Photoshop 7 or PSP 9?

This never really mattered to me before I came to SL and realized that some of the creative work I want to do is going to require good graphics manipulation tools.

I have owned Poser 1, 3 and 4 (and now 5) but I lost interest about the time I tried to master P5 and realized I was suddenly feeling over my head For my post work I usually used my copy of Paintshop Pro 5.0. That's right, 4 versions old!

Now that I'm trying to do more sophisticated things that's obviously not cutting it anymore. The quandry is that I don't have a great deal of money to spend. Obviously, $600+ for Photoshop CS is out of the question for me. I could probably get Paintshop Pro 9 for about $170 or so, which is more do-able but still a bite. (Don't ASK me to give up chocolate!)

But in shopping around the internet, I see that I can also get the older version of Photoshop 7.0, in OEM (no manuals, which is ok, there's gobs of how-to books at Barnes & Nobles) for about $50. Now we're talking. Patching to 7.1 would be child's play.

So my question to the more experienced PS experts among you: Would I be able to do most of what I want to do in PS7? Would PSP9 give me anything extra that PS7 wouldn't?

Mostly I'm going to want to use transparencies, masks, alpha channels and layer manipulation on textures. I want to add texture reflection (not sure if that's a Photoshop thing or not - I also have GMax if it helps) It'd be nice to be able to create smart masks on an image, use textures swatches on brushes, etc., none of which is all that easy or doable in PSP5 -- time for an upgrade

Input appreciated!

Cindy

I would have to recommend Corel Photo-paint. You can pick up Corel Draw 12 suite for $300. (Less if you know a student)

It's as powerful as Photoshop, and easier to use to boot. Simple things are ridiculously hard to do in photoshop. I wanted to draw a line once, nothing fancy, no antialasing, nothing. I asked a Photoshop expert who thought about it a while, and then started giving me instructions on how to create a custom brush and use such and such a tool, etc.

Of course, I'm biased. I worked at Corel back in '99 on Photopaint. (My name is in the easter eggs!

It really used to piss us off at Corel HQ because we felt we had a superior product, for cheaper, but we couldn't crack market share. Somehow Photoshop became the standard, and it's stuck like that.

I would beg to differ on that. PSP came with my scanner. I used it for a few days, found the interface to be completely nonsensical, and then tossed it, so I'd hardly call it "easier to use". Admittedly, Photoshop didn't make complete sense to me either at first, but learning what the basic tools did and where they all were took me all of a few hours of screwing around with it. Once the logic behind it became evident, the whole thing proved to be very intuitively designed. This was not the case at all for me with PSP.

As for power, for the advanced user, PSP seems to be missing quite a bit. Those who don't know any different sware up and down that they're the same, but I have yet to meet a one who when exposed to the differences doesn't go "Oh. That's what you mean. Okay."

Dont get me wrong. PSP is not a bad program. It's just no Photoshop. Just like Pontiac makes a pretty good car, but it's no Cadillac.


WHAT?!!! You're making a joke here, right?

If you want to draw a line if Photoshop, you click on -get this- the LINE TOOL. That's right, kids, it's that button with the pucture of the line on it. I know, I know, this is suprising stuff. Ooh, and ready for more? If you want something not to be anti-aliased, you uncheck the box that says guess what? That's right, you guessed it. You uncheck the box that says ANTI-ALIASING. Oh, and what's that you say? Where can such a box be found? Well kids, it's right at the top of the screen in front of your face. I know, it's a shocker to have stuff be right where you can find it in one glance, but we can't go around having to hunt for everythng, now can we? I mean we gave up having to search for berries to paint on cave walls 10,000 years ago. Why stop there?


Hehe, that's cool. Quit knockin' the competition though. Even if you prefer PSP, you can't deny Adobe makes a damn fine product. There's nothing wrong with admitting that. I've been in business for a long time now, and I tell every single one of my customers what's good that my competitors have to offer. I never say anything bad about them, ever. This is because I know what I have to offer is superior, and so I have nothing to fear. Any fool can see that my product and my service is better, so the better I make my competitors look, the better I look. Anyone who goes around talking smack about the competition obviously knows they have a lot to be afraid of.


Hey, nothing wrong with being proud of your work. I'd be pissed off too if someone else were beating the pants off me like that. I wouldn't necessarily agree with you on the question of superiority though. If you're talking about the feature to dollar ratio, then I would have to agree, PSP has a higher ratio, which to some would make it a better value. If you're talking about the total amount of features though, Photoshop wins hands down.


As far as industry goes, the more powerful product should always be the standard, which is what happened. A one time difference of a few hundred dollars doesn't mean much to the professional who's going to use the product every day. The savings in time more than pay for the price difference.


