Way back in the old millenium when I was running windows 95, I installed Photoshop to work with pohtos etc. The results were not good, lots of crashing happened everafter. In retrospect, I’m still not sure whether it was the windows 95 or a hardware problem (not enough RAM or some such) or if it was Photoshop’s fault. My present computer has XP (the dumbed down version, doesn’t even have MS office!) and 256 MB Ram, I’m not high-tech so I need some advice on image handling software that won’t cause loads of problems. I need to work with my whistle photos you know.
XP has been stable for me so far, so I want to be careful with it!
Photoshop is such a resources hog that at home I use Jasc’s Paintshop Pro. It will do about everything you need, including layers and all the standard formats (tiff, gif, jpg, and so on).
Hmm, well, in 97 I thought I paid $20 for photoshop, produced by Broederbound@ or some such company. Maybe Photoshop Elements is what I had, all I know was crash, crash, crash, then reformat hard drive, and throw out Broderbound!!! Yer right I certainly do not need CMYK stripping or Beziers tools, at least I think I don’t. I’m an admitted dummy in this area! I just want something to play around with, nothing expensive, nothing terribly complicated, the Gimp thing is FREE which is always a plus, but looking at the website I get the feeling it may be “buggy”, … Of course I could be wrong…
Oh yes, all recommendations will be looked into, thanks mvhplank, Zub, littlejohn.
$20 couldn’t possibly have bought you Photoshop, even in 1997. Probably a watered down version, since Elements wasn’t aroubnd back then. I’ve been running Photoshop Elements 2.0 on a Windows 2000 PC for a year, with no problems whatsoever. And it really gives you everything a non-professional could use put of the full version.
Both the “Broederbund” and the $20.00 tell me that it was definitely not Photoshop, which is produced by Adobe and costs, if I remember correctly, in the vicinity of $600.00 for a full install. I have a vague memory of a graphics program by Broederbund, but I can’t remember what it what called. Maybe it WAS Photoshop, but that’s certainly not what’s called Photoshop now.
I can personally recommend Jasc PaintShop Pro for general graphics editing. I use Gimp under Linix, but I’ve never tried the Windows port, so I don’t know how well it runs.
It might help to know what it is you want to DO with the tool. “Work with photos” is pretty vague. Gimp, PaintShop Pro, and Photoshop let you do some pretty sophisticated things with images, but that flexibility comes at the expense of complexity, to varying degrees. There may be simpler tools if all you want to do is red-eye removal, cropping, etc.
Sorry about that, obviously I never owned Photoshop then, but some Cheapo garbage that did me no good.
DB, I just want to use it for resizing, cropping, lighten, darken photos, first thing would be to get a suitable avatar up on C&F. It appears that MS paint is really dumbed down on my computer, it appears that everything is really dumbed down on my computer, A Compaq Presario from Best Buy… I shoulda shopped around oooohh, don’t get me started!!!
Broderbund, 97? Could it have been the early PhotoDeluxe (“onions, no ketchup, thanks”)? This sucked, with a moron more than “human” interface… Oh, Glauber beat me by quoting the right software, more “paint” than photo.
Photoshop Elements is way better. I’ll second Patrick on the fact it’s all most needs in Photoshop (bar the pre-press specialties I quoted above).
It’s bundled with quite a few mid-range cameras, printers and scanners, so chances are you know a pro photographer or graphist who already has the full “pro” Photoshop and will just GIVE you a license of Ph. Elements, complete with the original CD’s.
Else, GIMP is very good, and just plainly and completely free to download. However it lacks all the trick FX “plug-ins” that Photoshop home users seem to enjoy.
Finally, if you’re serious about photography, you can use Elements and at the same time learn Photoshop, which interface is identical. If really needed you can always “upgrade” later to the full ink-and-paper-geeks version.
I’m sorry, i think the soft i was thinking of is called Print Shop. It still exists, by the way. It was pretty cool for the time (Apple II), but not an image editing program.
Doesn’t the name Brotherbund sound like some evil South African secret society?
Brotherbund is pretty well known for spyware, by the way. Mostly stuff that “phones home” that gets installed when you install one of their games. Ad-aware treats them as low risk, so they probably aren’t doing a whole lot. But i clean them up regularly from my home computer.
I just want something to play around with, nothing expensive, nothing terribly complicated, the Gimp thing is FREE which is always a plus, but looking at the website I get the feeling it may be “buggy”, … Of course I could be wrong…