Which is easier for novice Adobe Photoshop CS5 or Corel PaintShop Pro X5

[zackiedawg]

But to my knowledge, the newest edition of PSP does not have full "content aware" fill. It does some simple object removal, scratch and blemish repair, cloning. The types of tools that are good when you want to remove an object from a constant background. But I haven't seen the equivalent of true "content aware" on PSP... am I missing it somewhere?

I can't recall where everything is as it's not in front of me at the moment...the equivalent of the smart scaling I believe is called 'smart carver' in PSP. As to Content aware fill...I forget now where I think I saw that in PSP...I'll need to go back in there at some point and dig around but I was fairly certain I found it...I think in the same menu area where Smart Carver was located. Maybe it was right inside the Smart Carver function.

I haven't really used it in a while (content-aware fill) - I actually don't use it too often. I do occasionally find good use for the smart scaling/smart carver though - I love being able to 'squeeze' a photo together, pushing distant objects close to eachother and eating up only the blank spaces between them - it's quite fascinating to watch as things just get closer and closer with no notable adverse effect on the rest of the shot. I remember when I first tried that in Photoshop CS5 and thought it was fascinating technology. When I upgraded to PSP X4, I found they had added it as well.

Photochick - I'll give you that on the differences between the two systems - I find for photo editing even at the advanced level that there are almost no tools missing and both are comparable, however I have rarely delved into digital art so I very well might not know of the equivalence of the two systems for that type of work. I've always been into photography, but not so much into graphical or digital art (I'm more a 'capture' guy than a 'create' guy!).

 

[LittleMissMagic]

Photochick - I'll give you that on the differences between the two systems - I find for photo editing even at the advanced level that there are almost no tools missing and both are comparable, however I have rarely delved into digital art so I very well might not know of the equivalence of the two systems for that type of work. I've always been into photography, but not so much into graphical or digital art (I'm more a 'capture' guy than a 'create' guy!).

I have both and have done graphic work with both, and I find Photoshop CS5 much preferable when creating things from scratch. Of course, this is because I'm often working with Photoshop and Illustrator/InDesign simultaneously. So if one wanted to get into graphics, I'd recommend purchasing the entire Adobe suite.

I purchased the CS5 Creative Suite for around $200-250 for an educational license and got Lightroom for $80... if you know a student or someone who works at a university, you might could get them to "assist" you. Otherwise, like mentioned before, since CS6 is the newest update, you could find a discounted CS5 on Amazon.

However, if all you want to do is simple photo editing in one program, I think Paint Shop Pro will be more than enough for you. The advantage I believe that Photoshop has is that it works cohesively with other Adobe programs (which it sounds like you won't be using).

 

[photo_chick]

I have both and have done graphic work with both, and I find Photoshop CS5 much preferable when creating things from scratch. Of course, this is because I'm often working with Photoshop and Illustrator/InDesign simultaneously. So if one wanted to get into graphics, I'd recommend purchasing the entire Adobe suite.

I do the same with Illustrator and Photoshop. And working between Photoshop and Lightroom can be pretty seamless once you have them both open. Or Photoshop and Premiere... they all play fairly nicely together.