Need to find a program other than PScs

[DJM]

Hi.Any suggestions for a retouch program other than Pscs. It's to complicated for me and costly. I am doing my ancestry, I want to repair doc's and photo's thats all, just a hobby. Also, are there any reasons for not buying academic versions of a program?

[Swampy]

You can download GIMP for free, but it's complicated too. You might look at Photoshop Elements that will let you do many of the adjustments that PSCS does. The academic version of PSCS has the full PSCS feature set.

[vbrestorer]

Often there are some extra hurdles you'll have to clear when buying the "academic" version of an item -- you have to be either a student or a teacher. Often you will be required to provide proof that you are one or the other (teacher or student) before a vendor will/can sell you the academic version.

[TEastman]

For your needs, I would also recommend Photoshop Elements.

[Kraellin]

i'd recommend paint shop pro, versions x2 or x3. it's a lot simpler than photoshop but still very powerful and is what i use primarily. i recently bought x3 for $49.95 at staples. for what's in there, that's a pretty good bargain.

[smoothfluid]

Pixelmator is a pretty good bargain ($59) if you are Mac based. By my reckoning not quite as complicated (or as huge) as PS but offers a hefty set of tools to do almost everything.

[Littlecoo]

I second Craig's suggestion. Check out Corel's PaintShop Photo Pro X3-
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satelli...8#tabview=tab1
I've been using it myself recently and I am really impressed with it- especially for what it costs.

[aartist]

Corel's Paintshop Pro is a great program and you will not regret getting it. Amazon sometimes runs a sale on it. Right now it's 35 dollars for x2 and 15 dollars more for x3 at Amazon's site.

http://www.amazon.com/Corel-Paint-Sh...8&sr=8-2-fkmr1

And that comes with a 2gb flash drive.

[lkroll]

Never tried it, but if you want easy, you can try Nikon's Capture program (based on the few videos of it's use that I've played). If you want a good free (but still a learning curve) program, I highly recommend GIMP having used it as my main editor for over 8 years now. Most of the edits I do here is done in GIMP. GIMP can run a lot of PS plugins too (via PSPI plugin; also free). I like free, so I milk free aps to see it's potential. I still use PS to process all my RAW files (and while there, do some other edits too), but I find GIMP easier for me to work in (because I took a lot of time to learn it). Any serious editing requires a learning curve no matter what editor you choose to use. Some are more intuitive then others. GIMP and PS are not for a lot of folk. Both are much more powerful then simple editors though. The question you have to ask yourself is, do you really want to learn retouching, or do you just want to apply quick fixes or enhancements to Photos. Lightroom is the tool of choice for many Photogs; I only participated in the original Beta, and it was pretty cool then; even more so now based on a lot of comments that I've read. Still, the power is with PS and for me GIMP. I'm not really in love with any one tool and even use stand-alones like Neatimage (too cheap to buy the PS plugin), DAP, and FotoSketcher to name just a few. It all depends on what you want your outcome to be and how to duplicate that look. Flows can change with time, but that's the fun of retouching.

Sorry for my diatribe; I would try GIMP since it only costs your time, but that's just my own personally opinion. Lost of support groups are out there too (I happen to frequent GIMPTalk) should you need help; I'm sure a lot of PS specific groups (and here too) exists as well to answer questions. We are all one big happy family.