Well, its sort of DIY

[The Medway Handyman]

Its a joke Jim - but not as we know it....

[PeterC]

Photoshop so that those who have used PS have something familiar:

are instructions on that page. It is from 2007, so not the newest version.

[The Natural Philosopher]

> Ah, not quite. Download and have a play:

However the Gimp aint a vector drawing program.

[Jules]

The problem I have is that the gimp's normal UI is f*cking awful - but last time I used photoshop, it was even worse. Talk about clunky and counter-intuitive...

[John Rumm]

To an extent that is often the case with PS - they often skip the obvious way of doing something in favour of a slightly less obvious but often far more powerful alternative approach.

[Mike Barnes]

It's designed for professionals who are prepared to invest time in learning how to use it effectively. Most Windows applications aren't like that.

[PeterC]

Adobe stuff in general is bloated and heavy. I have Flash and Shockwave, but only out of necessity. Also have Photoshop Lite v2 that came with a scanner, but have no use for it.

BTW, found 'Word Art' in OO - it took a bit of clicking around to get anything useful; Word seems to be abit less difficult.

[John Rumm]

Perhaps, but you can do stuff in PS that you can't even get close to in other apps. If you want easy, buy PS elements or paint shop pro.

[Steve Firth]

True.

Weeellll... professionals tend to prefer tools that are both wel designed and easy to use. Photoshop is actually fairly well designed. Whoever said that the user interface was clunky and counter intuitive was talking through his orpu orifice. What I think both of you are missing is that Photoshop is designed for use by people who are used to darkroom techniques for editing photographs hence it brings the terminology and techniques of the darkroom to a computer near you.

Photoshop wasn't designed as a Windows app.

[Stuart Noble]

Try Ulead PhotoImpact. I'm still on version 6, which cost me a fiver with the printed manual a few years back. Haven't come across anything it can't do yet.

[Jules]

I think I did have a copy of that, but don't any more - doubtless it'd run under Linux via Wine though (or, worst-case, via VMWare).

I can see the point* of photoshop for graphic designers - but for mere mortals, it just seems way too bloated, clunky and feature-rich - and hinders progress where a simpler program might not. Personally PSP v7's my usual tool of choice - it handles most things I need to do (again via Wine and VMWare), and for the rest I use gimp.

• mostly. I think it's one of those programs that's gone through way too many evolutions, and someone coming in with a clean slate could potentially produce something that did everything Photoshop did, but in a better way (gimp is not it). The problem being of course that Photoshop is such a de-facto standard now that it couldn't possibly compete, so nobody bothers trying. :/

cheers

Jules

[John Rumm]

Hmm, this sounds more like a "what have the Romans ever done for us?" type of discussion. Granted not everyone needs photoshop's facilities, there there are many areas in which it it difficult to find anything better. Sure, you can crop, rotate and touch out redeye in most graphics packages. Few however give you the delicacy of control PS gives for colour correction. None have the quality of camera RAW support to allow unprocessed imaged to be imported directly in native digital camera formats etc. PS will remain ubiquitous in the print industry since it is one of the few apps that support colour spaces other than RGB. Something that matters little to home users, but is kind of important if all your output is targeted on CMYK processes.

This is an area I would disagree with. Having used it since version 4, and upgraded to (most of) the versions along the way, its seems as if Adobe spend a fair amount of time listening the the requirements of their (admittedly broad) user base. Each new version has addressed areas lacking in previous ones generally - often far exceeding expectations with their implementation. For example there was a time where PS had no "undo" capability, while other packages did. So it was added in the next release. However unlike the competing packages it was a multi level undo and redo capability that allowed you to wind back steps sequentially, or jump to specific stages in a list. You could even milestone versions to go back to names pre-set points etc.

Its certainly got bigger with each release - but not dramatically so compared to many apps. The core directory of V6 was about 100Mb, version

11 (CS4) is now about 270MB.

Probably true - however it runs deeper I would say than just displacing the default standard - its also a very good bit of software IMHO.

[Jules]

I'd agree with that, which is perhaps were there is a problem - it does too much, at too high a cost (of the application, and of the hardware needed to run it) for the everyday home user, yet it's become such a "standard" that there's very little room for anything else to exist.

That's not as bad as I thought, admittedly....

Oh, I'm sure it's great for hard-core users and professionals; but Adobe seem to have enjoyed great success in marketing it to people who simply don't need it - to such an extent that they've rather killed off other graphics packages and you now have to buy photoshop or not bother (although there do exist lots of free 'basic' tools, but I don't think there's really a mid-range product around any more)

(what I suppose would be nice is if software vendors charged by the feature and not by the product as a whole; features with little use would presumably command a high price tag, whereas the stuff that everybody wanted would be cheap - but that's probably a separate discussion :-)

cheers

Jules

[Mike Barnes]

I'm a big fan of Fireworks, which as well as doing photo editing with non-destructive overlays, is brilliant for adding vector-based overlays (something I do quite a lot of - captions, borders, highlights, etc).

[Steve Firth]

Utter crap. If you mean "I'm incapable of understanding Photoshop" just say so rather than coming out with cobblers.

No, he really did say that.

If you want "bloated and clunky" then The Gimp is a classic example. If you want clunky and useless then PSP is a classic example. I'll use The Gimp if there's absolutely nothing else available, PSP is such a pile of crap it's not even worth starting up. It's Microsoft Paint with a few bells on.

[John Rumm]

For the market its aimed at[1], the price is not that important. The users will have potentially thousands of hours invested in learning, and huge piles of partial content and workflow that require it.

Remember for home users they punt the "Elements" version at a tenth of the price. It omits the out and out pro stuff (CMYK pre press etc), but includes a good deal of the useful stuff.

[1] The possible exception to that is the keen hobby photographer. The facilities they have added for serious photography recently make it very desirable for that. Still the cost is comparable to a reasonable DSLR.

Not sure how many they have killed - perhaps fireworx when they bought Macromedia. Paint Shop Pro is still available under the Corel brand - and in its "photo" version is quite cheap...

Perhaps - not sure it would be a popular model. Still Adobe do that for their font collections now. You pay a flat rate for the DVD that contains all of them, and the buy unlock codes for those you actually want.

[Steve Firth]

If Photoshop is too clunky for someone, then there's Aperture which has a simple, clear interface and it does everything that even professionals want from a photo-editing and archiving application. It's also relatively cheap at £126 for the first purchase of £64 for an upgrade.

Of course it doesn't run on Mickey Mouse operating systems, but that's also a bonus.

[Jules]

I've worked with professional graphic designers who use it, and even then they never use 100% of what it offers; for Joe Public's casual use the situation is much worse - and unnecessary functionality only pushes up the footprint and introduces complexity in the UI. Of course I could learn that UI if I put the time into it that the professional users do - but to be honest I've got much better things to be doing.

Yes it is. It's utter shit. I hate it. But I'm not aware of anything else that'll run natively under Linux and do half of what it does (of course I use Inkscape for any vector work, but for editing of bitmap data it seems as though it's gimp or nothing)

It got horrible after v7, no argument there - but I like v7 as a reasonably clean UI and with a reasonable set of features (but without trying to do a whole bunch of stuff for which there are better apps around)

[Stuart Noble]

I feel a Mac attack coming on.