The Real Photoshop

When I outgrew MS paint eons ago and wanted a tool that was a tad more powerful, I picked up the one that was within the easiest reach. That month's PC World magazine CD carried a trial version of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 3.0 and I started using it. Soon I heard about Photoshop but I was comfortable with PSP and felt no need to change.PSP used to have all the features of Photoshop but was significantly cheaper, and was often called the "poor man's Photoshop". As my skills improved and newer versions came out, I stuck with PSP right upto version 9.0

The the unthinkable happened. Corel acquired Jasc. Corel stopped projecting PSP as a Photoshop competitor and started tagetting non-pro users. The GUI became overly shiny and useless but the feature set started stagnating, bugs started creeping in. I stuck with Jasc's last version instead of moving to Corel's (which I think is now at 12.0)

But then the age of the software started showing, as Adobe came up with CS, CS2 and soon to be out CS3, I was stuck with an ancient piece of software. So I decided to make the jump.

So I got a copy of PS CS2. It is certainly cool. possibly even cooler. But my biggest gripe is that, having been used to a different tool, I struggle for hours even to find the simplest tools or figure out how to make them behave the way I want them to. I spent about 20 minutes figuring out how to select the background color using the ink-dropper tool..

(I think the biggest difference I found so far is that Adobe doesn't like the mouse so much, alternative uses of tools are not right-click but are usually ctrl-click or alt-click. Photoshop does not use the scroll wheel at all! PSP zooms in and out with the wheel and you can vary values using the wheel too. Photoshop leans more towards Keyboard shortcuts. Grr.. I can never remember them)

Well all in all, I've spent about a few hours making this image from scratch and I've had fun. So I must say Adobe, you've won a convert. Without much further ado, I present my first Photoshop creation :)