Cost of Photoshop

[Trinity]

Just noticed one of Kev's posts referring to the high cost of Photoshop. I bought a a little Canon IPF4850 £60 printer at the beginning of September, coming with Elements 6 software, but by mid October I'd received an Adobe email offering 50% of Photoshop CS5 - £328 inc Vat. But my photos are no better Kev!

[Jonny2morsos]

Photoshop will allow you to have far more control over the printing though so there is a potential to make far better correctly colour managed prints.

[stcstc]

photoshop is as essential as a good lens on your camera


cameras a just photocopiers and take low contrast and not very sharp pictures

you need photoshop to add contrast and sharpness, just for starters

[mikeysaling]

plenty of other post processors available - one of my favs is corel paint shop pro x3 - easier to cope with than PS and IMHO more intuitive. Cannot agree that pS is essential - a good lens on a camera is THE essential . Once the photo is taken its very difficult to make silk purse from a sows ear.

I know the question concerns a copier/scanner but with a camera take the image in RAW then process with whatever software is provided (or PS if you have it) then tweak if nec when its a JPG in paintshop or even a free image editor.

I don't subscribe to PS being the be all and end all of editinf specially at the price .

[stcstc]

sorry, i tend to use photoshop as a generic term now lol

your right mikey, there are loads of other apps out there including some free ones

in fact the most popular photo processing app would you belive is not photoshop, but lightroom

one thing i would say though if your serious about image manipulation then really the main choice if photoshop, if you want proper support, plugin developer support etc

[mikeysaling]

yep - if i had the dough i'd probably have PS and spend the time to learn it (but its a steep curve - maybe even a course or two) . Before concentrating on medals I spent many hours on frames for the local pub including many ciggy frames of all orientations and sizes. I bought a legit copy of autocad 14 from a local architect who was retiring! The learning curve was incredible and i needed cribsheets (post it notes) everywhere to enable design of ciggy frames - was not that easy !

When i took the files to another local framer who had a cmc he could produce the same thing in the fraction of the time it took me on autocad - but of course he wsas pleased i'd already done it on AC - but his software was a lot more user friendly than my top of the range all singing all dancing autocad. Have you seen the price of autocad compared with the software you get with a cmc?

hope that dissertation makes a bit of sense - i think i'm saying you don't need to buy an allsinging dancing thing to get a particular job done well.

mikey

[mikeysaling]

taken with a panasonic point and shoot and a close up lens processed with paint shop

[Framerpicture]

in fact the most popular photo processing app would you belive is not photoshop, but lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a piece of software to develop digital photos shot in "raw" format and for photographers to categorize their pictures for their archives. It is not for photo editing in the same way Photoshop is.

[Jonny2morsos]

At the end of the day it depends on what you want to use image processing software for. The above image is 530 x 591 pixels and is displayed on a monitor so pretty much anything would do.

If however you want to produce a large print on a fine art paper with correct colour gradation then that is a different matter.

[Framerpicture]

Totally agree J2M, I was just clarifying that photoshop and lightroom are quite different-
Elements is the "Lite" version of Photoshop. It allows you to edit images ,make adjustments such as cloning and similar . Lightroom is a cataloging program that has very powerful image processing controls, but doesn't allow editing at the pixel level, such as you would do with Elememts or Photoshop.

I've only ever used photoshop and to be honest I only ever use a fraction of its capabilities- I'd be interested to see what other alternative/free software people are using

[stcstc]

actually no one said lightroom was for pixel editing, infact not even photo editing

it is for photo processing. it can do the vast majority of the tasks that both pro and semi pro phototog need

I have been using photoshop since it first came out over 15 years ago, and yes for pixel level editing i find it the most useful

one of the fundemental things missing from photoshop elements is soft proofing, so if your serious about printing its not much use!!

[JFeig]

I have used Corel for many years.

http://www.corel.com/corel/product/inde ... rod4130078

It is more robust the Adobe Elements.

[Framerpicture]

What I was trying to say is there's a differnce between processing an image and editing it and you might choose different software with this in mind!

There's not Soft Proofing on Lightbox either but believe there are available plug-ins for lighbox and elements

[Not your average framer]

I've been using Paint Shop Pro since about the year 2000. I got the first copy from a friend who was upgrading and version 7 (the one I'm using now) as a clearance bargain. It's an excellent program and very easy to use.

[prospero]

I use PaintShopPro (V6). As Mark says, more user friendly than PS. Most of the time it is more than adequate for everyday image manipulation.

PS is pretty much the industry standard. A very powerful piece of software. But the average user will use about 0.1% of it's features. Also takes time to learn.

I've got PS (an old version) but very rarely crank it up. I only really use it for the airbrush, which is not one of PSP's better features.

[Ray]

I think I'm getting the message...... "DON'T USE SPRAYMOUNT!!!!".

[prospero]

That's a feature I didn't know about.

What will they think of next?

[kev@frames]

A pal of mine put it into perspective on the cost of photoshop, he's a photographer (he makes a living doing nothing else but taking and selling photos) and he uses CS5
he says photoshop is only the same price as an entry level professional DSLR camera. And for him it is just as important as his camera is to him.

My photoshop is an old version anyway, hence the W7/64bit issues that made me look at alternatives.

for a pro photographer I can see the advantage of having everything in one package like photoshop. But between paint.net (free), an old version of PSP (free on a magazine cover disk), picasa (free) I haven't hankered after a new version of photoshop.
The only thing about paint.net is that you can accumulate literally 1000s of plugins that you will probably never use, and end up using less than 1% of its potential, just like photoshop. I can waste hours messing with a photo, eventually realising that I have just been experimenting with plugins and effects for the sake of it, and invariably when my photographer mate sees them he'll pronounce that I have completely overdone it :-/
why give a film-noir, night vision, oval masked, fish-eye and motion blur to a picture of a cow?
er.... because I could.

To prove the point he took me out on a photography mission on Bodmin Moor a couple of weeks ago, and gave me a day's worth of tuition, shouting at, rolling eyes, and back-to-basics on F numbers, exposures, composition, shadows and most importantly "standing in the right spot, at the right time in the first place..."

btw you can run older software versions of photoshop and premiere by using windows virtual machine, so unless you want the latest version, older versions are always available at far less outlay.

[IslandViewJake]

Actually, Lightroom will work with RAW, Tiff's, JPG's and PSD's (Photoshop's native files), so it is quite versatile. It is a database which works on the 'Keyword' system, and if you're a full time photographer, or anyone with thousands of images, then that certainly is the way to go. Eliminates the tedious and impossible task of sifting through hundreds of folders to find the image file you want. Yes, it does a great many of the workflow jobs that Photoshop does, but ideally, they both work together or at least complement each other in the workflow. I work on all of my images in Lightroom, but when there's serious cloning and/or other work to be done, then PS is really necessary. Another advantage of LR is that it's none destructive to pixels and doesn't work with layers (as does Photoshop, if you're going to use it properly). As with most things, it's a case of how much work you have for either/or to justify the outlay.

[Custard]

Yes Photoshop is expensive, but actually the cost of the software is nothing compared to the cost of the time you'll have to invest to learn how to you use it properly and effectively. Even allowing for the fact that that any one user probably uses less than half of its features, it's still a massive undertaking, comparable to gaining a basic skill level in a language or a musical instrument. So think carefully before plunging in, decide what specifically it is that you want and see if there are simpler alternatives, for example if what you really need is RAW conversion or database management then Lightroom may be a better bet.