Design reviews - Photoshop alternatives 2

Two more fully featured digital image editing packages. Corel Photo-Paint for print design and Macromedia Fireworks for web design.

Corel Photo-Paint

Photo-Paint is Corel's attempt at a Photoshop level image editor. And Photo-Paint does indeed have some heavyweight design and graphics features.

Corel Photo-Paint also has support for a large number of graphics file formats, it has numerous filters and special effects, as well as a full set of retouching and digital manipulation and compositing tools.

These include curves, layers and masks. PhotoPaint also supports CMYK channels, which allows for professional print production output.

As you would expect, Photo Paint also has good integration with the other tools in the Corel range, such as CorelDraw. But Photo-Paint is still pretty far behind Photoshop in the sophistication of those features and it is clear to see the reasons for it being ignored by the majority of professional graphic artists.

The user interface is clumsy at times and it suffers from the fact that it has had to constantly play feature catch-up with Photoshop. But, overall, Corel Photo-Paint could certainly function as an all encompassing image editor for a cash-strapped graphic designer.

Macromedia Fireworks

Macromedia have always had an odd collection of digital graphics tools. At one point they had an application called xRes, which had great potential as a high-end graphics file editor. But Macromedia Fireworks could survive against Photoshop, despite having a unique 'proxy' file editing feature, which allowed the editing of huge graphics files in near real time.

Fireworks is currently Macromedia's only bitmap graphics tool. Fireworks is an unashamedly web graphics only editing application - there are no CMYK or print design features for example. But it is a perfectly capable graphics tool, with layers, text editing effects and a number of digital imaging options.

But unlike Paint Shop Pro, Macromedia Fireworks is aimed firmly at the professional web design market. Indeed, in many design houses, Fireworks is the main graphics package and has often been a direct competitor to Photoshop in the web graphics arena. Although, since the Macromedia and Adobe merger, whether that remains the case in the future is debatable

Fireworks also has a very elegant integration of vector and bitmap graphics editing within the same file format and, until recently, this was something that Photoshop had lacked. Criticism of Fireworks comes from designers who dislike its interface and there are some noticeable display glitches at times.

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Other digital images editors

• Paintshop Pro
• Corel Painter
• Corel Photo-Paint
• Macromedia Fireworks
• Photoshop overview

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