Reinaldokool Loc: San Rafael, CA

Let me start by saying that I have >20 years of using PS. In all those years I have learned one thing. I HATE ADOBE. They provide poor support and overcharge for it. They provide excellent support to large commercial customers who pay through the nose for it, but see it as just a cost of business. They have always over priced their product. BUT, in general, the product does work and they have become the standard of the industry.

Photoshop is built on very old code. They keep tweaking it; adding features; moving menu items, etc., but the basic programming code is still from the early days.

I tried Corel and mostly like it. But the learning curve was steep for me. After buying upgrades for 3-4 years but not really using it I finally quit. (I do use Corel Visual Studio for my video work.) Still, Corel has a lot of good tutorial videos, so it is my fault.

Since the beginning of this year, I have been using Affinity Photo. This product leverages my skills in PS, but is more robust, faster and less of a RAM hog. Since it is a newer product, the core code is more up to date. It does everything PS does (That ordinary photographers need--for example, no 3D imaging). I finally fell in love when I was trying to remove the tourists and tourist signs around an image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. No matter how much I tried with PS, there were always tell-tales. When I tried AP, I was amazed. A few strokes of the "InPainting" brush and it was done.

Also masking is better in AP. That gorgeous redhead with loose hair, looking out over the sandy beach. AP does a better job of masking her hair so you get a finer quality. PS does work, but the operative word is "work".

Another feature I liked was that while PS has always done a lot with layers. Affinity almost forces you to use layers. The value of this is that you can go back and change values in a layer, remove a layer, add another layer. I've become committed to layers in PS, but never fully embraced them in simple projects. It was too easy to bring up something, make a copy layer for convenience and then just adjust that layer in various ways. Affinity almost forces you to use the layers. That's a good thing.

The Affinity (Serif) folk are in constant state of development. They regularly offer free updates that add features, correct something or extend the product. All the comparisons I've seen are from earlier this year and are a bit outdated, but here's a Youtube worth looking at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGojM3A5t-g

AP is only a couple years old. First released for the Mac. They released the PC version at about the time I got it. 30day trial free. Some good tutorial videos.

NormanTheGr8 Loc: Racine, Wisconsin

I also use PSP, recently went to PSP 2018 I preferr to have the program on my laptop so I don't have to have a Internet connection (I don't even have cell phone coverage at the cabin) and the price is very reasonable, extra so when buying an up grade every other year .

dannac Loc: 60 miles SW of New Orleans

Curious as to what tools you use in Paint Shop Pro ?

TN. Photo taker

Very helpful!! Thanks.

Quantus5

Like someone already said Corel PaintShop Pro has been around since the late 90s. It started out as JASC, and then Corel bought JASC in the early 2000s.

They pretty much upgrade it every year. Last year's version was "X9" -- as in version Nineteen, but instead of going with "XX" they are now versioning it by the year. So the current version which was just released in August is now called "PaintShop Pro 2018"

Best is a "subjective" comparison, so I'm not even going to make that comparison.

The best way to think of PaintShop Pro is to think of it as an excellent program that does ~98% of what the full version of Adobe Photoshop does, for much, much less money.

In fact, I just upgraded to PaintShop Pro 2018 Ultimate for a $63 perpetual license. (Ultimate is just a version of the PaintShop Pro package which bundles in some additional software and some extra templates and scripts. Same program just some extra stuff.)

On support -- I've had excellent results with their forum. -- I agree with most users that tech support itself is just bad these days for almost all companies -- to include Corel and Adobe.

