Paintshop Pro X8

[photodrawken]

I'm shopping around again. There seem to be so many more/new Digital Photography Applications available, and some are free too.

I've read your concerns in this discussion thread with great interest. You owe it to yourself to look at PhotoLine as part of your shopping. Very small size, super fast, outstanding bitmap features on a par with PS, vector drawing waaaay beyond what's available in image editors, and it costs 59 euros.

Be aware that PhotoLine does not do focus stacking, or panorama stitching; and its HDR merge feature is...ummm...minimalistic. However, it has the outstanding capability to use any image editing software on your system as a plugin. That is to say, that you can send the active layer (or the flattened image) to bitmap editors or vector editors for processing and when saved in that external program the layer (or flattened image) is updated in PhotoLine.

[brucet]

Folks do use PSP for 'serious' work. Believe me that not all the creative folks out there simply follow blindly along behind the Adobe Pied Piper. In fact it could be argued that the less you have the more creative you need to be!
My bet is that the Corel bean counters know exactly where the want to position PSP and the numbers they need to get there. Maybe above the current price point it's no longer becomes viable to add more 'great' features without adding an Adobe price!

regards

[Cassel]

Adobe has almost everything I want and a lot more, oh wait, they do have all that I want.

That is the key point: what "YOU WANT".
I don't want the same thing so i don't care for Photoshop.
PSP has all I WANT.
So, to each their own.

You can't put down a program because it does not suit YOUR needs. If you find something else that fits, go for it.
If Photoshop has one feature you can't live without, go for it.

On the other hand, i want some features that Photoshop does not have AT ALL (namely scripting and picture tubes) so i am not even going to look in that direction. Does it mean that Photoshop is not listening to me? No. It just means that they will have users who want and need their features, while others will chose PSP because they want and need their features. Period.

Ideally, in the best of both worlds, each person would have BOTH programs (and more) because they both have their strengths and weaknesses, but too often people tend to compare them and put them against each other.

That is everyone's choice.

[zombielord]

PSP does what I want (including HDR) and has what I need for a fraction of the price I would have to pay for Photoshop annually.