[shuttertalk]

I've been playing with Microsoft Digital Image Suite Pro 10 for an upcoming review, and it looks pretty good so far. It's got all the stuff - brushes, selection and mask tools, effects, image organising and rating and a few cool features like photo story (turn photos into a movie slideshow). A few concepts are slightly different - i.e. no "layers" as such but they have selection "objects". I've yet to take a closer look at the essential stuff like blur and sharpening to see how effective they are.

But I'm keen to know - what makes photoshop / paint shop pro / etc. the suite of choice? Do you just use it because everyone else does?

[EnglishBob]

I use photoshop, but am a recent convert ( 2 versions) prior to that i used Paint Shop Pro... purely for financial reasons... .they both have very similar features to me.

[Kombisaurus]

I grew up on Corel Photo-Paint (version 3 through to version 12), and for the most part have been very happy with it. My only grumbles have been that the last few versions have included very few new features and that most versions are a bit slow, buggy and generally not as stable as they should be. But tough to fault for features, I know it like the back of my hand, and there are a few things I prefer in Photo-paint over Photoshop.

I more recently started forcing myself to learn Photoshop - initially because everyone seems to "speak photoshop", so being at least familiar with the processes and terminology makes it a lot easier for me to understand and "translate" into Photo-Paint. But now I tend to use the two apps together.
Photoshop plugins work in both apps, and if I put my 3rd party plugins into a common folder then I can simply point both programs to that folder and the plugins appear in both.

As a general rule, I prefer the way Photoshop handles adjustment layers (better than "lenses" in Corel), it has a much better Unsharp Mask, and Photoshop is much faster and a bit more stable.
Photo-Paint has a more comprehensive selection of mask selection and manipulation tools, a really nice textured fill generator for creating natural-looking textures, and I prefer the way it treats "objects" (equivalent of "layers" in Photoshop). It also has a much better "Colour Channel Mixer" for making B/W photos from colour images, but I have a plugin for that now anyway.

Painting and Touch-up tools such as clone and healing brushes are pretty much the same for both, as are all the standard image adjustment and transformation tools like histogram equalisation, tone curves, etc (but Photoshop is better at isolating these on layers), all the effects/filters are similar, but each app has a few that the other doesn't.

Usually, if I'm in a hurry to get a single image sorted or need to play with masking/objects or do "serious editing" (composites, major surgery, etc), I'll use Photo-Paint. The software is slower, but I don't need to go hunting through menus or "experimenting" with settings, and I can visualise the final product and work backwards to work out the steps I need to get there more easily.
If I'm mostly playing with colour and exposure, cropping, noise-reduction, or working with a lot of images, or I just want to "go exploring" with an image, then I'll double-click on Photoshop.

No doubt this balance will change towards Photoshop some more, especially as it seems Corel has bought out Paint Shop Pro... so it wouldn't suprise me if there are no future versions of Photo-Paint. Not that Paint Shop Pro isn't good, just that I'm not familiar with it.

I still think poor old Photo-Paint doesn't get the recognition it deserves, but Corel hasn't done much to help themselves in this regard.
You can think of Corel as "Commodore" and Photo-Paint as the "Amiga 500". A great product backed by a company destined to run itself into the ground

Cheers
Adrian

[shuttertalk]

I'm still evaluating Microsoft's Digital Image Pro 10, and I like what they've done in terms of making workflow more straightforward. When you click on a function like Smart Erase for example, it brings up a sidebar on the left with step by step instructions. e.g.



But I'm really missing some pretty simple stuff. For example, I can't find a way to make a fixed sized selection - I can limit it by ratio (e.g. 4:3) but not a fixed size. The status bar doesn't tell you how large the selection box is as well, so I can't draw it manually. Then there's the absense of the tool palette. To paint, I need to go Menu -> Effects -> Paint Brush -> Freehand. Little things like that drive me crazy and detract from what is otherwise a polished product.

Maybe it's more suited towards photo manipulation, rather than a web graphics platform, which I need...