Good photo editor?

[mutz]

I've been using Corel for years with acceptable results, besides, I know it. I now have Corel 10

With the advent of the Parhelia and my Canon G2 with such incredible clarity and colors, I get the impression Corel is muddying my photos.

Adobe seems to be priced for the corporate world, so I find that a little hard to justify, unless someone can give some overwhelming reasons that do justify the expense.

Any corrections, suggestions, recommendations?

[dshumake]

corel muddying pictures

What is the actual problem with the colors? On screen or after printing? I take it you are only having problems with Photo-Paint or Draw as well?

Another site which can certainly help is the Corel Newsgroups:

news://cnews.corel.com/corel.graphic_apps.photo-paint10

or pick the newsgroup you want from the list on this page

http://www3.corel.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=Corel/TechnicalServices/Newsgroups

[LvR]

I grew up with Photoshop, but can see no really good reason to recommend that over Corel if you are already familiar with that.

Given the abilities of digital cameras now, I often find the amount of tweaking to be done to be minimal.

I find myself using Camedia Master (Olympus) even though I have Photoshop on the same machine - Really nice slideshow feature, way simpler printing interface where one can just drag and drop on predefined pagelayouts with resizing happening automatically.

[mutz]

I always shoot at the highest resolution, because with a 1gig microdrive I hardly need to save space. After downloading they look perfect onscreen (Parhelia + pro monitor). Straight composition in CorelDraw or PhotoPaint then to print with no res reduction is very good too.

However when I need to reduce file size for e-mail or whatever, in PhotoPaint they start looking muddy. I suspect it has to do with their jpeg rendering, because photos I've reduced straight out of the Canon software and photos I receive look bright and sharp. It's probably nothing new with Corel, it's just with the Parhelia I'm starting to see things I wasn't aware of before.

I definitely need professional quality software for photos and graphics. Corel 11 has gotten mediocre to negative reviews, so I'm a bit up in the air about what to do.

[Wombat]

Mutz, you could get Adobe's Photoshop Elements. It's an $80 version of Photoshop that is supposed to have all the stuff a casual user needs. I haven't looked into exactly what is missing, but they specifically pitch it at people that need a photo toucher.

[Gurm]

Yeah PS:Elements has most of what the average bear needs in order to work with photos. Lots of stuff missing, but then again $80 vs. $500.

- Gurm

[mutz]

...hmmm, Thanks. I checked the links above, read lots of news groups, other reviews I hadn't seen, and it turns out Corel 11 isn't so bad. PhotoPaint is a valid competitor to Photoshop, one is better here, the other there. Elements would be significantly less than what I need. I might only use some tool, filter, whatever, once, but I want it to be there!

In any case, a Corel 11 upgrade, meaning the whole suite at $275 is a helluva lot less than $500 for a Photoshop stand alone. Guess I know what I gotta do. Thanks!

[rubank]

I´m not trying to be a smartass here, but if you use lossy compression of course there will be some degradation in image quality - if you´re talking "save for e-mail to someone on a modem connection" this will be obvious.

That said, I have both Photoshop 6 and Corel 10, and I for sure can´t spot any difference in the output, either to screen or printer, with or without compression, between the two.

rubank

[Wombat]

I'm sure he understands that. Maybe the JPEG implementations are different enough, or maybe they just use different levels of compression by default. PS6 offers more JPEG options than PS5, for example.

[Fred H]

I am using Paint Shop Pro 7.01 (http://www.jasc.com/ )
But I am not using it to professional work.
Not a bad competitor for 100$, to Photoshop.

Fred H

[rubank]

Wombat,

you´re right in that the two apps defaults to different settings (compressions),
but PhotoPaint (Corel) has a wider range than PS6 at both ends of the scale.
E.g., in PS6 a 36 meg file gives a a size of 5,5 Mb at maximum setting, while PP10 gives you a less compressed size of 6,7 Mb at maximum setting.

Though, at default settings PS6 will give you appr. twice the file size for the same picture, in my case 1,4 Mb vs. 700 Kb.

As said, you do have "all" the options, and both apps will serve you a dialogue for your preferred settings prior to saving it to disk.

rubank

[J1NG]

Just in case any students are here, you can get a highly reduced price version of the collections (I think all the collections have Photoshop 7.0) if you go to the Adobe site. Just gotta register to prove you ARE a student.

Damn, who'd thought that being student is so useful these days?

And for my own opinion of this, I suggest staying with the Corel products or Paint Shop Pro too. Unless you're working on fakes to fool your local intelligence agency or working in areas that just NEEDS stuff like Photoshop that is. Waaay cheaper as the others have said.

J1NG

[mutz]

...oooKay. Getting closer to the point. I was reading in some the reviews and newsgroups about the different jpg implementations giving differing quality. Corel 11 now has jpg2, perhaps for this reason. Of course I don't know what that means to the recipient of a jpg2 photo that doesn't have jpg2. Maybe it's getting like the days when you had to know which version of pkzip someone had.

Could be what I'm seeing is info loss when reducing size for e-mail or web, and how PhotoPaint does it compared to others. I just started seeing this, and of course what we see is highly dependent on graphic card and monitor. I've often marveled at the quality of even small jpgs at times.

Yes, PhotoPaint is quite good for "retouching" photos. Made a birthday card for my mother once. "What?" she said "That can't be! In this picture I am 18 and you are 10. When I was 18 I didn't even know your father!" She has WebTV, so you get the picture...

[Dilitante1]

hmmmm MSPaint and PSP here and powerGoo occasionally 8D

[UtwigMU]

Is this muddiness just colour or does image look different.

How are your profiles set up? (Tools->Color Manegement)

I recommend:
Internal RGB: AdobeRGB
CMYK: Of EuroPos
Monitor: Same as internal RGB yields best results but image still looks different from the same image in Photoshop.

Photoshop has Adobe Gamma utility that let's you calibrate monitors quite well, while Corel lacks similiar feature.

I use Photoshop for images and CorelDraw for vector/illustration/layout.

Adobe Design/Web/Publishing suites are priced at 2.5-3 times of CorelDraw suite but if you're doing pro-stuff they are worth it.

Also resampling in PhotoPaint is inferiour (bilinear vs bicubic) to Photoshop.