I agree wholeheartedly with another poster…I REALLY appreciate the guy that wrote PSP and was very sad when Corel bought it and (IMO) ruined it. Slicing, tubes, cloning,…every instance of image manipulation I felt was far batter that anything else on the market. I started using it on version 2 I believe and donated to the cause and purchased every subsequesnt release till corel go it.
There is a new upstart called paint.net (thats actually the program name) that looks a bit like that first version of Jasc which I am using now but it has a long way to go. I hope they succeed!
I’ve been using Photoshop since 1.0, in 1990 (grayscale!). I suppose the reason I continue to use it is because it’s what I’m used to. I’ve tried some of the others, but they just seem “alien” to me . . . it’s the same feeling I get when using a PC rather than a Mac. But I’m not deluding myself into thinking the program’s significantly better than its competitors, or that it’s the best choice for everyone.
I was working on an illustration in a painterly style, that I hadn’t really done before in Photoshop. But I found it hard going, and seemed to me more like something suited to Corel Painter.
I find Photoshop really useful for photo manipulation, and digital matte images, but I wouldn’t use it for illustration or painting type projects.
That may change come April: CS5 sneak peek
That’s certainly not the case nowadays. Photoshop has pretty powerful vector capabilities.
I occassionally need to edit images so I bought Photoshop. I spent a few hours playing with it and couldn’t figure out how to do anything.
Then I tried JASC Paint Shop Pro and had the opposite experience. It was intuitive and powerful. To this day, one of the first programs I install on any new PC is JASC PSP 8.10.
The current issue of ImagineFX has an article on Corel Painter vs Photoshop. You may want to check it out, if you can get the mag (I don’t know your location).