Help an Old fart out

As I'm fooking u/less with these computer things & things are a little busy here at the moment, can anyone point in the direct of a good photo edit suit package, would really help all round cheers Tone

 

you have PM

 

There is only one photo editing package and it's called Adobe PhotoShop However, it's very expensive (and also not great for beginners) so a permitted alternative is Paint Shop Pro: http://www.jasc.com/products/paintshoppro/

Michael.

 

Photoshop is by far the best but like Micheal says its not cheap. You can do a lot of great stuff with it though, I made my avator using it.

A free alternative is the Gimp which was Linux's answer to Photoshop however it has recently been ported to WIN32 which means it will run on windows. Its a great package considering it is free and has all the layering features etc.

Give me a few mins I and I will try and find a link.

 

Found it http://www.gimp.org/

Basicaly its open source and is freeware.

Paintshop pro is another good alternative like Micheal said but you do have to pay for it as its shareware. Personaly I only use photoshop.

 

Seriously, you can have Photoshop cheap if you can copy one from someone.


regards

 

Yes but we don't talk about that I guess its ok for home users though. PS I was refering to piracy and not photoshop itself! Photoshop is great!.

 

voodoo recommend Photoshop :MILD:.

 

There is also a version that will run under DOS

 

I could have your hifi cheap if I went to your place and nicked it. Same thing.

OTOH, I think that Adobe do price PhotoShop way too high. It's particularly annoying that the latest version (CS) is available for download in the US for $650 yet if you want it in the UK you have to pay £605 (inc. VAT) which is about a $380 mark up :bub:

It's not like it costs them any more if there's a downloadable version available (and the packaged version costs the same as the download version in the US anyway). There's no shipping or any other bollox. Of course the downloadable version is not available unless you live in the US :inferno:

Even more galling is that if you say you're ordering from Portugal the price (inc. VAT) is €713 - still a markup over the US price but a bearable one...but hold on, that's the Portuguese language version. If I want the English language version in Portugal I have to pay €867 roughly the same as in the UK (£605) so in fact you pay less for a local language version that must have cost them more to make! What's abundantly clear from all these varied prices is that Adobe are simply charging what the market will bear with no regard to what it actually costs them to make :inferno: :bub:

With that in mind, I do have some sympathy with people who get pirate copies of PhotoShop. If Adobe priced it realistically they'd get far more people paying for it.

Michael.

 

I think the price of PS is to reflect the profit a company can make by useing the software, I have a mate who works in the repro trade (profesional PS user) and they do advertisement graphics for Guiness, Coca Cola etc....
So you can imagine that thier profit quite happily covers the cost of software

 

Gimp is shit.

Adobe Photoshop is excellent, but its rather difficult to use.

Paint Shop Pro is easier to use, and contains many of the Photoshop features, but is a bit crashy.

Adobe Photoshop Elements I have not checked out yet, but I have a copy residing on my machine, which I need to try out, but I reckon that'd be worth a crack.

Download bit-torrent and install it.

Go to www.suprnova.org and click apps -- there

 

Paintshop Pro is pretty good for resizing images, making jpgs smaller, tweaking contrast and colour balance and all that sort of stuff. The red-eye remover works pretty well too.

Loads of bells and whistles, £99.95, http://www.digitalworkshop.com/index.shtml for details.


Paul

 

Thanks for all the replies, mucho gracias I have now managed to source the correct software, hopefully will be along tomorrow, again thanks to everyone. Tone

 

That's the real problem. PS was once something that pretty much only professionals used so the price wasn't really that important.

However, more and more people are using digital cameras now and more and more of them want a quality "digital darkroom" tool. Adobe has tried to fob people off with PS Elements. That will do for the complete novice but for the rest of us unfortunately only PhotoShop will do. I'm sure that Paintshop Pro is almost as good as PS but since PS is the de-facto tool all things like actions and camera specific addons (eg for reading RAW digital files) are made for PhotoShop.

Adobe have to realise that a great many non-pro users are using PhotoShop and they have to price it realistically.

Michael.

 

Photoshop elements is really good for the money

 

Yes it is, but there are any number of actions etc for my camera (Olympus E10 - which I believe you have also) which only work in the full blown PS and not elements.

A realistic price for Photoshop would be around $200-250. That still sets it way above the competition (which it has a right to be) but makes it pretty accessible to private individuals.

Michael.

 

I hate having dodgy software but I don't really have much choice, I need photoshop for uni work and its not practical doing all my work at uni when its so far away.

I cannot afford to pay £650 for it either. When I setup my own buisiness in multimedia I will happily pay for it then as thats another matter.

For educational and personal use I think software should be much cheaper. Most businesses in the industry can easily afford to spend £2000 or so on software licences per year. They just have to pass that onto the clients.

I think people need to appeciate exactly what is involved in making software like photoshop because it aint easy. I am currently writing an naughts and crosses game in c++ and its amazing how many little details there are that the average user never appecriates. Its like computer games, the amount of physics required to make even simple 2D ones is quite tense.

 

hmmmm....

If I were to post a message saying:

"anyone who has a copy of photoshop they wish to give me please pm me and i'll do you a few cds in return if you want"

would that be wrong?

 

If you were going to do it. I would not ask people on an open forum like this At uni some students literly give away free CDs in return for a blank cd. Thats where I get all my stuff.

Its a very grey area to be honest. It is of course possible to have all your software free. If you use a linux operating system, use open source software such as gimp and staroffice then you have a tottaly legal system.

I know of some companies that have switched to linux for this reason.