How many here DON'T use Photoshop

How many here DON'T use Photoshop

  • I use Photoshop

    Votes: 9 31.0%
  • I use an alternative

    Votes: 20 69.0%

  • Total voters
    29

Ian Grant

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Dec 19, 2017
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In 25 years of Digital imaging some of it commercial, and sending a lot of work for Litho printing etc, I've never really used Photoshop.

I started with Aldus PhotoStyler and CorelDraw 3 which includes PhotoPaint. I quickly switched to Micrografx Picture Publisher it had Layers and many other features well before Photoshop, it was a brilliant program but Corel bought the company and killed off their products. I'd be using it still but it's no longer compatible with modern Windows 64 bit OS.

These days I use an old JASC version 9 of PaintShop Pro - a program I first used as PaintShop circa 1993 :D It's ancient but still good, I have tried the later Corel versions but don't like them at all, instead I prefer to use GIMP. More recently (last two weeks) I've moved to CorelDraw X8 and PhotoPaint X8 and I'm very impressed. PhotoPaint X18 can do all I need or want and at a fraction of the cost of Photoshop. These days I buy the Student/Home edition for CorelDraw itself, I was never bothered with PhotoPaint but in X8 it changed.

Ian
 
PaintShop Pro version 9 was only released in 2003.

I think you mean PaintShop Pro 3.

Ian
 
My mistake, from memory I think it was 3. I might still have the floppy disks for it here
 
Photoshop for me.
I use Illustrator and Indesign too, but I have stuck with last versions that I can own outright. I didn't and don't approve of paying protection money to Adobe. The versions I have can do much more than I need, anyway. I have Lightroom too but have no idea what to do with it, although it seems popular.
When Affinity bring out their long-promised publishing software, I may switch to an all-Affinity setup. Sooner or later, I suppose, OSX will be updated beyond my Adobe programs.
 
Photoshop CS2 in my case. We started with Photoshop 4 and kept up to date with the later versions. I stopped at CS (1) but a hard drive failure and the necessity to reinstall the earliest version so that I could apply all the upgrades (assuming I could be bothered to try to find all the cds!) meant that I made use of Adobe's making CS2 available in a form that didn't need activation and I swapped to CS2. As it happens, I could legitimately move up to CS5 (paid for) but haven't felt the need, as I use one of the CS2 features that was dropped in later versions.
 
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The full CS2 suite is (or was) available as a free download on the Adobe website with all the extras. I had it installed on a previous laptop but found I didn't use it, it won't load on my Windows 10 machines. Over the years I've had various versions of Photoshop Elements bundled with scanners and cameras and that's quite a capable program.

Ian
 
No PS for me......i use Lightroom 6, but purely for cataloguing purposes.....no editing, no manipulation.....just scan and import so that i can quickly find negs going back to when i started. Sometimes wonder if i'm missing out. :confused:
 
The full CS2 suite is (or was) available as a free download on the Adobe website with all the extras. I had it installed on a previous laptop but found I didn't use it, it won't load on my Windows 10 machines.
Ian

I don't know if other parts of CS2 than Photoshop have problems with Windows 10, as I only installed Photoshop from the set, but it's fine on my Windows 10 desktop computer.
 
I use gimp here and that´s all I need.
It´s free and very similar to PS!
 
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I have the CS3 suite and mainly use Photoshop for scanning and tidying up LF negs.

For digital work, I use DxO PhotoLab unless I need to merge multiple images, when I revert to Photoshop.

As for older versions of Photoshop not working with future versions of macOS, it's interesting to note that it is written to use the Java runtime and, whenever I've upgraded macOS, it's overwritten the version that Photoshop requires with a newer version, which meant it wouldn't run… but only until I reinstalled the required older version of Java
 
I use GIMP for the odd bit of cropping and adjustment I need for web images. I do have access to the current Adobe Creative Suite - it's a perk of work - but that lives on my wife's machine. She's the digital artist, I'm a strictly chemical workflow.
 
