I haven’t used Photoshop in my Windows machine for a while. I only used it to do occasional stuff to my photos that simple photo editors cannot do.
When I opened the app, I was greeted with a banner and a dialogue box stating “this Adobe app is non-genuine and will be disabled soon”. (Both were written in Japanese though the original app’s language is set to English. I think it has something to do with my VPN.) I couldn’t figure what the buttons said but one seems to redirect me to an Adobe subscription page and the other simply closes the app.
I don’t have experience pirating stuff like this. I got help from another friend long ago in downloading the whole suite of Adobe products from what I think is a Russian source. I am pretty sure they told me to set up firewall restrictions for the app as well, and I haven’t touched the installer or anything similar since then. I don’t know if there is something I can do about this or if I should download an ‘updated version’ of the app from some other source.
I’m aware I’m not properly answering your question here but it sounds like you might be better off ditching Adobe and using something like GIMP or Krita. I went through a period when I was struggling with my cracked version of photoshop and not getting anything done and discovered it was much more efficient and relaxing to spend a couple of hours learning GIMP.
If you’d rather use photoshop that’s fair enough but I thought I’d just share my experience and offer a nudge in a different direction :)