Community poll forum: What's your favorite photo editor and why?

yeah, yeah, I know it's old fashioned by now, but for me it's still the photo editor of choice for ease of use, and intuitiveness. Corel and Adobe are good, I can't disagree, but Ive tried them both and find I spend most of my time trying to figure out how, rather than actually playing with the pictures.

I use it mostly for sharpening up images that need a bit of contrast or darkening, for making graphics for backgrounds, and lettering.

In other words, it suits my needs, and isnt overloaded with features I'll never use anyway.

My favorite photo editor? -> old Corel's PhotoHouse ver.1.1 (included in the Corel's WordPerfect 8 Suite)
Why? -> Because it's simple, easy to use and I can do my tasks (Resizing, brighting and sharpening) quick and accurate.
I also have and sporadically use:
Ulead's PhotoImpact5,
ACDSee's FotoCanvas Lite 1.1,
MS Picture It! Photo 6,
and PaintShop Pro 4 (very old and I don't know whose is it or where I got it from)

I'm glad I'm not the only one that keeps going back to Photodraw. Sure Photoshop Elements is a cool product and I'm learning to use it but when it comes to fast and easy I always open up Photodraw. I know of several others that do the same.

it's basically intuitive, without a great deal of emphasis on layers or rendering. It's a photo editing and manipulating program, all the controls are right out there, and you can move the image all over the place on the screen. to me, that's a plus.
Selection is simple, you just click and it's selected.
click again and it's unselected.

The only problem is, it is no longer on the market, so you need to get the disks either online or from a friend. And the default 'save' format is .mix, easily enough changed picture by picture, but still a bit too proprietary for my taste.

And the only way to find out if it works is to actually use it for a few days.

This sounds like the perfect fit for an untechnical person, and a great way to introduce them to photo editing.

Is this software available for the PC? It sounds great.

Barbara

so far it has been iPhoto from Apple. the why has to do with its simplicity and that it was designed to fit Mac computer architecture like a glove.

on the flip side of the coin I am not enthralled with the fact that to stay current version-wise one must religiously stay current with o/s updates, something I do not always do because of the unknown disruptions that are usually associated with o/s changes.

so at some point I will probably jump ship and find a suitable 3rd party photo editor for my Mac.

Years ago, I used Corel Phpto Paint. After all, it was less expensive. Did almost everything, too. Then I got some kind of deal on an older edition of PhotoShop, and found out why all the pros use it. I have since upgraded, and now I use PhotoShop CS2, and I'm still learning all its bells and whistles. But I'd rather have a program that can do more than I need, than one that does less.

Photoshop is the way to go, if you can afford it. I've used it on school computers but don't have it on my home pc. There I have ACDSee, which I love... it came free with a little scanner I bought a few years ago. It's never disappointed me. Unfortunately it's just about impossible to find nowadays.

Gimp is free but can be intimidating because of it's extensive capabilities. It wil also run on MANY different OS's

Gimp is very difficult to just set up. I spent many hours trying to set it up (on the screen that is) and I still was bewildered. I had an enourmous trouble finding a book on using it and when I did it was written way over my head. Thank god it was free and all I lost was the many frustrating hours.

I downloaded Gimp twice. I can't get the help menu. When I click it, I get The GIMP help files are not installed.

Could not open 'C:\Program Files\GIMPshop\share\gimp\2.0\help\en\gimp-help.xml' for reading: No such file or directory.

Know where I can get this?

Thanks.

very easy to find...go to ACDsee.com

Try Photoshop Elements, a small version of Photoshop. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles, but is very easy to use. I recommend this to many individuals who want to do good work but simply do not have the funds to purchase the full version of Photoshop. The latest version is
V.4. Scott Kelby, president of NAPP along with several well known users of Photoshop, have written some extremely good instructions books for Photoshop elements which are available for around $25 or so. Check them out at Amazon or other on line book stores.

A lot of my image processing needs are met by IrfanView, a free, fast, and astonishingly capable program. No one should be without this one.

I've also used The GIMP, an open-source Photoshop replacement, although it may not be for the casual user -- the interface takes a little getting used to (although it's logical and efficient), and it has so many bells and whistles that it takes a few moments just to load. But there's very little it won't do.

But my latest sweetheart is Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net/index.html), another open-source Photoshop replacement. The interface looks much like Photoshop, it's faster to load and easier to learn than The GIMP, and it features layers, a powerful tool set, and a growing choice of add-ins...gotta love open source! As the name suggests, it requires installation of the .NET framework (the download can include it if you don't already have it), which I found to be no big deal.

I was a professional photographer for 26 years specializing in portraits and weddings. I had used photpshop since version 2 came out and immediately saw that it could do much more than anything on the market. I, also, am using version CS2 and I don't believe I have come across anything which I could not do with it. I have on the selves above my computer at least 20 books on photoshop and am a member of the National Association of Photoshop Profesionals (NAPP). Through this organization I can get free tutorials monthly on all aspects of photoshopk and discounts to seminars held all overr the US by the great master of Photshop just to mention a few. I firmly believe that if you are going to do something worthwhile, then do it right, and this is the program for me. I see so many examples of individuals who copy a head from one photo and put it on another person in another photograph and they are so easy to spot because the do not blend into the sellected one, or you can see a rim around them. With photoshop this can be accomplished literally seamlessly! The cheapies are OK if that is what you want - cheap looking work, but IF you want you work to look the best then Photoshop is it, bar none!