Photoshop?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Is photoshop worth the 650 dollar price tag? For web design, for texturing, and random photo editing? I’d like to get it for learning texturing, web design skills etc, but I don’t have much in the way of making money off of it, thus it lacks any real short term justification.

My other problem with it is logistical: it’s windows only right now (on intel at least). That means while I do all my modeling and rendering in linux, as well as most anything else I’ve got to use windows in order to use it. This really removes from the total value.

If it’s really worth it (and I’d like to do some commerical work in it if possible sometime down the road), where can I find it under 300 dollars? I’ve been searching and the best place is ebay.

Thanks!

#2

Have you heard of the gimp? http://www.gimp.org/

#3

I thought I mentioned using gimp…I guess not. I’ve been using gimp since 1.2, and I feel it’s missing a lot features that photoshop offers.

#4

Just be careful with ebay. A friend of mine got photoshop CS for $100 Canadian–complete with a keygen and cracking instructions meticulously written on the burned cd’s booklet: “disconnect your computer from the internet when installing this product” :P.

Cheers,

b01c

#5

Hahahahaha, LOL!

#6

Photoshop is the industry standard for digital visual compositing work. Hey no one who uses Photoshop professionally questions the price as there is no alternative to it right now. That may change with Gimp who knows.

#7

It’s not really worth it unless you know you’re going to make money off it. There’s a Mac version as well, so it’s not only on Windows.

I think you should keep using the gimp until you get a job that requires you to use PS. It’s not very hard to learn.

#8

dittohead
gimp 2.0 was a big step up from gimp 1.0

but yeah currently i use photoshop, based on gimp having to many windows open on my task bar (no other reason LOL, well minor other reasons).

$650 which is about 1-2 months work, well personally i would say no its not worth it.

but on the other hand you will get about 2-3 years use out of it before the new version comes out and has been established enough to worry you.

Alltaken

#9

I have been a photoshop user for years. I recently bought the whole cs suite for my new mac, and let me say it is worth every penny. I remember when gimp 2.0 came out I was hoping that it had improved to the point where it was a viable alternative. Alas this is not the case as gimp still lacks many, many key features that would make it very unwise for me to use it for either my personal work or at my job.

I actually came to this conclusion based on a comparison with photoshop 5(!). When I got a load of the new stuff availible to me with CS, it gave me warm fuzzies. If you have the money, it will be well spent.

And like others have said, photoshop is not only windows, it runs on OSX as well which I have come to believe is a wonderfull and amazing OS. I used to be a dyed in the wool mac hater, but the stuff thats included with OSX is mind blowing, and at it’s core is a unix kernel. So ummm… get a mac as well :smiley:

Cheers,
Zarf

#10

What sort of fetures does Photoshop have that gimp doesn’t?

#11

zarf as a 1/2 time mac user, and 1/2 time windows user, amy i ask what comes with the mac that is so mind blowing, i am keen on finding all these hidden features.

Alltaken

#12

what about paint shop thats only £100

#13

I can only speak from my own experience (as someone who does use it professionally), in which case the answer is:

Hell, yes.

#14

Yah… I concur. I have photoshop, the Gimp and Paintshop on my machine… and I use paintshop most. Basicly for the same reason I’m still in blender and not in maya or 3dsmax… My personal workflow (the speed with which I can get things done) is much better in paintshop. And I don’t feel it misses any key features. Also it has much better options for saving images (optimising gifs and such).

#15

They can’t be considered all that well hidden if they are on apples webpage…

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartz/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/
http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/overview.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xcode/

The whole imaging model of the graphics engine is based on PDF. I thought this was a retarded idea at first until I thought about our macs at work and what it means for the print industry

Take it with all grain of salt if you will, all I know is that when we have a file that chokes Distiller or all other PDF creation methods on our PC’s, the mac’s pdf printer makes sense of it and when our RIP station is done chewing on it the printers don’t throw any postscript errors.

