Photoshop is exorbitantly expensive. I use GIMP on Linux. It's very good. I use it for levels, curves, colour balance, resizing, cropping, sharpening, etc. http://www.gimp.org/
I think so too. I don't understand why so many beginners are so willing to afford it. There are so many free tools like IrfanView for cropping, brightness/contrast kind of work.
the GIMP is really not bad. it's supposed to be a bit geeky but u get used to it after a while. i use the following functions a lot:
- curves
- channel mixer (though the preview doesn't work)
- quick masking for selection
but it lacks the following PS tools:
- healing brush
- shadow/highlights, as earlier mentioned
- camera raw
the GIMP feels a bit buggy to me. some things don't work the way i think they should. i can't seem to create adjustment layers like i can with PS. maybe i just haven't figured it out...
still, it's as full featured as a free program can get.
I just like to use PS to crop and scale my images really. I might do cutouts to comp stuff together occasionally, but I don't like messing with filters and such to improve the quality because I like to take care when I set up my shots in the first place.
