Photopaint vs. Photoshop vs. Gimp

Thursday, February 17, 2005It's a Photoshop world. Adobe's image editing software is used so widely it's a verb: "I photoshopped this image." However, I've been using Corel's Photopaint for years, currently running 6-year-old version 9. I'm interested in upgrading, mostly so I can get software that retains EXIF data, but also hoping to get a better means of masking hair and other fine detail.

I'm comparing the new version of Photopaint, version 12, with Photoshop CS and GIMP 2.2. The remarkable thing is that all these editors are extremely alike in functionality, with very similar layers, masks, channels, and brushes. The interfaces are laid out fairly similarly, as well. In operation, Photopaint 9 is of course the fastest, being the oldest (funny how software does that), and GIMP the slowest. Photopaint 12 and PS CS take forever to load in computer time, but PP9 and GIMP snap right up.

I'm not even going to try to fully compare these programs (plenty of other review out there for that), but here's a rundown of what I consider to be important, from the rather minority view of an experience Photopaint user.

PhotoPaint 9
My standard image-processing workhorse. The app has faithfully worked through tens of thousands of images with only an occasional hiccup on some huges images.

PhotoPaint 12
The logical move, and only about $150 for an upgrade
Photoshop CS
The industry standard, but $650
Gimp 2.2
Free!
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