Dvorak on 'Rinky-Dink' Software Rant 468
DigitalDame2 writes "John C. Dvorak explores the trials and tribulations of photo editing software and why it's so difficult to use. Unless you are using these programs full-time, you spend a lot of time trying to figure things out. Is it too much to ask for a simple and powerful software program that can do the 45 things photographers do most in Photoshop?"
He should try iPhoto. (Score:5, Interesting)
...but then again, it's a Mac program, and you can't be a tech writer and like something Apple has produced unless you're biased [pcmag.com].
Yaz.
Simple Image Resizing (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps someone knows of something simple yet able to do just this?
I'm sure photoshop is great, but it's hardly worth installing a large, expensive program just to have control over the size and resolution of your images.
Perhaps a free (Mmmm..beer) "Photoshop Lite"? Or have I missed a great little free program that's out there?
A step up (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought a camera that came with a program from Arc-Soft. It's not photoshop and it's not megabucks in price.
It does do all the simpler items needed for common photo editing and is not complicated. Red eye reduction, croping, changing size, changing resolution, adjusting contrast, brightness, saturation, etc are all not difficult. Stitching several photos together and adding text are also not difficult. Compressing for e-mail is also not hard.
The program does not have advanced bells and whistles such as adding lens flare and beveled edges for web buttons, but this might be in line of the simple but not dummed down software he is looking for.
It came bundled with my old Ricoh 3MP camera.
Just hide the tacky filters... (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, I kind of wish that certain "things photographers do most" were MORE difficult to find: I'm one of the art moderators on Elfwood [elfwood.com] (a big sci-fi/fantasy art web site), and let's just say that the world would be a better place if budding young artists did not immediately pull out the lens flare filter every time they needed a fairy or extra magical sparkle in their work.
Personally, though, I prefer using Painter Classic for general digital art because I find it more comfortable to use. It's not exactly photo-oriented like Photoshop is, but it can still be used for photo manipulation. I use The GIMP occasionally as well, but I can't figure out how to make it recognize my tablet's pressure sensitivity, so I don't use it very often.
Re:article is -1 troll (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I agree. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Just hide the tacky filters... (Score:2, Interesting)
I recently bought my wife an Wacom Intuos 3 and I installed The Gimp on her Windows XP machine. Pressure sensitivity worked out of the box. What version did you use? I used 2.2.8. Still, my wife doesn't use The Gimp, she uses Corel Painter (or whatever came with the Wacom, I don't know... I suck at using tablets)
Why can't I paste into Help? (Score:1, Interesting)
Does anything allow me to do this? And if not why not? Currently I use favorites to store helpful URLs but that's not really what I want. (PS: in the unlikely event this this is a new idea, I claim prior art, so no patenting!)
- Pete Austin
I smell some shady marketing stunt for Aperture (Score:3, Interesting)
Fits the image Dvorak has in public too.
PhotoStyler (Score:5, Interesting)
- Magic wand that can select based on hue (perfect for green screen)
- Magic wand with a threshold that you can adjust AFTER you have clicked.
- A color picker that can average a region.
- A pixel accurate crop box.
Those were really useful features that I still lack today. PhotoStyler was a professionnal tool costing more than 800$ and worth every penny. PhotoStyler was that feature rich. I was doing only the basic things but it was doing it well. It didn't had the fancy swirl effect but I never had a customer who required a swirl.
What happened to PhotoStyler? I was bought by Adobe and discontinued. It was a superior software at that time and it was the only way for Adobe to continue selling PhotoShop.
The guys who coded PhotoStyler decided to restart again and came up with Ulead PhotoImpact but that product not as good as the original PhotoStyler. They decided to target home users instead of professionals because of PhotoShop dominance and removed important features like CMYK support and added tons of useless features (for professionals) like a button makers and
how to make photo editors easy to use: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They already made it, John. (Score:4, Interesting)
Aperture is a professional (not personal as I mis-wrote above) photographer tool. It's meant to bring whatever's useful in PhotoShop, take out anything else, use a better interface and provide additional tools wich are all geared at professional photography.
Even the neutral gray background and interface is there to help you better visualise your images without distorsion and hue-skewing caused by otherwise too flashy UI (aka, Aqua). Just like FCP.
Paint Shop Pro, versions 5 (Score:2, Interesting)
I cannot think of any large imrovements between the two -- but I can say that the experience of using PSP with PSP 9 was noticeably more enjoyable than on my copy. I was surprised by this, as I came at it expecting things to be just more bloat -- but there seemed to have been some minor UI tweaks.
Though, I do miss that the 'L' key doesn't open the layers dialogue anymore... grrrrr
Dvorak... love 'em or hate 'em... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't go around complaining that the emissions test computers they use on your car is too complex for the shadetree mechanic. I don't go around saying that the tools they use at the optometrist to measure occular aberations is too complicated for my wife to use to test my kids.
These are professional tools, meant to be used by professionals who will have the necessary training and time invested to learn to use them. That the everyman finds them complex shouldn't be surprising or criticised.
Paint Shop Pro, until the most recent versions anyway, was always nearly as powerful as Photoshop and considerably less complex. For someone like me who does some occasional graphics work, but is far from a professional, it was nirvana. Why Dvorak can't see that is beyond me.
Ah, sorry, of course I can see why... he's a writer, and he's gotta write, and when you read anything by Dvorak you have to ask whether it's something legitimate (sometimes) or just a fluff piece to meet his required allotment of columns for the week (frequently). This one falls in the later category as far as I'm concerned.
Re:You can do 45+ photo tasks in other tools. (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple of weeks back, I bought a copy to put on a friend's machine (he's an artist, I thought he'd enjoy the cool brushing features with tubes and so forth) and when I habitually went to jasc.com to buy it (I always try to buy direct from the manufacturer... they get the whole margin that way), I was forwarded to corel.com, and lo and behold, right there was PSP as a Corel product.
We'll have to see how the product fares under Corel's umbrella. PSP has traditionally been a very user friendly product from a very user friendly company. I would class the support I saw JASC provide in newsgroups as somewhere between "poster-child for support how-to" and "legendary." Hopefully, we can look forward to more of the same from Corel.