Anyway, this debate has been raging for years now, and it will continue to do so. There is no answer to which one is "better". That's a matter of opinion, and for whatever reason, people have a tendency to get extremely attached to their raster editor of choice.

My advice, Cindy, ignoring for a second the fact that I happen to love Photoshop is this: Make a list of the pros & cons of each one & get the one that has the most pros. I'll help you get started.

Photoshop 7 Pros
1. As Francis pointed out, Photoshop is the industry standard. Knowing how to use it well is a highly marketable skill which wil only serve to benefit you in whatever it is you do now or in the future

2. While Photoshop 7 doesn't have all the bells & whistles of Photoshop CS & CS2, it is still got it where it counts. It's one hell of a program. I have CS, but I still find myself using 7 from time to time since there are certain features of it that I'm used to.

3. Contrary to what the PSP enthusiasts have to say on the subject, Photoshop is more feature rich than PSP. My experience has been that most times when people claim it's not, it's because they are unaware of what Photoshop is really capable of. You might not use every feature, but it's certainly better to have something & not need it then to find yourself needing it & not having it.

4. Photoshop's interface is great. Why do you think it is that when Corel came out with Painter 9, they were touting it's "redesigned Photoshop-like interface"? Obviously even they know Adobe is doing something right in that department.

5. Other software packages have ports to Photoshop or have features built with Photoshop in mind, including Maya, 3DS Max, Body Paint, Deep Paint, and many others. Granted these might not be programs you'd use, but you never know what the future might bring. It wasn't that long ago that you didn't use SL either. If you have Photoshop, you're prepared Again, it's better to have & not need than to need & not have.

6. There are tons of online tutorials for it.

Photoshop 7 cons
1. Vendors selling older software packages online are not always reputable. You have to be careful who you deal with.

2. Its interface can be confusing at first. Usually all it takes is to follow a few tutorials, of which there are thousands to choose from online, and you'll get it.

PSP Pros
1. It's cheap.

2. It's got more features per dollar than Photoshop.

3. There are tons of online tutorials for it.

Cons of PSP
1. It's arguably not as feature rich (and I do mean ARGUABLY, as people argue about it all the time)

2. Its interface can be confusing at first. Usually all it takes is to follow a few tutorials, of which there are thousands to choose from online, and you'll get it. That having been said, I found the way they set many things up to be very illogical, meaning things aren't where you expect them to be based on what you perceive the logic to be after learning the basics.

3. Unlike Photoshop, PSP does not give you direct access to alpha channels. You have to take a few extra steps to get to the alpha, which can be time consuming when working on a lot of images.


I highly recommend Photoshop. You absolutely can't go wrong with it. You probably but won't go wrong with PSP either, but I wouldn't be willing to guarantee that.

Good grief, Francis! Whoever did you talk to? And how could they know how to make brushes and not know how to make a line?

If you don't want to use the line tool, as Chosen suggested, all you have to do is grab the Pencil tool, which is never anti-aliased, click, hold down the Shift key, and click again. Presto! A line. Keep clicking, and you'll keep making more; nice straight lines between the two clicks.

Of course, if you do that, you are pretty much stuck with your line. With Photoshop CS2 the Line tool now makes a vector Shape, so you can change the width, change where it ends, change the color, make it chrome, or do whatever else you want to it, right up until you decide to rasterize it, if you ever do.

What's that? You didn't want a straight line? No problem. Use the Pen tool, which works exactly like the Bezier pen tools in Illustrator or most other vector programs. Manipulate the path to your heart's desire; add or delete points, change the points from smooth to corner points, do whatever you like with it. If you don't like Bezier curves, you can even use the Freeform Pen tool, and just draw your curve.

When you're ready, select it, right click, and choose Stroke Path from the contextual menu that appears. It will pop up a dialog that allows you to stroke the path using the current settings of any of the tools in the toolbox, from the Brush and Pencil to the Dodge and Burn tools, Clone tool, Smudge, Blur, Eraser, Color Replacement ... anything!

If you think you might want the same line again, just save the path. You'll always have it ready to use.

You can also stroke any selection, or any Shape, or just take any brush and draw a line "freehand." Making a line is PS is easy.

I'm not saying that it's harder in Photopaint or PSP. I've never used either one. But I can't believe that someone gave you the impression it was difficult in Photoshop!

(edited to fix error in reading Cindy's original post; she was asking about PS 7 or PSP 9, and I misread it as PS 7 or PS 9. Oops. )

Francis Chung's response concerns itself not with Paintshop Pro, but rather with Corel's Photopaint. Chosen Few's response makes repeated reference to the acronym PSP, which is the acronym used for Paintshop Pro, an entirely different program than the one Francis is referring to.

