I asked you guys a little while ago about graphics/illustration/art type software and got some great feed back and I have another question I hope you can help me with. I have narrowed down the field between Corel and Photoshop and I was wondering which one was easier to learn and which one has the most features/versitility and why?
I use both, and have for quite a few years, so this is just my opinion. Corel is more affordable, easier to learn, and offers many of the possibilities that Photoshop does. There’s not really anything that I can do in Photoshop that I can’t do in Corel.
Photoshop is fantastic, but it’s not the most intuitive program I’ve ever used. It’s very well-suited for specific purposes, or for those who have a bit more experience in graphics. I do prefer it for very high-end, artistic projects, but I rarely get paid for my artsy stuff like that.
Corel is pretty much usable out of the box, for anyone with a fundamental understanding of graphics. I find it much more efficient for most graphic design work.
This will be shot over to imho, I’m sure.
Photoshop isn’t 5 times as good as correl paint shop pro, but it is five times as expensive; it’s worth the money for professional applications, but for people just screwing around? I find paint shop pro easier to use, but I’ve been using it for the past six versions so it might just be familiarity.
These and these are examples of things that you can do with corel’s product. Come to think of it, I used it to make everything on this page too. Do you need to do fancier things?
Jasc sold out its flagship app, Paint Shop Pro, to Corel a few years back. Corel ruined a quality graphics program that beat Photoshop on price and features that the vast majority of graphics program users needed to use.
If you want a decent alternative to Photoshop, try its little brother, Photoshop Elements. Or go free with Gimp.
When I started working in graphics I had the option of learning Corel or Photoshop. After playing around in both it seemed to me that an artist getting into computers would probably find Corel more intuitive but a computer user getting into art would find Photoshop more intuitive. Being the latter I learnt Photoshop. One of the main differences that sold me on Photoshop was that Corel seemed to present me with a large ‘page’ which I would build the graphics on whereas Photoshop presented me with a window that was the actual size of the project I was working on. So if I were building a 2’x1’ ad in Photoshop I would just see the ad, in Corel I would see the ad and an enormous white border. There were a few other little things that seemed similarly bizarre in Corel that were much more obvious in Photoshop, but my memories are too fuzzy to try and explain them. I never really learnt Corel much though, since it made a bad first impression on me, it’s possible there was a way of setting it up more to my liking. And I haven’t used Corel in years so a lot has probably changed.
I really like Paint Shop Pro. I find its feature set similar to Photoshop’s (there are a few things I envy in Photoshop, such as the gradient tool and the background remover/featherer thing, but overall there’s never been a project I could not do in PSP – but then again, I’m just an interested amateur and not a pro). And in terms of price and ease of use, Paint Shop Pro has Photoshop beat by miles. PSP supports almost all Photoshop file types and even Photoshop filters. I started out on Photoshop and switched to PSP because I found it to be a more pleasant experience over the years.
That said, I think both offer trials. Why not try both and see which one you like?
Photoshop is the industry standard and some people will literally mock you for using anything less, but I generally just :rolleyes: at them. No one has ever been able to tell that I used something different.
If affordability is important to you I suggest GIMP. They are all about the same difficulty to learn and if you can use one you can use them all.
GIMP is free.
No, I don’t need more than that. That looks like everything I would want and more.
I guess I’ll have to buy the Dummies book or take classes, though.
They are very similar but if you’re looking to put something on a resume go with Photoshop. Corel is a bit easier to use, but it’s not THAT much easier.
Actually GIMP is free and does pretty much the same thing but it is hard to learn to use. I used it but thank goodness we had a step by step guide in our local library to use GIMP.
Totally agree. I have used Paint Shop Pro for years and years. It was a quality affordable package. It was a sad day when Corel bought it.
The background remover you’re probably talking about comes with Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate as a plug-in. I say “probably” because the instruction manual pdf for it talks about how to use in in Photoshop, not Paint Shop Pro…
I am probably waaay behind the times, but for about ten years when I was learning computer apps, I tried Corel (because it was cheap) and Photoshop (because it was the Industry Standard). And repeatedly, a function I couldn’t wrap my chops around in Photoshop turned out to be duck soup in Corel. Corel seemed to be made for real people, not computer programmers. And Corel was miles faster, too.
Things may have changed, so you can discount this comment considerably with the passage of time. I’m surprised to hear that Corel still exists.
