Which image editor

When designing graphics, you need to get an image editor that works well for you. The 3 main image editors are:

• Adobe Photoshop
• Paint Shop Pro
• Macromedia Fireworks

Adobe Photo Elements is also fairly popular but as it just a cut down versiom of photoshop I will skip past it. There are also many other image editors and shareware and freeware image editors but for now I'll concentrate on the three above.

Adobe Photoshop

Probably the best known and most popular image editor in the world, photoshop comes from Adobe, who continue to set world standards in software who's titles also include Premiere and Acrobat. Photoshop is the undisbuted champion of image editing though its not the most user friendly environment. The features that make it so good often confuse not just non techys but generally anyone who doesn't do a lot of image editing. Anyone who works in the business though should have no problems, and if your following tutorials, etc, its pretty easy to get used it to. If you can afford the expsense, Photoshop offers a traditional, poweful image editor.

Paint Shop Pro

This package has been around for a while and offers a slightly more user friendly version of Photoshop for a lot cheaper. Although it doesn't have the power for Photoshop it does offer a lot and comes with a free annimated image maker type software too! However there is nowhere that Paint Shop Pro really excells. Sure it has plenty of features and a load of useful templates but nothing really that stands out from the rest. And with Adobe Photo Elements now around the same price you might want to consider this one a bit deaper before you buy it.

Macromedia Fireworks

Macromedia are well know for making great web software such as Dreamweaver and probably the most famous browser plug in aftter Java, Flash. Fireworks is special because unlike the others, Fireworks is vector based. Similar to the way you have handles to drag around shapes and drawings in Microsoft Office, and espcially powerpoint, Fireworks offers shapes such as this all seperated into layers. It is built for the web with easily access to text and buttons as well as a host of special effects form 3D shading to drop down menus using images.

Conclusion

If you need pure power and you can afford it then Adobe Photoshop is the obvious choice for image editing. However if your working with web graphics you will find Fireworks is far superior than Photoshop offering easy graphics creation using vectors and plenty of extra features for less that half the price.