PSP is complex and cheap. PS is complex and expensive. PS is far better at colour handling and prepress. But, if you want a cheap program, and are interested in Photoshop, try looking at Elements. It has a lot of the power of Photoshop (indeed, it’s has about 80% of the full Photoshop’s abilities).
If all you want to do is manipulate and print fro friends and family, and web work, Elements is all you need and is much easier to use than PSP. And despite the snobbery surrounding other image manipulation programs, so is Ulead’s PhotoImpact (Which has one or two filters that, if they were to appear in Photoshop, would have everyone saying how brilliant Adobe programmers were.).
So look around π
I’ll agree with 75% of what you say…
PSP does not have PS’s prepress or color management chops, but is a killer little powerhouse for $100– and there are a few things it does rather better than PS– for 1/6th the price. The current version is a smart app that does more than enough for a whole lot of people.
Photoshop is a superior piece of software, but it is not six times better ***unless*** you need the upper end of the feature set. If it is the only thing
that does what you need– as has been the case for a very long time– you can get away with charging whatever you like for it. If you’re bleeding to death and need a transfusion of AB Negative blood, you aren’t going to accept O positive just because it is cheaper.
But if you’re just feeling a bit peckish and there’s a McDonald’s on one side
of the street and an expense account steakhouse on the other, you might balance the $5 fast sandwich and drink at the drive thru (and the $25 you’ll still have in your pocket) against the $30 sandwich and drink (and the $6 tip you’ll have to leave, and the $4 for the valet to park and retrieve your car) and decide you’d rather spend the extra money on concert tickets. This is even more true if you’re not by yourself, but have 3 or 4 friends in the car with you– or a schoolbus full of folks to provide for.
You’re also right about PhotoImpact— the asterism filter is actually very cool, and trackball rotate is slick…and if all you need is quick and dirty extrusions, nothing could be easier ……but it doesn’t make up for the fact that the rest of the program is cumbersome and molasses slow on large images. With prosumer digital cameras now in the 5-10 Megapixel range, if PI doesn’t clean up it’s act it’s going to get left in the dust. Try editing a 6MB image on a P4 with 512MB RAM with PI— a pretty typical consumer computer– but make sure the parrot is out of the room first, or he’ll start squawking ‘Oh Sh*t!" the next time the vicar comes to visit.
But I think Elements is a dog’s breakfast. You call it easy to use. I call it painfully dumbed down. There are layer styles, but you can’t create your own, so unless you buy a book like Jack Davis’ they are fairly useless. Call me crazy, but buying a $50 WOW book (Plus Hidden Secrets for another $40)
to get functionality out of a $100 program seems counterproductive. You’ve spent $200 and you still can’t draw a smooth curved line. There’s no manual image straightening utility– you either accept the automatic one, or you do it with deform and guides and hope you get it right. No Curves. Rudimentary levels…. but I’d bet the folks at AutoFx and AlienSkin love it….
of course those cost a couple of hundred bucks a piece, too. So, invest about $600 in Elements and you’ll have patched it up so it’s just like big brother….
Or PSP, for $100.
