Time to buy a new image editor program.. any suggestions/recommendations for the latest and greatest?

Not Photoshop.. but are there any great new releases that are easy to use for a busy amateur.. ??

If you're not willing to tackle Adobe Photoshop (well worth the learning curve and price), then I'd recommend Jasc Pain Shop Pro. The closest to Adobe Photoshop in terms of features.

I like paint shop pro, too.

MS Paint:D

Why spend hundreds of dollars searching for a resource-sucking, difficult-to-learn image editing program when Microsoft so generously includes one in Windows for free? And I'm not talking about Paint, I'm talking about the incredible graphic creator known as Notepad!

Just take a look at these samples, all drawn in Notepad!

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The realism! The flesh-tones! The incredibly low bandwidth! (Gawd I wish I could get to sleep. It's 2 AM and I'm tired.)

In all seriousness, I would personally recommend Photoshop as well (just because it's the only program I've ever been able to draw anything that didn't look like the artwork above or worse in).

However, you might wish to try Corel Draw. It's generally fairly cheap and easy-to-use with a lot of features implemented that Photoshop doesn't (such as contouring and "welding" layers together without flattening the image).

My major hangup with Corel Draw is twofold: first of all, the colour palette absolutely stinks for it. For some reason when I set a colour in hex for it, it's about 20% darker than I anticipated. Yet I can set the exact same hex colour in Photoshop and get the exact colour I intended to. WUSSUPWITDAT?

My other problem with Corel Draw is that it absolutely cannot export images at 72 DPI in any format (specifically web-ready GIFs and JPGs). I've found the only way to work around this is to export the images at 300 DPI and use a program called DeBabelizer Pro to reduce the resolution (side note: DeBabelizer and PhotoShop are the two best I've seen for web image optimization.)

I use Macromedia Fireworks, thouht about taking a look for a Photoshop trial, but never got round to it..

I also use an old version of MGI Photosuite, before they added all the "my first digi Photo" stuff. Version 8.05. Really just a more powerful version of paint, but I use it because it is so basic (loads like lightning too :) designed for win95!)

Later,
Douglas

Fireworks all the way.... :D

Originally posted by bitserve
I like paint shop pro, too.
Ditto, but I'm not designer, so I don't consider myself an authority on the subject. It is more just the only thing I have, but it seems to be pretty good.

Fireworks 4 stands out because of its image optimization tools. Gives you a great preview of your graphic under different file formats and sizes.