Adobe Photoshop CS3

Is Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended worth the £887.12 price tag or does the The Gimp (sounds like a character out of a Quentin Tarantino film) have better functionality.

you can get a lighter version of photoshop for less. TBH if your working on your own and have a tight budget then just get something cheaper/free.

A skilled and practised user of a cheap application can do a far better job than someone without skill using photoshop.

you on about Photoshop Elements?

A good alternative (in my opinion) would be Jasc/Corel Paint Shop Pro.

Paintshop is crap since Corel got hold of it.

Photoshop CS2 is decent value used from Amazon marketplace, the cheapest currently is £299 (New), but if you keep an eye on it, you can get it cheaper.

You don't mean this question seriously, do you?

The GIMP! is nice and useful and good enough for hobby use, but it certainly is not a professional tool and neither is it a serious replacement for Photoshop CS3 Extended - or will ever have the chance of becoming one.

If you need all those professional features of CS3 Extended, especially the ones that were developed for the medical sector, is a different question.

You should also ask yourself whether you need any of the professional features of CS3 (without the 'Extended' tag).

Then there is Photoshop Elements, and I think that even this version is already eating The GIMP!'s lunch.

The GIMP! is great when you have zero budget available, which usually is the case when you are --not-- somehow on the long run trying to make money with your work.

Only buy Photoshop when you have professional ambitions or when money simply is not a factor and you want the high-end industry standard, regardless of whether you actually need it or not.

When you are mainly a digital photographer, you probably won't need either The GIMP! nor CS3. Lightroom, Lightzone or Aperture are better choices here and will do most of the stuff that you will ever need for your photography. However, you might still need CS3 Extended or specialized software for features like 'stitching'.

I can't honestly recall seeing anything post Photoshop 6 which mattered a jot for games work. I would imagine a second hand license for Photoshop 6 would be pretty cheap now, but finding second hand copies of Photoshop is difficult, because there are so many pirates and counterfeit sellers on Ebay.

I own photoshop 6 and it is good enough for doing game graphics and the like in.

CS2 however (which I use at work) has some handy little additions that make things a little easier. (although the Adobe bridge annoys the hell out of me, and they disabled the thumbnail preview in explorer)

Now here's a question from me : Is it worth upgrading from PS7 to CS3 for $199?

Main thing that ticks the crap out of me in PS7 is that you can't move the canvas itself past its border, making precision work along the border hell. Apparently they changed that in the CS series from what I've experienced at my college's lab.

Were there any major changes to the suite since PS7 or something?

It depends on what you use it for, really.

There's a bunch of small usability changes, as you've seen with the moving canvas beyond border thing you already mentioned yourself.

One major new feature are the 'patch'/ 'red eye' / 'healing' and 'spot healing' abilities -- which make up pretty much either a one-click or select & drag spot remover for blemishes and such. If you often work on portraits or want to erase objects from photographs then those are extremely valuable additions that will save you a lot of time.

There's also a bunch of niceties like a visual edge refinement dialog for selections (new in CS3)

CS3 also added a vanishing point plane editing mode, where you can freehand draw or clone-stamp in using a vanishing point persective

One very nice feature which I think was introduced somewhere after PS7 (could be wrong though) is PhotoMerge, which allows you to assemble panorama pictures simply by selecting a bunch of partial shots and sit back while photoshop automatically zoomes, rotates, overlaps and color adjusts all the images to automagically make a composite panorame image.

CS3 Extended added the ability to load and edit video frames into layers

another nice feature of CS3 (Extended?) is that it can do an 'average' of multiple images, effectively automatically removing moving objects, as shown here:

http://www.jnack.com/adobe/photoshop/fountain/

Is it worth it? Maybe so, maybe not -- impossible to say without knowing what you actually use Photoshop for. :-?

No.


No.

Personally I still use more CS2 at work than CS3 - design/GUI went so "streamlined" and "designed" in CS3 that I have not yet quite used to it :)

According to an Adobe employee at an Adobe fair in Cologne last year, that feature actually was implemented for use in medical applications. No kidding.

Did you know that even the Windows Vista Photo Gallery software can do stitching? That was one of the main reasons why I bought CS3...

Good ol' PhotoImpact can do the removing of objects from multiple images as well...

No and No to both questions.

Paintshop Pro 9 + Gimp together has all you will ever need for doing game stuff.

For price vs functionality PSP wins hands down for most people. PS is just overkill unless you are a very very serious photographer.

PhotoImpact is horribly buggy though.

I think you have to REALLY use Photoshop a lot to get the value out of it PSP is better for most people although I don't like Corel's influence on it.

Darkheart

http://www.artweaver.de/

I use illustrator for my game graphics i find the spline tools more useable, I always end up in photoshop adding durt etc to the textures. I use CS2 and CS3 at work, I dont use any of the extra stuff so im sticking with what ive got.

I didn't get along with Illustrator too well. I can get better results with Flash 8 and find it generally easier to use.