Corel's Photopaint interface strikes me as much easier to use than Photoshop's.

Ooh, new vector tools in CS2? That I didn't know. You may sell me on upgrading yet, Robin.

D'Oh! Missed that. You're absolutely right, Sherrianne. Sorry about that, Francis & anyone else who might have been confused. Thanks for pointing that out, Sherrianne.

Don't I feel like a freakin' genius now.

I have zero experience with Photopaint so please don't anyone assume anything I said was actually in reference to that. I really thought he had said PSP.

I hope my answers were at least helpful to Cindy in determining a PS vs PSP answer.

Another lesser-known choice that I rarely (if ever) see mentioned on these forums is the GIMP.

http://www.gimp.org/

GIMP Pros:
- It's absolutely free. Forever!
- And very stable.
- And cross-platform too.
- Supports commercial drawing tablets with pressure sensitivity.
- Runs tools in separate processes. If one locks up, you don't lose the entire program.
- Fully-featured plugin API
- Very intuitive if you know what you're doing
- Very good with alpha compared to older versions of Photoshop.
- Has many of the advanced features of PSP and Photoshop, as well as an outstanding set of color and filtering tools

GIMP Cons:
- Can be a little intimidating for new users.
- Runs everything in a separate process, which can be outright annoying at times.
- Advanced lighting techniques are harder than with PS.
- Brush creation API is only decent.
- Not as documented/publicized as PS or PSP.



Another tool that I live by is Corel's Painter series (I use Painter IX).

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel3/Home

(Grumble... wish they'd been offering that Wacom deal when I bought my copy )


Painter IX is fairly expensive, but worth it. It supports one of the best brush APIs I know, as well as layering support and natural drawing ability that bests Photoshop, PSP, and the GIMP. I use it for real drawing, and leave the GIMP to editing and effects.

Chosen, it was like that in CS, as well. It's one of those things that's easy to miss, but when they moved it under the Shape menu, Lines became honest-to-goodness shapes.

Which means that you can use the Point Selection tool, and manuipulate them, just like you can all the other shapes. Try it! You can select both end points, and put the end of the line someplace else, or use the Convert Point tool and make the end rounded, or pull out one point and make a tapering line, or whatever else you want to do to it.

All the shapes are real vector shapes. So you can do the same things with circles, stars, custom shapes; all of them. I didn't discover it until CS, but for all I know that started with the Shapes tool in 7, or whenever shapes started. I can't look, because I don't have the earlier versions on my machine any more.

LOL! I was testing this in CS, just to be sure I remembered correctly, and I tried to shift-select both layers of the image. Which, of course, you can't do in CS! Now, there's another reason to upgrade for you.

Cindy, I use Painter, too. I haven't upgraded to 9 yet, but it's the best tool I've found for "Natural Media" stuff.

You can't beat the price for GIMP, but I've not had good luck with it. For one thing, it doesn't actually run in the Mac OS; it uses X11.app, which is an emulator. You also need to install the C compiler, which is on the Apple System Install disks, but isn't installed automatically.

I've never been able to get it to run at all. So I can't tell you what it's like. Seems good for the PC, though.

If you are looking at free stuff, there's a lot out there. Have you considered any of them? Just wondering.

Thanks to all of you for the great input. FWIW, I'd downloaded GIMP and tried it briefly, but as you note, it's intimidating to a new user. I'm very familiar with Paintshop and can do *most* of what I want with it -- some more easily than the rest. Chosen makes some very telling points:


Kinda thought so


Feature value is important, but so is modularity (plug-ins) and standardization. I've used Photoshop long ago. I still have a CD sitting here with an old version of Kai's Power Tools You don't see that kind of stuff for Photoshop.


This is my feeling, and I haven't even used PS7 -- I've read some tutorials on making clothing in SL, and I always read the Photoshop part to pick up on ideas. And I'm always thinking, "What? They can DO that?"



And here may be the deciding vote - extensibility. I wonder if Kai knows that a CD he sold years ago is going to make Adobe a little money today? And GMax is a free 3D program, too, with Photoshop compatibility.


VERY important. I've made some primitive 1-2 layer clothing in SL so far to get the hang of it, and the obscurity of the alpha channel is annoying. It's there in Paintshop, it's just annoying.

Ok. $50 isn't bad. Since I can't figure out GIMP in my limited available time, I think I'm going with the OEM version of PS7. As you say, it's a marketable skill if nothing else.

