Is Adobe the only way to go?

[cristinawilliams]

I am relatively new to this and use Corel but notice that MANY (or most) workshops I see steer towards adobe. Before I go too far...do I need to transition over? I am looking at taking some courses and dont see any "hands on" that arent focused on Adobe...Is it the professional standard?

[Jamfke]

Pretty much, yeah. If you are planning on going "all the way" into professional photography, it might be worth your while to go ahead and get a copy of one of the Adobe programs. There are several levels of them out there, from Lightroom, to Elements, to the full blown Creative Suite. Each has its own price level, with Lightroom going for about $200 unless you go with the student version, and CS 4 going for $1400.

I'm using Corel myself at the moment as I can't justify getting Adobe yet (primarily because I can't afford it ). From those that have used both, I've heard that they are pretty similar, but Adobe is much more robust, and as you have pointed out, more widely discussed and tutorialized. I don't know how easy it would be to transition over to Adobe from Corel, but I'll use it to learn post processing for now.

[teaking]

Depending on how much post processing you are doing, if it is minimal I know a lot of people use irfanview its fast small and light on resources and you can get a handy curves plugin for it and it will support some 8bf filters like high pass sharpening etc etc lol. And its free has a thubnail view will creat contacts sheets blah blah blah. But like I said its probably more for minimal post processing, enchancing shots on the fly.

It actualy supports quite a few formats and you can batch process so convert all your jpegs to tiff before editing then when finished batch process them back to jpeg... yeah i said jpeg lol

[Eaurouge]

If you do end up making the transition and taking courses at an accredited higher ed institution, or are already enrolled in one, you can definitely take advantage of the Adobe student editions. They can help your transition at least in a financial sense as they are up to 80 percent off the full retail versions. Additionally, they are functionally identical to the retail versions, and since you are in North America, you can also use them for commercial purposes.

[navcom]

Adobe Photoshop is the standard in the photography and graphic arts world. Most other high-end image editing software attempts to emulate Photoshop. Photoshop Elements is a less functional version of the full blown Photoshop version.

Then there is Adobe Lightroom, which is pretty much purely a photographers program. Though others use it too, it was designed with photographers in mind. It acts as a database to keep track of all your images and is also a very powerful image editor that is very intuitive. For photography, you can do pretty much anything you can do with Photoshop (less major manipulation such as intensive cloning, etc.) directly in Lightroom. And if you also have Photoshop, Lightroom can seamlessly go back and forth between Photoshop and itself for editing images. In the real world, having a copy of both is the best set-up. Of course Adobe is expensive too. Programs such as GIMP are free versions that emulate Photoshop (and are great too), but are not necessarily replacements for it.

In the industry, Photoshop is where everything comes back to.

I would recommend going to Adobe's site and downloading a trial copy of Photoshop and Lightroom to try them out and see what you think. The trials are free, fully-functional versions. Then you can compare them with Corel.

I would caution that they can be addicting...especially Lightroom. I don't know what I would do without it any more!

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by navcom

Adobe Photoshop is the standard in the photography and graphic arts world.

Exactly, which is why about 95% of the world's tutorials, classes and instructors teach it.

[jdepould]

It's worthwhile to mention that CS4 is a lot more than just Photoshop. The CS4 master suite will run you about $10k. It has everything from photo editing to web and print design to motion graphics.

[amymnc]

I've been using pspxi for about 4 years now. The last few months my frustration level has really grown with post processing- I'm finding that there are things I just cannot do (or can't figure out how) with it. Very few tutorials around, not good with precise editing (like clone tool and I even have a lot of problems with sharpening). If I ever get a new computer I'll go for cs3 too. If you can afford it I'd say just go for photoshop.
I also use lightroom. Love that one, but wish it had capacity to work with layers. Big problem for me with going back and forth between the two is that the photos never look the same, even set to the same color workspace.

[i speak in math]

There is also Picasa for very basic editing and saving to jpegs from raw. I'm suprised no one has mentioned GIMP. GIMP is very similar to Photoshop. It's open source, free and is continually being improved by the community. If you haven't used photoshop seriously in the past, its quirks may not be noticed. It's quite a powerful application.

[sybren]

I've been using Bibble Pro for quite some time now, and I'm really happy with it. Much faster and easier to work with than Photoshop, I've heared it's comparable to Lightroom but I've never used that.