Review: Five Photoshop Wannabes

June 09, 2006
Review: Five Photoshop Wannabes

Photoshop may be the standard for image editing, but these five low-cost image editors set out to do its job for for a lot less money.

By Ron White

There is no doubt that Adobe Photoshop CS2 is the reigning champion of image editing. Anything that can be conceived by human (and perhaps extraterrestrial) imagination can be created on-screen with a few shrewd choices from Photoshop's arsenal of brushes, tools, palettes, and bag of clever visual tricks. It is the standard of pixel pushers around the world. It has redefined art and photography. It is a fine, fine program that costs $649.

I'm going to repeat that.

Adobe Photoshop CS2 costs $649. Six hundred. And forty nine. Dollars.

It is not illegal to charge $649 for a single software program. But it's not mandatory either, and we decided to find some less expensive alternatives and see if they came up to the standard set by Photoshop.

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