Review by Michael

I use Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Gimp and I’m having a hard time finding the place for PhotoPlus. It is like the poor man’s Photoshop, but really the free Gimp is the poor man’s Photoshop. PhotoPlus does have some features that Gimp doesn’t, but if you get to the point where you really need a professional editing program–Photoshop is the industry standard!nnYou can find tons and tons of Photoshop tutorials online, while the few Photoplus tutorials I find are by serif. There are also tons of Photoshop Elements and Gimp tutorials online. I wanted to make some gold letters in Gimp a while back and was able to Google tons of ways to make gold letters in Gimp. I just looked now and there are also tons of them for Photoshop and Elements. I can’t find any tutorials to make gold text for PhotoPlus. Even beyond tutorials, the only book I see on PhotoPlus is by Serif and not available on Amazon!nnI tried to get my wife to use PhotoPlus to see how easy it would be for a person who doesn’t do photo editing. She was overwhelmed. I then tried her on Photoshop Elements and she got the hang of some basics. I know my wife uses Google when she has problems. So again the online community was part of the reason Elements did better, but Elements also seems just more intuitive for a beginner (even though neither are simple).

I’m sure that there are some people that Gimp or Elements won’t work for who just don’t want to pay for Photoshop. I just think they’re few and far between. If you need something as good as Photoshop, knuckle down and buy Photoshop.