Speaking of rip (Raster Imaging Protocol) the OS has a RIP built in that can be controlled via python. Actually the whole Quartz engine can be controlled via python.

Thats just freaking cool.

Also the X11 server that ships with it is is fully integrated with the Quartz graphics engine including support for hardware accellerated graphics. Most unix applications are trivial to port.

Maybe you don’t agree and all this stuff dosn’t impress. It’s just my opinion.

Cheers,
Zarf

#16

I’m surprised that the other viable alternative hasn’t been mentioned yet:
Corel PhotoPaint.

Gimp is great, version 2 really is better than the older one (was that 1.25?). But it is nowhere near Photoshop, lacks a lot of things (eg: colour management for one). If you ever intend to work professionally, for print, publication, etc., you have to buy one of the higher end packages.
Corel PhotoPaint has basically the same features that Photoshop does, for a lower price tag. And if you ever plan on doing extensive vector-based graphics, then Corel Draw is definitely the way to go!

I’ve also used Paint Shop Pro, and it’s a nice little brother to the two biggies (Adobe and Corel), I’ve bought it, and use it often because of the already entioned fast workflow. Whenever I need anything more complex, then I fire up Corel PhotoPaint or CorelDraw.
The fortunate thing is that my university has a contract with Corel, so I’ve received the whole Corel Graphics Suite for free. However, now that I know how good it is, it IS worth the money, I would consider purchasing it if I had to.

Zsolt

#17

A good alternative is to get an older PS.
I like PS5.5 very much. I got 7 at work but never found the reason to update at home. haven’t seen the CS features yet, probably just a change of hotkeys (again) and some things that I never use.
Just make sure the older version got the features you’re dumping Gimp for.

#18

I used to be a graphic designer for a screen printing company that was an all Corel shop. At the time CorelDraw was much more advanced in many regards than illustrator and remained so for a long time. Corel Photopaint was also pretty good. It was very difficult for me to transition away from their products, however I am glad I did for several reasons.

  1. There is a cost to be paid for being different.

    Although Corel can open Illustrator/PSD files ect, it is not gaurenteed to work, and you cannot be sure when something is wrong unless you review a hardcopy proof first. This can become economically prohibitive when you are dealing with multipage documents with lots of text and graphics. Remember in the commercial world it’s your @$$ if Corel mangles something during import, not theirs.

  2. Corel dosn’t know where it’s going

    Sad to say but it became painfully obvious a long time ago that Corel Simply dosn’t have a direction. With each iteration of the corel suite a new round of strange extras is included that may or may not be usefull, and that may or may not be discontinued with the next release. Such oddities include Corel3d, CorelShow, Some bar code generataion software, Corel Texture yadda yadda yadda.

  3. Corel is a good deal more clunky than the adobe products.

    The only place where I feel they have an advantage is in the ‘live’ tools where your able to interactivley adjust the parameters of an object (ie: the bevelling of box corners, the percentages of pie slices ect.) But when it comes to bare bones stuff like layer managment and node editing, Adobe wins hands down.

So pick your poison.

Cheers,
Zarf

#19

Adjustment layers (this alone makes gimp nearly worthless to me.)
Layer effects (use sparingly)
An advanced brush engine
More blending modes and advanced controls for them
Better managment of extremley large files
Shape layers

the list goes on and on…

Cheers,
Zarf

#20

Photoshop is also a lot faster for big images/lots of layers.

And I’ve ranted before, and I’ll rant again, but the colour management in Adobe products is rivalled only by Apple, or high priced specialist PC based solutions (ie, you buy from the manufacturer and daren’t touch a setting for fear of breaking something).

A side point, PDFs have been in use in print production since the day they were conceived, because as mentioned, Distiller could take nasty PS input, turn it to PDF, and create nice PS output (in case your imagesetter didn’t like the first one) and that feature alone made it very useful.

I still loathe Illustrator with an absolute passion. How you can conceive such a needlessly complicated program for that I don’t know.