How is Corel’s latest software for bugginess? Back in the day, I used to do a lot of graphics work using Corel Draw and other Corel applications, and even though I became fluent in them, I eventually abandoned all Corel products because of the insane amount of bugs. The kicker for me was when one of the versions of Corel shipped with a print driver that would crash on any resolution over 300 DPI. Since Corel was aiming their product at graphics professionals, this was an insane bug to ship with. I found out about it at 3 AM the night before a deadline to get a full-page ad in a magazine, when I finally finished the layout and tried to print a 1200 DPI postcript file for my print house. That bug cost me about $2000.
Later, I heard a strong rumor that Corel knew about a number of release-criterion bugs, but shipped the product because they needed to get it in before the end of the quarter to prop up their stock price because they were working a deal with another company.
I also used Corel’s desktop publishing software for my software manuals, and it was painful constantly having to work around the numerous bugs in that product.
This is about 10 years ago now, so maybe they’ve cleaned up their act.
I don’t know about Corel, but as stated above Paint Shop Pro was originally a Jasc product. Corel just bought out the company, and well, PSP still works much like I remember it from Jasc.
The lead programmer on Paint Shop Pro was an old friend of mine named Jon Ort - one of the brightest people I’ve ever known. When we worked together at a graphics company in Chicago (Targa board days), Jon designed a PC motherboard, wrote the microcode and BIOS and designed one of the first 24-bit VGA cards. The graphics utilities he wrote for that card eventually became the basis of Paint Shop Pro.
His original goal was to have “90% of Photoshop’s capability at one-tenth the price”. Somewhere around PSP 7, he started to exceed Photoshop (IMO, obviously). Adobe started playing catch-up with PSP features like Browse. The main problem with Adobe Photoshop is that they want to continue to sell their other products like Illustrator, so Photoshop is downright crippled compared to PSP in terms of vector drawing - you want vector masks? Open Illustrator.
I lost contact with him when JASC sold, so I don’t know if Jon is still working on the program at Corel.
Neat. Well, if you ever get in touch with him again, please tell him an anonymous Doper worships his program 
I started out with a pirated copy, but after a few dozen hours I gained so much respect for it I finally paid for it and every version since.
I’m assuming from your first post that you’re looking for pixel-based editing, not vectors, so I’ll save my proselytizing of MS Expression Design and Illustrator. 
Between PSP and Photoshop, it really comes down to personal preferences. I believe both currently offer trial versions, so I’d recommend getting your hands on 'em and seeing which you prefer. I find Photoshop’s interface more intuitive, but it’s a heckuva lot more expensive.
Depending on what you’re looking to do, though, I highly recommend checking out GIMP and Paint.Net. GIMP is nearly as powerful as PS, but with a very different interface and fewer “automatic” tools to streamline jobs. Still very useful. Paint.Net is much simpler, but for cropping and tweaking existing images, it’s very efficient.
Back when it was owned by JASC, Jon told me that he deliberately didn’t make the copy protection especially difficult to break. He’d rather people use it, and the more people who used it, the more people who eventually buy it, exactly as you did.
If I could, I’d like to make a pitch for a much more obscure program, QFX. It has been in continuous development since the computer graphics were done on 24bit Targa cards when PC and Mac graphics were monochrome. One man has been producing it, Ron Scott, and he started as a photographer and learned to program to produce the photo editing tool he wanted. It was fully multi-threaded years before Photoshop, and uses multiple processors far better - QFX splits the screen and each processor works on part of the image. It operates on images in a fundamentally different way than Photoshop of PSP, and has been able to work on multi-gigabyte images on a machine with only one gigabyte of memory.
It’s not been updated with anywhere near the frequency of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but it has capabilities that neither of those has. Back when I was doing 3D animation, I would use QFX as a compositing engine. The program started out as a collection of DOS programs united under an interface, so I could call one small program to do an alpha channel composite of one image over another through a batch file. The images were at 4k - in 1986. SInce then, he has incorporated a full scripting language in the main program.
I find Paint.NET handles most simple photo editing duties and its 100% free and unlike The Gimp, its interface is easy to understand.
This seems pretty common practice in the “creative tools” field. Even in this day and age of fancy online-enabled protection schemes, most creative software seems to still be locked down with a simple, easy-to-find-online serial number.
It makes sense. Most people don’t want to use pirated software for commercial use. Get 'em using your product as a learning / dabbling tool and if they ever decide to buy software, they’ll buy yours.