A combination of Flash and Photoshop works best for me.

Any body got any views on PSP X2 ?

Yes. Give it a miss if Corel are still calling the shots.

You can get a trial copy from here, I am still using Paintshop Pro 9 and have no plans to upgrade to X2 ... from what I have seen its slower than PSP 9 and I didn't like the horrible interface.

Try and get hold of an American copy if you can, it costs $950 on Amazon.com - about £500. Yep, a £350+ difference for the same product bought somewhere else - the reason I currently refuse to buy anything by Adobe.

They all do it to UK consumers, its a ruddy scam... And it'll never end, when we join the EU (Without a vote may I add), nothing will change, We'll still end up working more hours, have less holidays and pay more for goods than our euro counterparts, well, apart from Norway, where I last heard a pint was £7 or something... I'd cry!!!

£7 F**king quid :O
Christ almighty and I though my local was dear.

Why are programmers buying Photo software? ;-)

Get Photoshop Elements instead.

The UK's been a EU member for decades now. And if you don't join the EURO, which is long overdue, you forfeit your membership. Which would be a smart move, I dare say... I wish Germany had never founded that club, and I certainly wish we'd never gotten that trashy EURO. I still think it was a 50% salary cut over night.

@dawlane

Sorry, my mistake, beer isnt £7 a pint... Its actually eight quid a pint! *Shocked faced smiley*

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=362369&in_page_id=1770

P.S. Sorry for going off-topic! ;)

P.S.S. Bugger, I missed out the constitution bit winni! :)

£8 quid.
Quick some body dial 999/911. I'm having a heart attack.

Edit:
CS3 Extended is starting to sound cheap

i alway avoided photoshop/paintshop for pixel work
there is a way to make it work but last i tried (over a year ago) it still anti alaised and other unwanted things
edit:
a few months back someone said how to get psp doing it right but i never tried it

id only use em for photo manipulation, its what they were geared for and why they are so damn expensive
a pro photographer wouldnt think it was dear considering the price of some SLR lenses on the market

an amature like myself its bloody expensive and i chose a fixed lense SLResque 12x optical for the same price (or less) as a lense of the same range

i have photo elements 5 as i needed to work with some of its native file formats and didnt want to waste money on psp (i had an older version so sort of knew it) to find out it was an unsupported format

but at the moment i mostly use it to resize my 10megapixel images to a web friendly size

snarty's pro pixel would probably do me fine ... is it still available?

Because I don't live in my PC chair. I do wedding photography as well. (And landscape stuff but I don't get paid for that.)

my dad used to gate crash weddings and take better photos for free* than the guy getting paid an obnoxious amount for

he'd get paid gigs that way from word of mouth

*he would sell if wanted a professionally bound album he wasnt going to give the prints out for free

and a guy at work got married recently at gretna green
some of his photoes were ace but the album only had 20 shots in it and it could hold nearer 100
i thought it was a bit odd but he told me he paid for the CD too and was going to have em photoshopped tinted, aged etc and printed out to put in later

i offered to do a few just to get back into the swing of things but he never took me up on the offer

edit:
must update my flickr site

Its almost as bad in sweden too, £3.50 - 4.00 for a 'glass' of beer. That wouldnt be so bad if it were not only JUST OVER HALF A PINT!
Which i personally believe is against human rights.

Strangley the government run booze-supermarket monopoly (the only legal distributor) is not that much more pricey than "wine rack" or "threshers".

Hence theres not a lot of "go to the local pub" culture which i miss soo much. There is however 100Mbit unlimited hardwired broadband in all the major towns and cities (and up to 24Mbit in rural areas) so i forgive them a little and just drink at home.

one of the reasons i hated being the sober responsible one on a night out*
and no i wasnt the 'des'
it costs a bomb to drink coke almost as much as to get a half pint or more

*one flatmate ended most nights out in A&E and i got lumbered with baby sitting duties most times
now he can sort himself out for all i care
*another is a bit dense and has the habit of getting me into trouble over his own actions so it was best for me to stay sober and alert so id know what im in for and out of it asap

so it kinda defeated the whole point of going out for a night out to have fun if im in A&E's waiting room or risking being barred for no reason what so ever than guilty by association and being sober to boot

I would change your friends.

A door man made the mistake of grabbing hold of me once for no reason what so ever, he found him self in A&E and out of a job as I was on my way to see the bar owner who was a friend of mine.

Back to the topic (kind of)

This weekend I will be looking into the fore-mentioned applications. So if any one else has any more offerings/words of wisdom etc,etc. Please post them :-)

flate mate #1 has his own A&E waiting slot afaik

got pished for the first time in an age with work mate (cant spell collegue at the mo i is pished) after bumping into him ater a trip to dentist who were closing for the day

had more fun talking bout work than i have all the last year

@Dodo
Lets make a patition against Corel :-P *we want jasc back*

Some how I don't thing that the man behind Jets And Small Computers will be buying the software rights back.