of tree conservation and going "Green".

Yeah;  I saw several good books, and I think I might have found the manual . . . asking questions right now . . .

I totally understand the omissions of the manual if they had cut the price by 40 or 50 dollars, but they never have . . . and if they want to cut it, that's fine, but they need to make them a little easier to find besides just offereing them for the current version . . . you can get for CS4 by calling customer service for 50$ . . . would have thought they could supply a list of suppliers for the toher versions . . .

I believe CaptainJack1 steered me close by saying' user guide' and it wouldn't be the first time that the help file was actually the manual in electronic form . . .

I saw the one you mentioned - does it go over every tool and process thoroughly?

I've got the CS4 version of the Photoshop Bible, and it seems to cover everything pretty well. Pretty massive tome for reading in bed, I find, but that's where I read most of my how-to books.

Come to think of it, maybe that's why I have such strange dreams...

Well, I don’t own the extended version of CS3 so there’s stuff in there I can’t use. I’ve been a Photoshop user since version 3 so a lot of the stuff in there is redundant for me but I’m quite satisfied with it when I do need information on the CS3 updated material. The book itself is 1,113 pages not including the index so there really isn’t much that can be left out. I wouldn't exactly call it Saturday night cozy reading.

LOLLing all over the place . . .

just want the manual . . . straight information with not other stuff to wade through . . . I hated school text books - they always muddied up the important stuff with non essential information . . . so I don't learn well unless it's just really straight-lined . . .

It does have plenty of tutorials together with work along files on the CD that some people find helpful but I do completely understand information overload.

don't want tutes or lessons . . . just straight information . . . that's why I was looking for the manual that should have come with it . . .if I can't find one, then I will probably buy the CS4 one and stumble through it . . .

O, CS4 users can call toll free to Adobe's customer service to order the manual . . . but older versions aren't available

Did you look on ebay?

It's a bitch, but I'm not surprised Adobe only offers the most recent version of the manual on their site, they're probably hoping to get folks to upgrade by getting rid of the stuff for the older versions.  :glare:

I'm not interested in upgrading with companies that don't support their old versions . . .

You bought Adobe Photoshop CS3 a year ago? Have you been using it? I'm curious why you have waited this long to get a "manual". I'm pretty sure the official printed Adobe Photoshop book (manual/users guide) would be a hard copy of help file PDF. I bought Adobe Standard CS4 Suite last month. The PDF for Photoshop is 29MB and is 707 pages. Not something I would want to print out. I am seriously considering getting an ebook reader like Kindle because everything seems to come with PDF files rather than a hard copy. Of course I did also buy CorelDRAW X4 last month. That came with both PDF files and a 500 page Users Guide plus a couple of other books.

At http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=436105 there is for download a large Manual for CS3 (43 MB, 464 pages) that you can download, burn in a CD and take to a shop for having it printed.
A lot cheaper than buying from Adobe.
I hate the verb "to buy".

Eduardo

agreed;  but printed is neater and easier to handle . . . have several of those download and printout ones - big, clumsy and by the time they bind it around here, it is more than one from Adobe . . . LOL

think I found a printed one for 18.00 and shipping

hmmm....try googling it in torrents or warez sites....