I’d like a good image manipulation program. Adobe’s photoshop is the standard, but is expensive and very complicated. Where are those open-sourcers when you need them? If anyone knows of any good free programs, I’d really like to hear it.
Thanks.
The open source graphics editor is The GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program). IIRC, we may even have a GIMP developer here on the boards.
Or you could try Photoshop Elements, which does 90% of what the full version does, but only retails for $99, and is probably discounted by many resellers.
You can try Paint Shop Pro, which has a free trial version (30 days, I think) and costs like $49 to register. Or The GIMP.
Elements also has the free trial offer. I tried it and when it expired I went and bought it. Great program.
Are you running Windows?
Yeah, windows. ME at that. Pity me. But I have been thinking about making a Linux partition. I’m assuming GIMP only runs on linux?
I bought PSP 7 and they gave me version 8 free. I also have Photoshop 5.0LE and PhotoDeluxe 2.0, both of which came free with some hardware.
It runs on Windows. I just installed it (in response to this thread) and it actually seems pretty good.
From what I’ve seen in the fifteen minutes I have poked at it, I think most of the stuff I use in Photoshop is there. There will be a learning curve I’m sure, but I’m interested.
I am looking into buying some photoshop-like software at the moment. I have massive ignorance about the cost of this kind of software, as I’ve never had to buy it for personal use before, so imagine my surprise when I was told that the latest edition of photoshop would set me back the equivalent of $500.
$500!!! How can they justify such an outrageous price?. Surely there’s enough people who would be intetersted in buying the product to allow it to retail for something much less than that.
And another thing- how can this cost $500, whilst a computer game which, I would imagine, cost just as much, and neede just as much expertise to program, retails for a fraction of that price?.
Sheesh, no wonder Bill gastes is billionaire with prices like that, and wonder people hate is company so much.
Yea, that darn Bill Gates and his Photo…hey, wait, Adobe makes Photoshop, not Microsoft.
That’s why there’s Photoshop Elements for $99. Read my post above.
Economies of scale. For a long time – before most computers became powerful enough and digital cameras popular, the photo-manipulation market was pretty much restricted to just graphics professionals, whereas games have a much larger consumer market base. Assuming two pieces of software cost the same to develop, a company would have to sell the “unpopular” program at a higher per-unit price than the popular one in order to recoup their initial investment. In other words, you’re getting the benefit of a volume discount when buying a widely used program.
Oops, my bad. like I said, my ignorance on such topics know’s no bounds (and this on a website that fights ignorance, blush)- shouldn’t have waded in like that, but I’m mad at the owners of this company, whoever they are.
i did read your post Earthling, but it does rather beg the question- if they can offer 90% of the content for the 5th of the price, why not make the full version cheaper? However, I guess that’s the one I shall have to settle for.
And, I disagree that there aren’t more people that want the full photoshop. The reason I want it is partly job based- I want to improve my prospects of getting a job with my existing art and design skills, so getting good at photo shop is a must- all employers who want people with artistic/ design based computer skills demand familarity with THAT particular programme.
Plus, even as someone who’s not a natural computerophile, I can see the benefit of a photoshop programme. I had some software similar to photoshop that came with my scanner, and I found it’s artisitic applications for manipulating already existing images almost endless, and I don’t even own a digital camera.
I guess I’m just fed up with the price of software in general. I really want to improve my computer skills, and therefore my job prospects, by learning how to use photoshop, plus how to design websites, plus my boyfriends a film student with a digital camera, and I want to be able to edit digitial film, but the cost of many of these kinds of software seems prohibitively high, especially to someone like me, getting paid eastern european level wages.
If all you’re interested in doing in web and otherwise computer stuff, or maybe designing a couple of flyers or a CD booklet for your band, then the GIMP’ll do ya.
If your livelihood depends on being able to do.high-quality print work, though, you’ll have to shell out for Photoshop, among other things.
I’m not knocking the GIMP; it’s really the only thing I use for graphics. But I’m by no means a Graphics Professional. Maybe it’ll be there one day, but it ain’t yet.
–black455, non-evangelizing Linux semi-zealot, who thinks that Linux would be perfectly satisfactory for 99% of people who use computers.
The other thing with Photoshop is, it has all kinds of features like CMYK colour management and spot colours and Pantone swatch libraries, which are oriented towards the publishing market. Adobe pays hefty licensing fees to get and use those specs, and passes the costs on.
The Gimp does not have these, at least the last time I looked; it was RGB only.
I suspect that Photoshop Elements does not have those features.
Photoshop is like any fairly specialized, fairly complex software. There’s no real alternative to it that’s considered acceptable (as of right now), so you’re going to have to shell out.
go to ebay get a used 5.5 or later version of Photoshop than get Photoshop 7.0 upgrade you will end up with a full version of Photoshop 7.0
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“Bill gastes” doesn’t develop or sell Photoshop; Adobe does, and no one hates them for it.
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There are entire careers made around Photoshop. This is a seriously advanced piece of software. You seem to greatly underestimate both how complicated and essential it is. That game you bought? Many elements of it were likely created with Photoshop. The program pays for itself. Many times over. And in any case, it’s called supply and demand. If Photoshop weren’t worth hundreds of dollars to the majority of the people who buy it, it wouldn’t cost that much.
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Photoshop is professional-grade software. If you don’t think it’s worth the price, then it’s very likely because it wasn’t designed for you. If you just want to touch up your vacation photos, using Photoshop is like killing a fly with a B-52. If you want to use it for work, as you suggested, but you don’t know enough about it to understand why it costs so much, then you should try some of the less expensive alternatives mentioned in this thread. Student discounts are often available as well.
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Software this expensive is not uncommon. Flash, 3D Studio Max, Microsoft Office, etc. Professional-grade software isn’t cheap.
There are loads of tutorials on the web for designing websites. Do a google search for “HTML primer,” “HTML tutorial,” or “web tutorials.” There are also online tutorials to help you with web scripting languages, like PHP and Javascript.
You can write all of your site’s code in regular old notepad if you want, but there are also freeware editors that will highlight syntax mistakes, line up brackets, and things like that.
You mean a digital video camera? If so, VirtualDub is a good freeware program for editing video, capturing, and encoding to AVI codecs (like Divx). It certainly doesn’t have the functionality of something like Premier, but it has everything I want and is easy to use. For MPEG encoding, you can use TMPGenc, freeware for MPEG-1, and something like $30 or $40 for MPEG-2 encoding. It also has crude editing capabilities. You can frameserve video from Vdub to TMPGenc in order to take advantage of Vdub’s editing capabilities and TMPGenc’s MPEG encoding at the same time. DVDrHelp and Doom9 have tons of tutorials about and download links to the mentioned programs.
Of course, all this is assuming the video camera is digital. 
But your use of the phrase “edit digital film” made me think it was. If not, oh well. Ignore that paragraph.
Piracy is pretty rampant over there, isn’t it? Well, good on you for resisting.
Just remember to read around online. There are freeware programs out there for almost every common application. They often lack some of the functionality of their commercial counterparts, but, depending on your situation, you may find that you don’t even need those extra features.
NoNags is a great site for freeware of all types.
Whoops. Fixed Doom9 link.