Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

Which version of Photoshop do you have? And how does it perform for you?

I want to buy a version, but there's a large range and they cover a considerable price range.

The choices appear to be
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4
Adobe Photoshop CS3
Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended
Adobe Illustrator (do I need to buy this too?)
Adobe Creative Suite 3 (and this comes in several guises)

I currently use The Gimp with a Wacom Graphire4 A6 tablet (which I plan to upgrade one day to an Wacom Intuo3 A5 tablet). I have a Mac.

I'd be most interested to know if Photoshop Elements 4 (the cheapest by far) will be sufficient to do all that The Gimp can and more.

There are two main reasons why I want to buy Photoshop:
1. Many seems to use it and prefer it over The Gimp
2. I want pressure sensitive pen control (and tilt with the intuo3)

I don't want to loose the things that The Gimp can do, such as path stroking, layer control, the undo stack, and brush editing.

I have also used Corel Painter Essentials 3, and was disappointed with its feature set (no path stroking, too many gimmicks, not enough control and poor user interface). I don't want to buy Photoshop Elements and find I'm in the same boat, but neither do I want to save up for months and month to buy CS3 Extended and find I'm only using features I could have got with Photoshop Elements.

You do realize that Photoshop is 650 dollars - 1000 dollars right?

Yes :roll:

But Elements is only 80 dollars, right? Also, there are such things a Student's versions and such, and I have a rich Aunt :P - although not that rich but I do have two birthday's worth of allowance unspent and, ... and well I'll need to save up if I buy the more expensive versions, but that's why I was asking. Is it worth it?

(and yes, I know it's not going to make me a better artist, but one can hope)

You do know that ... there are ways of acquiring extremely expensive software for no money, right? And Elements is lacking in many features to the point you should probably stick with GIMP (as much as I hate GIMP).

I did hate The Gimp when I started to use it, but it's more capable than any other drawing program I have.

So, okay, forget elements. It's good to cross that off the list :-) And let's assume the way I get photoshop is irrelevant ;-) Will CS3 do the job, or do you think I need to hold out for the Extended version or the Creative Suite package?

Seriously, I'm not expecting a definitive answer, just hoping for an opinion or two.

And, anyone thinks that Photoshop is not going to offer me much more than The Gimp can (or another program) then I can be turned.

Photoshop will offer you a top of the line standard for nearly every digital art related field in the world. The version doesn't matter too much as long as its CS2 or higher (CS had problems and theres no point in using older versions). CS3 hasnt been out very long- havent heard any reviews good or bad but it does have some very interesting new features.

Point is- if your not going to pay for it go for the best- if you plan on paying for it - well I think that money could be spent elsewhere, 650 dollars would buy a great tablet and a new hard drive - or a new video card or some more memory- or a lot of dvds...

But if you ever plan on having anything to do with graphics for a job, anything from newspaper ads to creating textures or making models look like they are glowing- GIMP looks lame on a resume - while Photoshop shines.

And unless you need the extra software (Flash, Illustrator, etc), don't bother picking up the full Creative Suite. That's what the CS stands for, after all. If you decide you want to play around with Flash or Illustrator, go with Creative Suite 3. Flash CS3 has some really nice improvements over Flash 8, particularly when it comes to integrating native Photoshop and Illustrator files.

Thank you Sage and avwolf.

I found I can get PS CS3 Extended as a 30-day demo, so I've already started to play with it.

Take you point about better thing to do with my money than buy PS, it had crossed my mind too. Still, there are ways to legally obtain a license without forking out forking out the equivalent of 200 BigMacs, but its requires a Student Card and I don't have one, yet. But I have and cunning plan, and 30-days....