butchM Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Arka wrote:
Chez, you obviously will prioritize your time as you see fit, but let's not imagine that it takes very long to try out "a bunch of other applications" versus relying upon your "years of iage [sic] processing experience." Have you tried any alternatives? I'm going to assume you haven't. I have, and I quickly realized that they offer numerous advantages that persuade me to reject the "sunk costs" argument re: my accrued PS skills. Unless you have very particular reasons to keep Photoshop in a workflow (e.g., custom scripts, brushes, interoperability among multiple users in a production environment, etc.), I don't see why one should avoid newer and usually better ways of working. Even in collaborative content creation pipelines that enforce use of PS, many artists and photographers secretly embrace non-PS alternatives, and simply save the images they create in .PSD format for art editors to review. The editors are none the wiser.
I don't know how complex your workflow needs are. My own demands on image processing software are not modest, and I suspect that I have probably spent at least as much time as you have learning Photoshop (I started in 1992 with Photoshop 2.0 on a Apple Macintosh IIci). Yet despite over two decades of working in PS, I have been able to learn how to make images like the ones attached to this post with less than 30mins of "learning" iOS apps like Pixelmator and Procreate.
These are apps that, combined, cost only slightly more than a month of CC subscription. Had you asked me even a year ago whether I could achieve this level of creative productivity on iOS, independent of Photoshop, I would have laughed at you. But now I realize that even in their early days, many iOS apps are extremely capable, and unlike freeware like Gimp, extraordinarily well designed. And they enjoy significant improvements in update cycles of a few months, rather than over years.
Are they as efficient in all workflow aspects as Photoshop? Of course not (though Affinity's Serif is interchangeable with PS for all of my needs, and functions basically in the same way). But are they extremely competent for a wide range of complex image processing and content creation tasks? Absolutely! Indeed, any person with "years of [image] processing experience" such as yourself can learn exactly what is possible in each app in far less than an hour of tinkering. That is the power of new apps; they make many workflow tasks easier, and are nowhere near as difficult to learn as PS. As a result, I haven't really used PS in over two months, but have generated at least as much image content in those months as I was when I was living in PS. ...Show more →
I agree with much of what you offer. We shouldn't be afraid to explore and evaluate possible options. A slider for white balance, HSL, contrast, etc., etc. is a slider. There are far more similarities than differences between most imaging/graphics apps. Some of the nomenclature of the tools or developer jargon may differ, but not excessively so.
Some of the new apps, when compared to Ps, may not have every facet of goodness that we have become accustomed to over the years ... but they also don't carry all the cruft of ancient code and unnecessary functions that have since become mostly deprecated yet still present from when Ps was young.
In fact most of the newer apps that come close to replacing Ps are far more efficient from a hardware resource perspective because of the cleaner, more efficient code base.
There are some tasks in Affinity Photo and even Pixelmator (also in Acorn too) that move much more quickly and smoothly than in Ps. All with a much smaller footprint across the board.
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