Software help needed!

[bbodine9]

I have been a user off and on for several years of PWP but have never developed my skills as far as I would like. This is my dilemma. This forum is without equal in the willingness of its users to share information time and again with those of us who need it but there is so much material on the market about Photoshop both free and for sale that I often wonder if I might be making a mistake. Are there any users out there who have used both programs and can give me an honest opinion of the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms? I am going on 60 years old so the time for a learning curve is getting short. Kiril and Johnathon your views on this matter are also encouraged as you have a wonderful product and maybe I have not just devoted enough time to learning the details. I would be interested in knowing your thoughts as you developed PWP as opposed to the methodology of Photoshop.

Thanks in advance for opinions on this matter!

Bruce

[keithrj]

Just some notes on why I chose PWP over Photoshop. I was looking for a program that did everything I wanted for my digital photos. I did not want a program like Photoshop which has a heritage based on graphic design and was enhanced to cater for the digital photo market. I came across PWP and immediately liked it for two main reasons:

1. It was designed by photographers for photographers and had none of the baggage of Photoshop.
2. It was (and still is) an extremely lightweight and small program that has been efficiently and well written.

After purchasing PWP I realised how good the support forums were and have never looked back. As I was a C programmer in the past I appreciate programs that are efficient when it comes to footprint size (memory and disk). This makes PWP an ideal tool for my use and the more I use it the more I find it can do. It looks deceptively simple but it can do so much.

I have used Photoshop so realise that people who are used to layers may have difficulty adjusting to PWP but I can honestly say I find using Photoshop has a huge learning curve whereas PWP can be used for the basics very quickly and you will grow into the program and use more and more features as you read these forums.

Hope this helps.

[JML]

Bruce:

First, I would not sell the PWP White Papers + Help Pages + User Guide short as they have lots of info and they all deserve more than one read as we can glean more from repeated reads as our knowledge increases.

PS is the lingua franca of the imaging world so most of the educational material is created using PS as the example. So While PS has more learning material, it also has a much larger learning curve and the net gain is not obvious. PS was designed for the professional working in pre-press and has a many features not used by most photographers. So in a quest to learn PS, a person has to stumble around those issues as well. PWP was designed for photographers.

Another dimension to this is that even after we learn our target tool (whatever that is), is it fun to use? Most of us do this for fun and not for a living, and I want my tools to be enjoyable as well as simply functional. I’ve read enough PS books to know that, for me at least, PS is cumbersome and often requires many steps to accomplish what PWP can do in a jiffy, so for me, PS is not fun.

The single best reference I know of for image editing fundamentals and it covers both PWP and PS is Ctein’s Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and if you don’t have a copy, pick one up.

Jim

[Dieter Mayr]

Hello Bruce

PS is designed to be for the graphics and printing business, you can create CMYK separations, lost of (also custom) special effects, almost everything you could ever desire to do with a graphic or image, and it does a damn good job in this, it isn't for nothing THE big player in this business.
But for my needs as (amateur) Photographer, it is way too overshooted, in my opinion.
I do not need CMYK separation, i do not want my image look like a waterpainting or whatever art filters photoshop has, I want to make the neccessary corrections to the photos i make and make good prints from it.
My fist contact to PWP was after i got my first digital camera in 2002 with ver 3.2.
I had some expierience in the wet darkroom, mostly black and white, but also some in color (i made mostly slides, when working with color material).
Everything seemed to be so logic in PWP, i just could work from the very first moment.
Of course there is some learning curve, but the basic, most needet things works so logic to me, so i came to quick and nice results.
And it is fast and small, very well programmed.
Once i visited my sister, her husband works as a freelance photographer for local newspapers.
He was just downloading a update of photoshop, some 100s of MB.
The actual size of the download file for PWP 5.0.1.4 is 6,54 MB, of course without the manuals and white papers, which make another 20MB for the manual and some other MB for the white papers. PS CS4 needs 9,3 GB on the harddisk, according to the system requirements on the adobe homepage, i prefer the use that space for pictures.
Not to mention the difference in the prices......
For me it was love on first sight with PWP, it does all i need and it is really fun to work with.

[tomczak]

If I was sent to an uninhabited island (but with electricity) to do photography, and was allowed to bring just one piece of software with me, PWP would be it. This is not only because of it's strengths, flexibility, efficiencly, portability, logic, customer loyalty etc. - I know the programme well enough by now to understand how things work and be able to figure out how to do pretty much any editing techique that's needed, even if I haven't done it before and without having to look up a reference or follow published recipes. Also, from learning standpoint and as others mentioned, the Help, Tutorial, White Papers and this forum is an unprecedented gold mine of photograpic information.

[tomczak]

Bruce, I thought about your question and the learning curve and time involved. It sure takes time to learn techniques, and there are many in both PWP and PS.

One aspect of PWP that I find helpful in learning new techniques is that most PWP transformations follow similar logic (e.g. most of the transformation have the Amount slider which work with masks; once you learn how it works for one technique it works the same with all the others. This alone covers a lot of ground).

Often, I need to use a procedure that I either don't understand or forgot how it worked. 95% of the time I can find the answer in PWP Help alone, and just by reading the help, learn the technique. I find the help to be extremely well and concisely written, and in such a precise and structured way that it actually helps to understand what the technique does, quickly, simply, without clutter and unnecessary technical jargon (but without lobotomizing the user). It's an art to write such help and it's rarely found elsewhere.

Cheers.

[HanSch]

Bruce,
although I'm no graphic artist I use PS occasionally in my job, mainly for creating test files, not for image editing. PS is originally not made with the photographer in mind, but can do almost anything a photographer could think of. Because of the many, many possibilities it is easy to get lost in PS, even when you use manuals or tutorials. When you are used to PS a program like PaintShopPro is easy to learn, because it has a similar approach with layers, selections and so on.
PWPro has a different approach and therefore it took me some time to learn to use it, because I was used to the PS way of doing things. But the most important and time consuming part of the learning curve, and this goes for any image editor, is to understand how to interpret an image, what you like and don't like in it, and how you want to change it. You must learn to understand the image as it is represented by e.g. histograms in a color space like RGB or HSV. Only then you have reached the point that you must become familiar with the tools that are available to manipulate the image, with PS or PWPro.
My experience is, that PWPro is much faster to learn than PS. The tutorials and the support board can be a great help. In most cases I prefer the HSV or HSL color spaces of PWPro to the RGB color space, I like the easy mask building facilities, the simple lens corrections, the workflows, the filters, the color correction tools etc. Sometimes I wish I could make a selection and easily copy/paste it into another image, like in PS, but if I had to start again from scratch I would certainly prefer to learn PWPro. This is apart from the difference in price, for I think that nothing can beat PWPro w.r.t. value for money.