If you’ve ever done any photo editing I’m sure you’ve heard of and most likely used Adobe Photoshop. So I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that I use it.
Really when it comes down to it there isn’t a quality replacement for Photoshop in the marketplace. There are some options that some claim work fine, like Gimp or Paint.net. In my experience/opinion, both of those softwares are basics that can do some functions, but they are not a replacement to Photoshop.
Adobe Photoshop is the most experienced product of it’s type in the marketplace and thus the most mature – it has so many features built into it that seamlessly work with one another that simply make your time working in it ridiculously fast. It even has some pretty powerful video editing features. Yes, I did say a photo editing software does a good job at video editing. It was weird the first time I heard of this too.
I’ll admit though, I’ve been using Photoshop since 1999 so I’ve grown with it as it’s grown over the years. I first learned to use it in a High School multimedia class. There are a TON of tips, tricks, and methods to do things in here, and there is a bit of a learning curve to get there. I’d suggest picking up a good book/tutorial to help you along the way.
If you really get into media development and need to branch out of Photoshop and utilize some of the perks of the Adobe Suite. An example – a layered Photoshop file can be imported into Adobe After Effects to make an animated image or logo. If at some point you go back into Photoshop to make an edit to this file, After Effects knows of the changes and adjusts so quickly you won’t know what just happened! This works with Adobe Premiere as well, and I’m quite certain many of the other product offerings for desktop publishing or web development as well (I don’t have as much experience with those product lines).
In 2013 Adobe made a shift in their business model that quite frankly I don’t exactly agree with… They switched away from selling copies of their software to instead turn it into a subscription based product. What this means is you no longer purchase an installation disk with a licensee key. You instead subscribe to a monthly plan, download the software to your computer, and once your subscription term is up the software no longer works until you resubscribe. This model of course has some pros and cons to it.
| Pros | Cons |
| Software is always up to date | Your software changes from day to day |
| You can purchase enough time to complete a project and not pay as much as traditional software purchasing | If you use this every day, you are paying monthly. |
Adobe views the pricing like this though – if you were a loyal upgrader of their software, the pricing works out to be the same. I’m sure they are right on that, but I was the person that didn’t see the need to upgrade every version. I would skip a few. To that point, I’m still using Adobe CS6 – the last version before they switched to the subscription model. It offers everything I’ve needed thus far and of course doesn’t incur monthly fees.
All in all, there are various pricing packages depending on what Adobe software you are looking to use. I suggest you take a look at the Adobe Creative Cloud plan pricing page to start using Adobe Photoshop or other Creative Cloud software.
