Photoshop frustration

Dear PropellerHeads: Everything is "Photoshop this" or "Photoshop that." Well, have you seen how much Photoshop costs?! How can I get better bang for my buck?

A: Don't you be dissin' my Photoshop, mister! I've been using Photoshop for...well, going back to the last millennium. It was a steep learning curve, but even now, years later, I remember all the tricks I acquired over time and can just about Photoshop anything you need. I love my Photoshop.

My Photoshop version is CS5, which our family astutely acquired (via my wife's educational discount) for under $300. It is already 5 years old. I was unaware of the shenanigans Adobe (adobe.com) has been up to since then.

Evidently, starting in 2013, Adobe released Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud) and instead of owning Photoshop, you now rent it on a monthly basis. Current rates are $20/month for the privilege of using Photoshop. If Adobe had this model in place back in 2011, I'd have spent about $1,000 on subscription fees by now. To me, that is ridiculous. Shame on you, Adobe, shame on you.

Adobe does offer a standalone product in Photoshop Elements for about $100. Of course, what you are getting is a limited edition of the full Photoshop. Bit.ly/1vqeOFB has a nice review comparing the various editions of Photoshop available.

So, now I understand your frustration with Photoshop, but what else is out there? See bit.ly/1DVAJc2 for a good overview of free, cheap, and cloud-based alternatives to Photoshop. Let's look at some of these free options more closely.

First up is GIMP (gimp.org), short for GNU Image Manipulation Program. This guy has been around for a long time and is available for any platform that isn't a handheld device. While free, donations are appreciated.

GIMP is pretty powerful. Besides the basics of cutting, pasting, resizing, cropping, and distorting, it has the requisite selection tools: rectangle, circle, lasso, color range, and scissors (magnetic lasso in Photoshop-speak). It possesses an abundance of filters, so you can turn any photo into a Monet masterpiece or a Matisse mess.

Most importantly, it leverages the concept of layers and masks, which I'm very fond of in Photoshop, and allows you to get pretty sophisticated pretty quickly in image manipulation. While many of the terms and concepts are familiar to Photoshop users, it will take some time to learn the nuances and limitations of the user interface. The GIMP website has a number of helpful tutorials to get you up-to speed though.

Another option in the same league as GIMP is Krita (krita.org), as in "get this krita outta here!" Chirp...chirp. Yeah, that was bad I have to admit. But what isn't bad is Krita. In fact, I liked it much better than GIMP. It has pretty much the same tools that GIMP has, but is presented in a much more pleasing and less confusing manner. In other words, it is more like Photoshop than GIMP is and where it differs, it is intuitive enough for a user to know what to do.

One thing that Krita does better than GIMP, or at least made easier for me to identify how to do, is layer styles. This feature allows you to add nifty effects like shadows, glows and overlays to layers. Doesn't sound like much, but trust me when I say that this makes things so much easier. Krita is available for Linux and Windows.

A much lighter option for the Windows platform is Paint.NET (getpaint.net). While it has a lot of the same selection, filtering, and layering options that the other two have, as a whole, it just feels lighter in its feature set. It also felt lighter in its processing power than the others did. So yes, while the download is smaller and its memory footprint may be smaller, the flip-side is it may take longer to do the same thing. Reminded me of working on my 486.

So there you have it. Photoshop without the Photoshopped prices!

When the PropellerHeads at Data Directions aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. Email them to [email protected] or contact us at Data Directions Inc., 8510 Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville, VA 23116. Visit our website at www.askthepropellerheads.com.