Also -- as far as tutorials go -- PaintShop Pro has over 300 YouTube videos available (and I'm only counting the high quality ones). Yes -- not nearly as much as Photoshop -- but still 300 is pretty good. If you're a really an advanced user you can watch a Photoshop video to get the concept -- and then easily just apply the concept in PaintShop Pro.

jamesl Loc: Pennsylvania

I have never used support from Photoshop or Corel Paintshop Pro so I can't really offer an opinion on them. I have older versions of Photoshop (CS6) and Lightroom (LR5.7) as well as Paintshop Pro X9 and I like all of them. Lightroom gets used just about all the time, but depending on what I am trying to do, I find that I like to use which ever I feel is easiest for the project. I also have "Photoshop Elements 15" as well as "Affinity Photo" and "ON1 Photo RAW 2017.6" and work with all of them too. I haven't gone with the Photoshop and Lightroom CC package because I don't want any reoccuring monthly payments at all. I like working with the ON1 quite a bit and I feel it is getting better all the time. If you are primarily only interested in Paintshop Pro or Photoshop you will find that Paintshop Pro will do just about anything your are likely to want to do. Photoshop does do some more but for me not enough to matter. Either should do a good job for you.

waegwan Loc: Mae Won Li

Really? I didn't know that, that is messed up. I don't use a Mac and never thought about PSP not having a Mac version. It seems like they are losing a lot of customers that way.

Quantus5

Corel is Mac friendly company. Their product "AfterShot Pro 3", which is basically they're competitive offering to Adobe Lightroom works on a Mac.

It really has to do with the history of the product. AfterShot is a relatively recent acquisition by Corel (about four years ago) and newer products tend to be developed in a more cross platform fashion, so easier and less expensive to get it to work on both the PC and the Mac. (AfterShot even works on Linux).

Serif Affinity is a similar story. Serif used to have a PC only product called Serif PhotoPlus and they acquired a product called Affinity (which I think was Mac only to start with), from my understanding it was based on a fairly modern code base -- so it wasn't hard for Serif to get Affinity to work on the PC. So Serif Affinity now works on both the PC and Mac.

I don't use Affinity but have some friends that do -- and have pretty much heard only good things about Affinity. If you use a Mac then Affinity is a great option.

waegwan Loc: Mae Won Li

That is good to hear, thanks for the update. :-)

ziphler

;->-}

ziphler

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ziphler

Well I learned two things - 1st, I had never noticed the Photoshop emulation feature in PhotoPaint, interesting but doesn't really change anything because all the functions and menus are definitely still PhotoPaint of course. 2nd, I guess I maybe should look at PSP again. I remember when it was Jasc and I remember when Corel bought it and I watched it for awhile but Corel continued to maintain and advance their higher end product, PhotoPaint, and PSP was a distant second in terms of functionality and quality. PhotoPaint, Draw, and Capture are all bundled in Corel Graphics Suite along with some utilities. The most recent version is Graphic Suite x8. Corel Draw is vector based like Adobe illustrator and PhotoPaint is clearly still a photo editor. They do have a paint program they keep upgrading too. I think its called Painter but its not in graphics suite. I will be really surprised if PSP has surpassed PhotoPaint. I remember mostly liking PSP for its organizing and browsing abilities until ACDSee blew it out of the water. Nowadays ACDSee's image manipulation engines are Photoshop quality so for quick fixes it is my choice. It even does layers but in that realm PhotoPaint is just easier to use. For browsing and organizing photos, nothing beats ACDSee.

Quantus5

PSP is very different than it was before. There is very little that it can't do that the full version of Photoshop can do. In fact, I only know of two big features that PS has that PSP doesn't. 1) The ability to edit in the CYMK color space directly (and this is only a useful feature if you work in a print house), and 2) It doesn't have built in support for photo stacking (there is a workaround for this though -- that you can use PSP with some third party photo stacking software like Helicon Soft). Photo stacking is not a widely used feature, but if you do want to do photo stacking with PSP -- look at a program called Helicon Soft. If you need the ability to edit directly in the CYMK color space -- then I suggest your company needs at least one copy of Photoshop to do this. However being able to edit in CYMK directly -- is really only needed if you work in a print house that creates high-end printed documents, like a magazine publisher, a newspaper, etc...

The main reason I got PSP versus other photo editing software -- is that it supports Photoshop brushes and Photoshop scripts. So instantly most PS resources can be used with PSP. :-)

PSP is pretty amazing. Like I said again -- the way to think of it is a program that does ~98% of what Photoshop does at a fraction of the price. I just paid $60 dollars (for a perpetual license) of PSP 2018. Way, way less than Photoshop.