Yesterday, I finally bought a copy of Adobe Photoshop. It was on sale at the NYU Computer Store for the low price of “only” $180. Not exactly cheap, but it would be painful indeed to buy it at the regular price of $620. That’s more expensive than a DSLR!
The last time I was a student, back in 2001, I bought the Corel Graphics Suite at the student price. At the time, Photoshop was $100 more, so I figured why not save $100 and get an entire suite of stuff? That turned out to be a big mistake. I never used any of the other programs in the suite besides Photo-Paint, and for the next seven years I had Photoshop envy.
Whether or not it’s possible to accomplish the same effects in Photoshop as you can in a less expensive photo editing program, it’s indisputable that Photoshop is the industry standard, and as such there is a lot more help available in the form of books, online tutorials, and formal instruction. Advanced photo-editing is quite complicated, and I found that without any quality instruction materials, I was stuck using the very ineffective trial-and-error method.
What other photo editing programs might you use if you can’t afford to buy Photoshop? You might consider Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 for $65. I don’t have it currently running on my computer, but a few months ago I did check out the 30-day trial of the previous X1 version, and I found it to be quite feature-packed. It has a useful easy-to-use purple-fringe-removing tool that you won’t find in Photoshop. It even runs some Photoshop plugins.
Another program I like is Picture Window Pro. It comes with very good documentation that fully explains how to accomplish all of the most important photo-editing tasks. Picture Window was the very first program to include a chromatic aberration correction tool, but that feature is now in Photoshop. Picture Window Pro also includes the best color correction tool, that’s not like anything in Photoshop. (The same company sells this tool separately for $60 as a Photoshop plugin.) Unfortunately, Picture Window is weak in some areas, such as its inferior unsharp mask tool and its inability to run Photoshop plugins. Nevertheless, I really like this program, and would recommend it as the best inexpensive alternative to Photoshop, but with the caution that it has a unique interface that’s very different from every other program.
A program I don’t recommend is Adobe Photoshop Elements 6. This is a program in which advanced tools, such as curves (included in every other program mentioned above), have purposely been removed in order to punish the user for not buying the full price version of Photoshop. It’s much better to buy a program in which the programmers are trying to develop the best possible program instead of one where the programmers are intentionally making it less capable. And the lack of curves is a deal-breaker.