Cindy

Just to clarify, I was indeed talking about Corel Photo-paint, not Paint-shop Pro.

The "simple line" problem was with an older version of Photoshop (I think it was v7?) not the current Photoshop.

GIMP is a good suggestion. I think GIMP, Photopaint and Photoshop have comparable power as an image editing solution. Probably the ease of use would probably be ranked Photopaint, Photoshop then GIMP. I love open-source, but open-source projects are rarely known for their ease-of-use.

Photoshop is better at UI, but not very. It really seemed like the developers of Photoshop operate kind of autonomously from each other, each with different ideas on how UI should work.

Photopaint was written in a way that the different components of the software were built with a much closer binding (object oriented and all that) so that the interface was presented in a more uniform manner.

I have an old old copy of PSP that I still load up on occasion to do simple tasks. It does a few things well, but it's not a comprehensive solution for me.

Yes, Sherri pointed that out. Sorry I misunderstood (in case you missed my earlier apology). I've never used Photopaint, but I've heard good things about it.


The line tool existed in version 7, as did the anti-alias switch. So did the pencil tool. Whoever you talked to was either smoking crack, messing with you, or both.


I can't comment on the ease of use of Photopaint, since as I said I've never used it, but I agree with you about GIMP. I love that they've put high quality raster editing in the hands of anyone who wants it, but they've got some awfully funny ideas about how it should be set up. GIMPshop has some promise if the bugs are ever worked out.


I disagree about this within Photoshop itself, but I do agree with you about this issue with Adobe in general. It's getting better now, but for years Photoshop & Illustrator had completely different commands for accomplishing very similar tasks, and don't even get me started on After Effects and Premiere. It's pretty silly that even a company as sometimes retarded as Microsoft is is still smart enough to make sure all their office programs have the same set of buttons, menus, and commands, but Adobe kept missing the boat on this until very recently. I'm a huge Adobe fan in terms of what their programs can do (well, except for Premiere), but someone really has to have a sit-down with all their interface people and lay down some laws.


You've got me intrigued now. I'll have to check it out. It's highly unlikely I'd ever abandon Photoshop, but I'm really curious about Photopaint now.


Agreed.

Okay, I have installed a trial version of photoshop CS here to play with.

I'm using the line tool here, and I've set the weight to 1 pixel, which draws for me, nice, straight, antialiased lines. I'm really looking, but I honestly don't see any checkbox that says "ANTI-ALIASING" or anything like that? I'm looking in all the menus too.

In Corel Photo-paint, there is an "Anti-aliasing" toggle button at the top of the screen with the line tool.

Using the pencil tool in PS like Robin describes works, though. This is kind of how I feel about Photoshop, it's hard to figure out in the beginning. "The pencil is never antialiased." That's not intuitive to me. There's no line of reasoning that will bring you from "pencil" to "not antialiased".

Right here:

I don't have one of those!

Francis, I know this isn't going to make you any happier with the Photoshop interface, but..

When you select the Line tool, in the upper left hand corner of that toolbar shown in Chosen's post, you'll see three little icons. Those determine how the program interprets the shape tools.

If you click the first one, it will make a Shape Layer. This is the one i usually use. It gives you an editable vector shape, as described in my post above.

The second icon will give you a Path. It's also editable, but doesn't appear on its own layer, isn't automatically filled, and is better for some uses.

The third just fills the line with pixels. Once it's drawn, it's drawn, and you can't edit the points, since it's raster, not vector.

I suspect that's the one that Chosen normally uses. (Am I right, Chosen? Do I get a prize? )

The Anti-aliased toggle only shows up in the third mode, since it doesn't apply to vector drawing.

You can rasterize vector layers; but as far as I know you can't choose not to anti-alias them when you do so. At least, if there is a way, i don't know how.

Personally, if I don't want a shape, I always just use the pencil for lines. It's a lot faster, for me.

Your comment about "pencil" not being intuitively "non-anti-aliased" really brought home to me how much "intuitive" really means, "what you are used to, and therefore expect."

I've used PS since it first came out, what - more than 15 years ago? (Whew, but it was February, 1990, so it really is.) The pencil has always been the tool that used no AA, and it became so intuitive to reach for it when I didn't want AA that I was shocked to find that the pencil in Painter was Anti-aliased! How could they! How completely counter-intuitive!

Haha Okay I get it now. But hopefully you understand what I mean when I say that Photoshop can be kind of hard to figure out for new users

That's what I'd go for, Cindy.
Just one warning.
The earliest versions of PS 7 could not export images with alpha in targa format..

This is certainly true for Mac, and I think for PC versions too. It was a deliberate change in how things were done, withdrawn as a result of popular outcry.

