Do You Need Photoshop?

When you have Adobe’s Photoshop among your software tools, you know you’ve arrived as a computer graphics/design professional. Photoshop puts tools on your desktop that allow you to do just about anything conceivable with a digital photo. And if someway you need to manipulate a photo isn’t built into Photoshop, somebody somewhere has written a plug-in to make it happen. If you can’t do what you need to do in Photoshop, chances are it’s just that you don’t know how.

I’ve been using Photoshop since version 3.0. I would say that means about 13 years. The copyright date in my original Photoshop manual is 1994. I obtained my first copy when Adobe absorbed Aldus back in 1994. Up to that time I was an Aldus customer, as they were the publishers of PageMaker, and I was using Aldus PhotoStyler for image manipulation. When Adobe took over, they offered some great deals to all us former Aldus customers, which were way too good to pass up. I’m not necessarily an Adobe fanboy, but after they bought out Frame (who published FrameMaker, commercial desktop publishing software for Unix, Mac,  and Windows, which I also owned, Mac and Windows versions) as well, my choices became extremely limited. I’ve therefore owned a lot of Adobe software in the past 13 years, most recently having upgraded to InDesign CS2. With the exception of Quark Express for desktop publishing, Adobe is the prime source for desktop publishing tools, with fonts and font management, great prepress tools, InDesign, and great tools for image design and manipulation with Illustrator and Photoshop. And then of course there’s Acrobat, the de facto standard for document exchange and sharing. There is virtually no way to be a graphics professional without having some contact with Adobe and their software products. And along with Microsoft and Intel, they form the triumvirate that dictates the current standards of personal computing.

Well, I’ve been using a couple of products that are Open Source instead of using Photoshop. When you already know how to use Photoshop pretty well and it’s already installed on your computer, it’s difficult to make yourself use anything else. But I’ve resisted just so I could learn enough about The Gimp (Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows) and Paint.NET (Windows only) just so I could tell you they’re good enough to do all your image and photo processing. The Gimp is available under the Gnu General Public License, and Paint.NET is available under the MIT License. (License information corrected per comment of Rick Brewster. Paint.NET’s logo and icon(s) are licensed under Creative Commons. Thanks, Rick.) Now that I’ve used both of these products, I’ll go out on a limb and say that you really DON’T need Photoshop. Anything I’ve needed to do in the past two months in terms of photo or bit-mapped graphic manipulation has been done in one or the other of these Open Source applications. In fact I’ve been able to do things that aren’t possible trying to use the combination of Photoshop and Acrobat, but had no trouble doing using PDF Creator and Paint.NET.

I’m sure this could cause a great deal of disagreement from Photoshop users, but I’m equally sure that those who would argue loudest haven’t even tried to use anything else,  except maybe MacPaint or Windows Paint. And there’s great resistence to Open Source from people who’ve spent lots of money for their preferred commercial software tools.  A high level of pride is common among those who have invested both time and money in order to master software tools such as Photoshop. Because of the cost and learning curve, there’s a lack of belief that something can be free AND good, especially so in The Gimp’s case due to the association with Open Source operating systems. Yet these will be the same people who’ll toss away that commercial software whenever their publisher comes out with a new version, even though that software has not lost one bit of capability. I know of some people who upgrade just to upgrade, just because there’s something new out there, disregarding the fact that publishers put out a new version with at least part of the equation being revenue enhancement. One could argue that Microsoft in at least one particular case released a product purely for increasing cash flow. Remember Windows ME? You’re fortunate if you avoided that mess. The jury is still out on Vista.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. But my point is that Open Source upgrades that are free obviously have some other purpose.  Upgrades of Paint.NET or The Gimp and other Open Source applications mean enhanced functionality, pure and simple, either by way of bug fixes and/or increased capability for the end user. This is one aspect of the Open Source philosophy that makes it such a beautiful thing.

Give The Gimp or Paint.NET a try.