Paint Shop Pro vs. Photoshop

I've used Paint Shop Pro for upwards of 6 years now, upgrading

versions as I went along. Does anyone have anything to say about this program in comparison with Adobe? What, if anything, am I missing out on?

Primarily with Photoshop you'll buy in to a userbase with more knowledge and experience than most others in the area. You also run the chance of getting advice from people that know nothing. The biggest and most hidden advantage in photoshop is the quality of its processing. I've noticed many operations take a little longer in PS and they produce nicer results. Their algorithms are more finely tuned and are higher in precision. You don't get the same quality Histogram calculations in PSP that you can get in PS.

 

With that said, if you're not interested in sinking the money in to Adobe (its absurdly and needlessly expensive) go with Corel PhotoPaint. I've noticed little difference and the quality is right on par with PS. It also costs considerably less. i have both Photopaint and Photoshop on my system.

Do you feel as if you're missing something? If not, then you're not missing out on anything.

> (its absurdly and needlessly expensive) <

 

Actually, if you look at EVERYTHING it can do, it is a reasonably-priced piece of software. The problem is that as photographers, we only regularly use about 1/3 of its functionality. Nonetheless, it is a very powerful program once you have mastered a few of the basics. Also, it has become the defacto standard in the industry for post processing digital images. Hence it would be difficult for me to imagine switching to a different program. YMMV

 

Cheers,

I converted from Paint Shop Pro 7 to Photoshop 6 for one reason: color management. Paint Shop Pro has some color management features, but they are not well documented and I was never satisfied that they were doing things correctly. Photoshop 6 has advanced color management features and I think the publishing industry beat on Adobe until they got it (mostly) right.

PSP has a very intuitive interface with a feature set that covers the needs of casual to intermediate users. Like you, I used PSP extensively before switching to PS. PSP is like a bicycle compared to Photoshop's (and presumably Corel's) automobile. If you want to go from home to the local library, a bicycle will get you there. If you want to travel 300 miles in a few hours with 100 lbs of luggage, you need a car. That said, it took me a few days to learn how to ride a bicycle, but several months of serious effort to learn to drive a car.

 

Here are a few examples.

 

In Photoshop I might separately adjust the sky and the rest of the image. Or separately adjust the magentas or reduce the saturation of the yellow leaves of a fall tree. I might selectively composite the sky from one exposure of an image with the non-sky from another exposure of the same image. I might need to zap the chromatic aberration in one picture or reduce scanner noise in only the blue channel. I routinely use a complex action called edge sharpening to apply extremely strong unsharp mask to edges of objects while leaving smooth areas such as sky and water untouched. I work in the Adobe98 colour space to preserve colours from film that are lost in sRGB; and the colours I see on the monitor are the same colours I see on the print from my inkjet.

 

All or most of these issues may be irrelevant to you; in which case PSP is all you need.

If you are a casual user (i.e. aren't using imaging tools to make your living

with), there is Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. Much less expensive than

Photoshop 7.0 but still has most of the features photographers commonly use.

IS there much of a difference between photoshop 6 versus photoshop 7 .... I presently have version 6.

The new features in PS7 fall into the buckets of highly useful, nice to have, and keeping Adobe software engineers employed. Which features fall into which bucket depends on your needs.

<ul>

<li>The healing brush and patch tools do a great job at knocking out scratches, dust, and zits. The results do not have the blurry look the clone tool produces.

<li>The new brush settings are a powerful tool for graphics designers. You can customize the size, shape, tilt, and who knows what all else. Along the same lines are a set of art studio brushes to simulate charcoal and pastel work.

<li>If you share a computer, PS7 allows you to save multiple workspaces.

<li>The File Browser is nice in that it shows both image previews and EXIF info for the digicam crowd.

<li>Making portions of images transparent for web use is easier.

<li>The Picture Package is actually a useful tool. You can place different images on a page as well as multiple copies of the same one.

<li>The spell checker is now multilingually useless.

</li></ul>

Ben

 

I did a quick comparison of Photoshop 5.0 and a PSP of the same era (was it 6?). The main differences I saw were

 

a) PS is significantly faster than PSP when performing CPU intensive operations such as sharpening and gaussian blurs of large files.

b) The PS sharpening algorithm is much 'cleaner' than the PSP one. By

cleaner I mean that it seems to do a much more pleasing and less noisy job.

 

I am sure there are other differences as I just scratched the surface. I concluded that PS is a pro product aimed (and priced) at people for whom time is money and who need high quality output. Part of the cost comes from the time spent optimising the algorithms for speed and quality. The amateur interested in scanning and manipulating family snaps probably would not notice the difference.

 

Does PSP have layers and channels? That is one feature of PS that really is superb. The ability to do high pass sharpening with a channel mask really is essential for getting the most out of a slide scan.

 

As someone has said, PS Elements is excellent. It lacks layers but otherwise has sharpening, curves, and lots else. It has some weird features aimed at the amateur which I are supposed to make it user friendly and which I don't like. Otherwise it is PS without the pro features. Better than PSP in my opinion.

 

Leif

Regarding Photoshop Elements - I agree it a very good value, but you are not correct in saying it lacks layers - it does indeed do layers basically the same as full PS - it does lack masks (plus a few other things I have never even thought of using). PS Elements is a really useful programme, and great value. I have both Elements 2 and PS 6 and I really don't notice any difference, except a few cosmetic differences, and the way the toolbars stick to the main page.

Here is a screen save showing Photoshop Elements 2 - I have dragged the layers toolbar out of the "stable" of toolbars on the top right - it normally sits there, and pops down when being used, and then disappears - if you are used to the toolbars in full PS you might find this annoying, but you can then just drag the box onto the screen and it will stick there.