It is no problem so long as someone warns you. For SL you need to export your textures in Targa format, and of course Alpha is how you make parts of your texture transparent. I spent hours failng to get this to work.

But once someone told me, it was easily solved, because Adobe supply a replacement Targa Plug-in to solve the problem.

I just searched the web for "Targa Plug-in Photoshop 7" and found several copies. Downloaded it, popped it in the right folder, and bingo, it all worked.

Couldn't find it on the Adobe site, though.

I think if you patch to 7.1 this solves it too, but it might be 7.2.

I think it's 7.01 actually It was the first thing they patched after 7 came out because the outrage over the change to how TGA alpha was handled in 7 was almost instantaneous, hehe.

Right, Chip. In reading up on it before my purchase, it was the first thing I realized I was going to have to do -- patch.

Thank the gods for the internet.

Cindy

I use plugins daily with Paintshop Pro. I have since... I dunno. Forever. PSP supports Photoshop plugins.

Actually, at one point (Around photoshop 4?) I ganked all the default Photoshop filters and stuff and added them as plugins to Paintshop. It worked remarkably well. This may not be possible anymore.

But I do indeed use photoshop plugins constantly. Xenofex and Alienskin are my friends.

Just want to add my two cents in here. I was trained on Photoshop way back when - I'm thinking it was like 2.0 (don't laugh - I'm not really that old). Over the years, I somewhere made the transition to Corel - and I must say - it just seems to work better for me all around. It's like it takes a completely different mindset to understand Photoshop - and I don't know what that is. I have tried it recently - and I keep trying it here and there to keep myself current on what it is doing - but I just gotta say - the Corel suite is just so great! And - if you are really, really into the image editing - Corel Painter with a Wacom Pen Tablet is a wonderful thing to have!!! Kinda off topic of course - but Painter is really neat.

Corel also offers amazing upgrade offers - usually half the price of the full product. This is something to take into consideration. That seems to work forever too. It has for me. Corel always has a try it before you buy it thing - I suggest you do this before diving in deep with *cough* Photoshop.

Actually no, I use them all. I suppose I overestimated the power of mouse-over pop-up labels on the buttons. I just assumed that anyone who was analytically minded enough to be a software engineer would have been curious enough to notice the shape/path/pixels options on the tool (and which one of the three was selected in my picture). I guess I shouldn't have made that assumption though since I'm equally non-observant for never having noticed that the vectors in PS were editable until you pointed it out to me.


I've been having the same thoughts, Robin. To me, the question of whether a program is "intuitive" means can you effectively get into the mindset of the program's creator so that you can reasonably assume what behaviors to expect. In other words, is there a governing logic to its rules or is just a haphazard collection of cantradictions? I've found the answer to that question with PS is absolutely yes, there is a distinct logic to it, although I must admit it took me a bit to find the right mindset.

Once I did find the right way to look at it, it became perfectly obvious and logical to me that the pencil would not be anti-aliased. Otherwise there would be no point in having a brush AND a pencil. The logic is brushes bleed; pencils do not.

I guess the way other people might define "intuitive" could be the exact opposite. The question is not "can I get into the mindset of the program's creator," but "has the program been set up for my own default mindset". If someone's definition is the latter, I can see why they would say that PS is not intuitive. My mother thinks that way, which is why she can't program a VCR, even though she's highly intelligent. The VCR wasn't designed in a way that makes sense to HER, and adjusting her way of thinking to try to match the thinking of VCR creators is not something her brain would ever naturally want to do. Therefore, the VCR feels foreign and uncomfortable to her.

Neither defenition of "intuitive" is any more or less valid than the other. People think in different ways. I guess we'd all do well to remember that when trying to explain software concepts to eachother. I certainly will try.


If you want a little more insight into my thought process when appraching new software, I fully expected the pencil in Painter to be anti-aliased. My reasoning went like this:

1. Unlike Photoshop, which is a "clean," screen-oriented painting device, Painter's is supposed to resemble real natural media.

2. Natural media is messy. Pencils smear, crumble, distort the grain of the paper, etc.

3. The creators of Painter would likely be trying to emulate all these effects, which is something you can't do without anit-aliasing. Therefore it's logical to assume that pencils in Painter would have to be anti-aliased.

That's the way I tend to look at things. For me it's pretty much always "What would they have had in mind when they made this and what would the results then have to be?" Where I tend to run into frustration is in situations where I can't find any such governing logic.

I use CS2. The new features over CS (which I had) aren't all that impressive, but the best thing about CS2 is it runs much much faster. I do love the option to preview fonts also. I ca keep CS2 open all day and work in SL.