Design Review: Digital Image Editors
Digital image editing applications are vital tools in the arsenal of graphic artists, web site designers, photographers and pre-press operators. Our reviews start with Photoshop, the defacto industry standard. But we then move swiftly on to some of the lesser known, but still useful, software alternatives to Photoshop.
For 15 years, Adobe Photoshop has been the primary digital image editor in the graphics industry.
Originally developed for photographers as a Mac only package, Photoshop has since gone on to become an indispensable tool in all parts of the graphic arts industry – as a creative design package, in the prepress industry and as a web site design tool.
Photoshop’s position at the top is not just down to its feature set, which has been consistently ahead of the competition. It is also down to Adobe’s commitment to making an extremely complicated application as easy to use as is it reasonable to expect.
Which is not to say that Photoshop is an easy programme to learn to use - hence the plethora training videos and online training courses. It is also fair to say that it is possible to become an expert in a certain aspect of Photoshop, for example as a web designer, without even being a beginner in another of its functions, for example digital photo retouching.
Adobe Photoshop comes bundled with another application called ImageReady, which is targetted at web graphics users. Although, there is little that ImageReady can do that can’t be done in Photoshop itself (apart from the creation of animated gifs), ImageReady does provide a very targetted environment for the creation of web graphics.
Becoming an expert in Photoshop is an endless and occasionally frustrating task. But, for the dedicated designer, it is usually an enjoyable one. Photoshop is probably the design application that allows the most freedom for creative expression and its popularity and dominance in the professional design arena continues with few serious challengers.
But that is not to say that there are no alternatives. Photoshop is not cheap and it is also not the only digital image editor capable of producing professional quality graphics. Particularly with regards to web design graphics, there are a number of perfectly capable alternatives to Photoshop.
Below we review four of the main Photoshop wannabees. Digital editing graphics applications that designers may want to consider, if Photoshop is not an option. Some are purely positioned for editing web graphics, whilst others, like Corel Photo-Paint, are closer to rivalling Photoshop on a feature-for-feature basis.