Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 vs PaintShop Pro X2?

Hi!

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 vs PaintShop Pro X2

^^ Which one would you buy?

Grisu

P.S.: I don't have the money to buy Photoshop C3.

Between those two I'd get PaintShop. Photoshop Elements is way lacking in features. Of course, if I were seriously considering getting Paintshop, then I'd just save my money and use GIMP.

I prefer paintshop as its more of an 'art' package and the feel of the tools is more comfortable to me when drawing stuff. Photoshop is probaby more capable (and should be for the price difference!) but its overkill and has extra photolab stuff that you will prob. never use, want or need.
Gimp is very capable, but i cannot get used to the brush tools for painting stuff and as PSP 9 (&7) runs great in wine on Linux im happy enough, so i am not in a hurry to learn to the gimp way of doing things.

Grab Corel/Ulead's PhotoImpact X3 when it arrives (very soon). I'm using the XL version from four years ago and it can still do everything I want to and more... except I could use some better file format support, which X3 will give me.

Paintshop, Adobe killed the interface for Elements since v5, in an attempt to make it more 'newbie friendly' looking, where-as from my experience, it just makes things more annoying to navigate.....
(as well as the fact Elements is really lacking in features that makes the actual Photoshop worth the price tag)

[EDIT] Man, just google'd up v6 to make sure my statement on the interface was correct....and apparently it is. The screen's default setup is as cramped/crowded as ever.

Eeew... The interface of the latest versions of Elements does look like crap -- the older versions looked much better.

Paintshop is very, very capable, and personally I use both it and photoshop. I find Paintshop nicer for pixel-work though. what do you intent to use it for? Digital photo manipulation, or freehand drawing?

Oh, and another one you may want to take a look at it paint.NET, a free download from http://www.getpaint.net/

(It also supports millions of colors, layers, and a bunch of tools & effects)

I use PaintShop Pro X2 every day, IMHO it even outperforms the sluggish Photoshop (in the areas I am using it).
That said, there are a few plugins that must be in place before it is perfect :o)

I tried Elements 6 a few days ago and cannot see one single
reason why it should be preferred before PaintShop Pro X2.

Currently I'm considering bying "DxO Optics pro 5.0". I have
a 15 days trial of it running right now and it is *the* best
for digital photos. It's a whopping $169 for standard version
but it is worth it, no doubt!
http://www.dxo.com/intl/photo

(The Elite verson just supports more cameras,If you don't
own a $2000+ SLR camera there is no reason to buy it.)

But for editing all kinds of GFX PSP is the only choice, IMHO :-)

You can get version 10, Painshop X really cheap these days.

Grisue, you can also check out Photoline32 as another alternative: www.pl32.com

Then there are still The GIMP! and CinePaint available for free, and they are also steadily getting better and are sufficient for most web related work.

I have used The GIMP, Elements, PhotoLine32 and CS3 Extened on the Mac, and PaintShop Pro is the only one that is not available in a Mac version. The last PaintShop Pro version that I used was 7, which obviously was a long time ago. So I cannot say anything useful about current versions of PaintShop Pro.

I bought PhotoShop CS3 Extended because I actually use some of the extended features. It is an expensive beast, and I think most people will NEVER need it.

PhotoShop Elements does most the relevant work, and it even uses the same file format as its bigger sibling. Aperture for example exports quite nicely to Elements in PSD format and re-imports the changed photo without any problems. It can use other external editors, too, but the interesting thing here is that it uses Adobe's native PSD format instead of TIFF or JPEG (NEVER use that for digital photos!!!!).

I don't know about PaintShop Pro, but Elements also works very well with RAW files -- which is a killer argument for me. Most other programs actually have problems with RAW (especially when it is Pentax RAW, what I use).

The downside is PhotoShop's "unique" user interface, which could need a lot of improvement. The same can be said about its performance. However, PhotoShop is the de facto standard, and it has by far the best third party support and comes with a load of features. And both Elements and CS3 have the best "magic wand" utility that I've seen (and that is another killer feature for me).

If you want to spend money, my vote goes to PhotoShop (Elements). But you should carefully evaluate if you really need to spend money and if, let's say, Paint.NET and The GIMP! won't do the job for you.

i had the need to use photoshop's own format so i got pselements (came with the movie? version too) after being a (not quite) user of psp7

i had psp7 on my old pc and mainly used it for resizing my APS scans to something more webable and having gotten a new pc and migrated to a 10 megapixel camera and gone to a few local music festivals i found myself with a few hundred 4mb jpegs to resize but no psp7 cd to be found for new pc (assumed it was in storage ooop norf)

so needing adobe compatibility i chose elements over psp (didnt want to chance it not accepting the files) ... and found it gybbing each time i tried to resize :(

...

PS

having found my psp7 CD afterall (and installed it)
how the fek to i get it to be more of a pixel editor again?
cos i only wanted it for piexel art not photo retouching (just resizing)

or are they still selling snarty's pro pixel?

Go to the brush or aibrush tool and make it full hardness and you should get 100% color on all brush pixels then choose color or normal mode. I think Use precice cursors has something to do with it too, i always leave it on. (all this is in the tool options box. If you want the oldstyle airbrush, decrease the density.

You also need to untick 'antialias' in the selection tool window otherwise it blurs your copy-pasted selections.

The other way of doing it if you want to go oldskool is choose an 8 bit palette (on image menu?), if you do this you get a 256 color editable palette, it disables all smoothing tools and becomes a bit more like Deluxe Paint (but not as good of course, DP2e is still the 'god' of lo-res 8bit for me :) but i prefer working in 24 bit these days.

@winni, i thought there was a mac version these days, although mabe not for V7.
Both PSP 7 and 9 also work very well under wine on linux with some naitive DLL copying (isnt it possible to run wine on OSX seeing as its unix/bsd based??)

ta, now i have to learn how not to suck at making random dots ;)

The trick is to not make them at random. :-)

Thanks guys for the many replies. Don't need the app for digital cameras and photos. Mostly for pixel art.

So I think I'll stick with PSP. Adobe and their moon prizes are insane anyway.

Have you checked out GraphicsGale? GraphicsGale is a fantastic pixel art program with a nice free version.

http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

SpaceAce

I want to win a moon!! :P

well you can name an asteroid or star ... will that do ;)