Photoshop total dominance?

[Andy]

Is that about it for competitors to Adobe? It seems with every passing year the competion is falling away, few of the magazines now cater for anything other than Photoshop.

[Bob Hastie]

I'm sure one day someone will challenge their dominance, but until I find a programme that works as well, has the plug-ins as freely available and has the tips etc in magazines, I'll keep on using it. This will happen one day, I've just swapped away from the mighty internet explorer to firefox on the grounds that it was easy to use and better, but maybe that's the problem, once a programme has such dominance a rival has to be a lot better in order to get us to change our loyalty.
Bob

[jseaman]

PhotoShop has been around for years and it improves every year. Adobe has made a ton of money on this program and I'm sure they will keep improving it to drive still more sales in the future. Any competition would have a huge uphill battle just to equal PhotoShop's features - they would then have to overcome the loyalty issues and during all of this, Adobe would be starting to lower its prices to make PhotoShop even more desirable!

I don't expect to see anything of interest on the horizon.

[Skipton]

I can't see anybody taking on Adobe.... Photoshop is all powerful and, I do believe that Adobe have acquired the number one web package Macromedia Dreamweaver! I don't envisage ditching my CS2 for anything else. Many more features than I will ever use and, a steep learning curve but; I love it.

Trev

[Andy]

12 months ago there was a bit of an uproar on a photo magazine's forums that the mag had decided to drop tutorials for PSP.

[Andy]

My advise whenever asked about what software to get is 'buy photoshop now, get used to it as you'll end up using it in the long run anyway'

[Tannin]

Photoshop is by far the most difficult major application to learn. Adobe's dominance of the industry has seen to it that the company has no real incentive to drag its user interface out of the previous century. Sure, it has massive power and features like a dog has fleas, but when you consider the learning curve with Photoshop and compare it to that of other major software packages, it just doesn't cut it.

But because it dominates the industry, people just have to learn it anyway. I can almost forgive Adobe its outrageous pricing (compare Photoshop with most other major software packages, it's about double the going price for a full-featured heavyweight - though AutoCAD is even dearer, of course) but the time wasted learning your way around a poorly designed and needlessly difficult interface is time that could be much, much more usefully spent doing other things.

But in the end, what else are you going to do?

[Andy]

Never really tried Elements but I did think Photoshop 5LE was good at the time (considering it was free with almost everything), had quick mask in, which early versions of Elements didn't.

[rayl]

I got a copy of Elements with an Olympus camera a few years ago and replaced my very old copy of ps with it. It is a cut down version of ps but still has all the major features. There is a new version, Elements 4, which retails for £69 compared to ps cs at £500 plus must be a bargain.
My advice would be to enrol on a course at your local college, I did a couple of 1 night per week, 10-week courses, which were free and found them really good.


Ray

[John N]

I attended a couple of courses on photoshop,found it a steep learning curve,but what I learned comes in very useful and it made me realise the enormous potential of either elements or the full version of photoshop.