Paint Shop Pro vs. Photoshop?

I'm sort of wondering... If I want a good program to enhance either digital photos, or premade graphics for use in games or other software applications, which graphics program should I be looking at for enhancing those? I was thinking of open-source like Gimp, but would it actually be better looking into these $100 - $300 packages for doing graphics enhancements? What are the pros and cons of all these different graphics apps as far as bells and whistles, and the ones that'll have the best results, etc...?

Top of the range is Photoshop imo, but PaintShop has a lot of good filters and such as well.

paintshop pro is ok only, Photoshop is by far the best but expensive. Gimp does a lot of what photoshop does and is probably ok if you start off on it. But coming from Photoshop Gimp feels a bit clunky in the UI department. Even with the alternative photoshop like addon UI.

You really can't beat photoshop if you can afford it.

If you shoot in RAW, there simply is no alternative to the combination of Apple Aperture and Adobe Photoshop (Extended) CS3.

If you are on Windows, you will have to stick with Photoshop Lightroom instead of Aperture. Lightroom does not support multiple displays (what Aperture does VERY nicely), and it also is not as feature rich as Aperture, but it's a bit easier to get started with it.

We're talking about a ~1300 US Dollars investment here, but you won't regret a single cent of it when you're serious about photography.

PaintShop Pro is also a very good program, and so are Photoshop Elements and Photoline 32, but none of them gets anywhere near Photoshop -- especially not when you edit RAWs. If that is not your main focus and you don't need special features like "stitching" or those other cool features that now come with Photoshop Extended, then the lower priced alternatives will probably be good enough for you.

Paintshop is OK but I've always found the UI a little... awkward.

Probably better off with Photoshop Elements tbh.

Elements is pretty good. Also Gimp but it's a bit awkward sometimes.

Rawshooter Essentials is quite a good alternative.

Personally I'm Paint Shop pro all the way, I find photoshop too cluttered and arsey. Never had a problem with PSP, once you've read the manual and userstood where everything is it works really well.

Gimp wins

www.thegimp.org or somthing..

I always use GIMP its Free.

I have Paint Shop v5 (freebie) and there doesn't even appear to be a way to draw a circle/ellipse by defining a bounding box for it to fit in. It only seems to allow them to be drawn by clicking on the circle centre and dragging out. Pants!

/rant

Personal preference is Photoshop, but I also use Paintshop pro for making sprites and such.

I prefer Paint Shop Pro. Simple easy to use...

Photoshop all the way.

I think I've said this before but there's a really good way to get the full Photoshop CS3 at a much reduced cost and it's completely legal.

What I did was hit ebay looking for Photoshop 6. I found 2 auctions selling Photoshop 6 full retail. I ended up winning one of the Auctions and had a full retail copy of Photoshop 6 for £115. I then spent the £150 getting the CS2 upgrade from the Adobe site.

Basically I ended up with Photoshop CS2 for a bargain of just over £260 squids.

I don't see why I should have paid £100 for PSP when I could get PhotoShop 6 and pay £150 to upgrade to CS2.

:)

Me neither.

Personally I think unless you're an experienced artist/photo editor then either product will be more than enough for you and it's just down to personal taste.

Try Ulead's (or now Corel's) PhotoImpact. Photoshop is better, as you'd expect for the price, but PhotoImpact is fast. I've done many jobs with it, and it's very rarely let me down. Photoshop's layer system is ultimately more powerful, but PhotoImpact's is just so much more enjoyable it's scary. The only thing I don't like about PhotoImpact are its brushes, but they're good enough for most things.

Photoshop is powerful, for sure. But, it's not really worth the cash when something like PhotoImpact will do 90% of what's possible. You can also go for PSP as well, as some have mentioned, but I personally enjoy PhotoImpact much more. Version 13 should be out soon.

I personally couldn't figure out how to use Gimp. It has an aspect adjusting tool, but I could never get it to actually do anything. And I don't want to have to pay hundreds for other existing tools.

If you're interested, I have some image libraries, one for Blitz3D and the other for OpenGL and Allegro. My plan is to use these libraries to make a complete editor that will allow you write scripts to edit the image (called SuperTurtle). The Blitz3D (BankImage) is becoming too slow to be useful for a full-fledged image editor, but the Allegro-GL version (DanTex) is moving along nicely. I'm creating this selection system that will let you pick which pixels get certain edits. With enough manipulation tools for these selections, I hope to be able to do all kinds of modifications to images for this. But I guess we'll have to see.

If you'd like to have access to these tools, BankImage is available on my website at http://danbar10.allhyper.com/module DanTex isn't available online yet but I could send you a copy of what I've got working right now. Let me know if you (or anyone) is interested.

You can pick up a cheap version of PhotoImpact on a magazine for almost nothing these days. If you can't find it, pop into a second hand bookstore and have a look through their old computer magazines. If you want the latest version, it'll cost $50 for an upgrade from Ulead.com

It doesn't have to cost you hundreds of dollars.