choosing a software package

dizave · April 27, 2004

I'd like to play around with one of the software packages out there for image manipulation. Photoshop itself appears to be around $700, which rules it out for my casual use. I've noticed PS Elements, PSPro, and Gimp. Any thoughts on how to choose where to throw my money, or on any alternatives I should be considering?

Thanks.

-dave

cletus · April 27, 2004

dizave wrote:

I'd like to play around with one of the software packages out there for image manipulation. Photoshop itself appears to be around $700, which rules it out for my casual use. I've noticed PS Elements, PSPro, and Gimp. Any thoughts on how to choose where to throw my money, or on any alternatives I should be considering?

Thanks.

-dave

You've named the major ones with the exception of two products from Corel - CorelDraw (~$400) and Painter (~$250).

Photoshop is the only program I have experience with, so I can't really make a recomendation for any of the others. I will suggest that you take them out for a test drive. All of them have free trials available. Try them out and see which is the best fit for you.

pathfinder · April 27, 2004

dizave wrote:

I'd like to play around with one of the software packages out there for image manipulation. Photoshop itself appears to be around $700, which rules it out for my casual use. I've noticed PS Elements, PSPro, and Gimp. Any thoughts on how to choose where to throw my money, or on any alternatives I should be considering?

Thanks.

-dave

Another image editing program is Picture Window Pro - it can be found here http://www.dl-c.com/Temp/ for $89.00

Photoshop Elements 2 is probably the most widely used inexpensive image editor in general use, and can frequently be found for about $49. It is frequently bundled with the purchase of a scanner or a digital camera.

rutt · April 27, 2004

Photoshop doesn't have to cost $700
You can get full photoshop for much less than $700 if you buy an old version and buy an upgrade to a recent version. The upgrade is roughtly $150 (but use froogle.google.com or dealtime or bizrate to search). Look on ebay for old never-registered full versions. Search for "photoshop full version". I don't know what the rules are, but I think if you do this right, you can have a legal photoshop license for about $300 or maybe less. Ebay also has some recent full versions (7,cs) for about $400 buy-it-now.

It's worth shopping around for a deal. Photoshop really is the standard and eventually you'll be happy you invested in learning to use it instead of something else.

wxwax · April 27, 2004

I like Rutt's suggestion. And if you get hooked, you'll really want the power of Photochop.

patch29 · April 27, 2004

I stopped by Sam's Club and they have Photoshop Elements for $53.00.

Costco has Elements and Photoshop Album for $89.00 (I think) with a $20 rebate, either that or 99 with 30 rebate for $69.00 total. I think 69 is the final price sorry I forgot to write it down and saw it in passing. Can I be more wishy-washy??

dizave · April 27, 2004

Sounds like my plan will be to find a ~$60 elements and see what I can do with that. Thanks for the advice.

dizave · April 28, 2004

Man, ebay is shady. Taking a look at the feedback on some of the Elements sellers, some of these guys have a "friend" who "got it with his digital cam but didn't need it". About 100 times. What are the chances these guys are legal???

patch29 · April 28, 2004

dizave wrote:

Man, ebay is shady. Taking a look at the feedback on some of the Elements sellers, some of these guys have a "friend" who "got it with his digital cam but didn't need it". About 100 times. What are the chances these guys are legal???

Some are probably legit. I had a copy of Elements that came with a Wacom Tablet that I sold to a friend. I had no need for it since I already have the full version. Buyer beware, bad feedback and I would stay away.

Netgarden · April 28, 2004

My preference is PaintshopPro8. I have both that and PhotoShop. For around $70 its a super buy and has all the bells and whistles as Pshop. Less steps too, and easy to learn. You can't beat it! Even my daughter was impressed, as she was a Pshop diehard for years. Jasc has done a great job for the price.

You can download the trial for 30 days at http://www.jasc.com/products/?

patch29 wrote:

Some are probably legit. I had a copy of Elements that came with a Wacom Tablet that I sold to a friend. I had no need for it since I already have the full version. Buyer beware, bad feedback and I would stay away.

gubbs · April 29, 2004

I use ULead PhotoImpact wihich you can buy for around $80, I'm certainly no expert and Ive not used anything else, but I like it. I seem to be able to do most of the stuff that PS does.

If you have a look at Steve's digital he has a section on Graphic editors:-
http://www.steves-digicams.com/digsoftware_editors.html.
He rates PI as his second favourite after PS.

Having said that, I would still like to get PS mainly because of the information, tips, and support that are available. Just looking through DGrin there are so many tutorials and suggestions using PS, while I can generally figure out how to do stuff with PI it tends to take me a lot longer. BIG difference in price though and there's few things higher on my shopping list at the moment!!

You can download a trial copy of PI from:-
http://www.ulead.com/pi/runme.htm

Cheers

Jon

jimf · April 29, 2004

wxwax wrote:

I like Rutt's suggestion. And if you get hooked, you'll really want the power of Photochop.

Coming from Gimp I was really skeptical of the value of Photoshop. I mean, $600? That seemed ridiculous when Gimp does nearly all the same stuff for nothing.

Unfortunately getting Gimp to run on the Mac proved more difficult than it was worth, but if you're on Windows it may be a viable choice. Beware, though, that it is more difficult to use than Photoshop -- significantly so.

Elements came with my camera and I used it for awhile. It's sufficient, certainly, although if you're shooting raw then the agony of running the raw converter and then photoshop gets annoying fast. Moreover Elements can't deal with more than 8 bit deep images, and it doesn't support "actions" (basically Photoshop scripting). For bulk stuff Elements will prove insufficient.

I bought Photoshop CS with an educational discount, making it reasionably affordable. Having used it a bunch in the last few weeks I have to say that Adobe is right, this is actually worth $600 if you're doing a lot of image work. It's easily the smoothest prto use of any of the programs I've tried (a lot of them, but not all of them by any means). I would not have guessed that before I started using it myself.

IMO if you can get Photoshop CS then do it. If it's too much money I would suggest trying Elements to see if it works for you and if it's not sophisticated enough then check out Gimp. The others I've used, like Paint Shop Pro, I found to be more or less the same as Elements in capabilities (although admittedly it's been awhile since I used PSP) and were eminently skippable when Gimp was an option.

rutt · April 29, 2004

BTW, if you are a student, it seems that the price for photoshop cs is $280. Look here..

jimf · April 29, 2004

rutt wrote:

BTW, if you are a student, it seems that the price for photoshop cs is $280. Look here..

I got my Educational copy for $260 from a local university computer store, including tax.

gubbs · April 29, 2004

In the UK the Educational copy is Â£299 inc 17.5% vat = $532 which is more than double what you guys in the US can get it for.

Same with Cameras eg
Olympus 8080 Â£599 = $1066 you pay $800
Canon Powershot Pro = Â£799 = $1422 you pay $900

I could flyover pick up a camera and a copy of PS, have a few beers with you guys and still make a saving! What's going on!

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choosing a software package

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