It's interesting that no-one is using the later or latest versions of Photoshop, OK Graham has access but we can forgive him :D

I'm not against Photoshop, I really dislike Adobe's current licensing schemes it makes their programs unaffordable for non professional use. I was talking to a University graphic arts student about this on Sunday evening, she was complaining that as a student it was cheaper to pay the monthly fee rather than the yearly - she'd rather a one off yearly payment.

CorelDraw have a price for Student and Home use, and can be installed on 3 computers, you have to register on each computer, but it's an outright purchase.

I've not looked at "DxO PhotoLab" that Joanna uses but at £99 it's worth downloading the trial version, but isn't it really for RAW files ? My Canon software is excellent anyway and Coel draw comes with something similar.

Ian
 
Like you Ian, my biggest gripe with software like PS and Office is the money-grabbing approach that Adobe and Microsoft (respectively) take. That's why i bought a copy of Lightroom.
 
I subscribe to the latest Photoshop for Photographers platform where you get both Photoshop and Lightroom for £10 per month.
 
I've not looked at "DxO PhotoLab" that Joanna uses but at £99 it's worth downloading the trial version, but isn't it really for RAW files ? My Canon software is excellent anyway and Corel draw comes with something similar.

Ian

I also have DXO; it works with both raw and jpg. Similar in some but not all ways to Photoshop, both have strengths and weaknesses. I prefer DXO for the raw file handling; the shadow/highlight feature (Adobe name) can give better results than CS2 (can't comment on later versions). I find the vignetting (removal of) tool very useful.

When working on some 30 year old Kodachrome transparencies, DXO gave better results than CS2 did - some of the colour balances were appalling, and many seemed very underexposed. They came up remarkably well.
 
Joanna,
Yes, that runtime thing is very irritating and I have to hunt for it each time. It doesn't seem to affect me for minor updates, but you would think that Apple would be able to build a permanent fix.
It might be worth looking at Affinity. It seems to do most of what my Photoshop does, although the nomenclature is different. £48.99 including updates (so far) and you get to keep it. There's a free trial.
I have no connection other than being a customer. So far, I've been too lazy to switch over but when they eventually
produce their Indesign/QuarkXpress rival, I'll probably do it.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
 
Interesting David, Serif is a British company although now US owned, these new products are a complete new rangge replacing their older products which were good although a bit basic.

Ian
 
I object to paying a subscription to Adobe, which is why I am staying with my fully paid up CS3. I run Macs, so Microsoft is irrelevant; I use Apple's own "versions" of Office, all of which are free forever and are perfectly adequate.

David, Affinity Designer is available and, from limited experimentation seems quite acceptable. I copied the contents of an Illustrator file to the clipboard and then pasted it directly into Affinity Designer without any problem.

Another "low-cost" alternative to Photoshop (with layers) is Luminar https://macphun.com/luminar

Although, having tried all three alternatives, when it comes to scanning LF negs, I still can't feel comfortable with anything other than Photoshop when it comes to using curve layers and masks.

Out of interest, here's a couple of images, taken on a Nikon D810 and then processed in DxO PhotoLab, with its excellent FilmPack emulation of Fuji Acros 100 film:

_JNA0044_DxO.jpg _JNA0129_DxO.jpg
 
Joanna,
You are quite right. The Apple alternatives to Office are excellent. Keynote seems to have some tricks that Powerpoint doesn't. I find that I still need to save documents as .doc for use by the lumpen microtariat.
Incidentally, the latest iteration of Photos does a respectable job of adjusting images.
 
You are quite right. The Apple alternatives to Office are excellent. Keynote seems to have some tricks that Powerpoint doesn't. I find that I still need to save documents as .doc for use by the lumpen microtariat.

Unless the document needs editing by someone else, I usually print it to pdf.

Incidentally, the latest iteration of Photos does a respectable job of adjusting images.

I have had all sorts of problems since the upgrade with slow response and crashes. Perhaps it's due to the number of images I have.
 
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