Is anybody here familiar with both Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro product lines?. I've been using the second since the seventh (like 6 years ago) version and I now have PSPX.
My question is: Since I never used photoshop, am I missing on any feature? I don't see what it could have that PSP don't, but I could be wrong.
I haven't used the PSP line in a while but Photoshop, whilst more expensive, is the better app. It's more stable (had a few PSP crashes) and much more efficient for production quality stuffs. The performance boost I got from switching from CS3 to 4 was mad - what took about 8 minutes to load in CS3 only took 3 minutes in CS4.
Don't know the exact differences though. But under the hood Photoshop CS4 is a mother truckin powerhouse.
The stability part is appealing because I sometimes have unwarranted crashes just by deleting a layer. The bad thing is, I just checked the prices, and I wonder what justify 1500+$.
You say it's much more efficient. I'm not sure I'd be ready to pay that much just for that. It would need to have more features.
Efficiency is nice, but I'm sure that we don't do the same kind of work anyway. The widest I go would be about 2000 pxls. But for an image to take 8 minutes to load, or even 3, it sure has to be crazy big! You probably work with loads of layers too.
I'm in love with Photoshop, however I can't say I'm that big of a fan of CS4. I use a GeForce 9800GT, 2GB's of Ram, and a Dual Core processor. The whole program still runs pretty shitty for me. I love CS3 though, very solid, stable, haven't had a single problem, and it's never once crashed on me.
It's probably worth saying I'm using CS4 on the Mac partition of my computer though, the Windows version doesn't run as well but it's still a brilliant app. Though it might be down to my Windows partition being 32bit... (though I only have 3gb ram).
You can't go wrong with CS3 or CS4. CS2 is quite bad at handling large files. I guess it just depends on what you'll be using it for.
PSP is imo no where near as good as Photoshop. Like James said, it's more stable, but it costs more. Photoshop has better textures, brushes, effects, drawing material, such.
Tbh, Photoshop is impressive, heh... WAY better than PSP, but I'd rather have Illustrator.
And you know, it's worth something that the mainstream'd word for photo editing is "Photoshopped." Yea, you can argue that what's the most popular isn't necessarily the best, but I don't often hear much about things made in PSP. You hear about Photoshop all the time.
Corel has almost always been a backseat kind of software developer to me, I don't know why. (Sorry Clickteam. ) Whereas Adobe makes some top-tier stuff. (Even if slow and memory-hogging on old systems) It's a pretty safe bet that if a program costs you an arm and a leg and it still sells, it's the best program on the market.
That said, I've begun to like GIMP, even though I used to despise it. Once you get used to it it really grows on you. It's intended to be a photoshop replacement, isn't it? And it's free.
I'll go get trial versions of photoshop and painter then, just to see what would fit with my needs the best.
Gimp might be good too, so I'll also look into it.
I used to use Paintshop Pro back when it was like 6 and 7, but after I got Photoshop I never really looked back. Photoshop has been able to do everything I needed, I've never felt that it wasn't able to complete a task.
But then again, depends what you want to use it for and whether you need a lot of features and extras.