by SenorPhrog » Sat Mar 06, 2004 5:27 am
Photoshop is crap, my friends and countrymen. A bloated hunk of code, riddled with shoddy design concepts and an interface so utterly asanine it would take an idiot-savant donkey to appreciate and enjoy it. Every time I'm forced to use it at school, I shudder. Sure, it can be powerful...but have you ever tried throwing together a quick bit of text-on-image work, or something as simple as, God forbid, editing a photo? It takes ten minutes just to get everything set up to fix a minor flaw, and that's not counting load times! Perhaps if it weren't so filled with extraneous spyware, such as the code in the recent edition that detects if you've scanned in an image of a piece of US currency and pops up an error saying in essence "counterfeiting is bad!", things would take so damned long to get going. Its only saving grace, perhaps, is that nobody pays the outrageous $900-or so pricetag on the thing except for serious graphics artists who need it for doing things like making stock photos of George W. Bush look less ape-like or bit-mapping the Human genome.
No, folks: Jasc's Paint Shop Pro is where it's at. If you're looking for a program with the power of layers and filters enough to keep you going and happy but don't need all that extra garbage, and you'd just like something to quickly and easily touch up photos, drawings, or even compose them on the program, you can't do much better than PSP. Granted, its more recent versions have tried to make it more similar to PS, which unfortunately has brought more bad than good, but earlier versions are still available and absolutely great to work with. At least, that's my experience. I've yet to hear from you big time artists here, so take my ramblings with a grain of salt--I've never really had to try to get the most out of my imaging program, so I'm not particularly sure what either is truly capable of. That's my two copper.
