Adobe Photoshop is the best known graphics product on the market.
$20
per month
Google Slides
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google Slides is a presentation tool that enables users to create, edit, collaborate, and present. It is free for personal use, and available to businesses via a Google Workspaces subscription.
Photoshop is a useful tool for everything from creating social media graphics to editing and sizing photos. There is a bit of a learning curve, so you need to have a bit of experience to master it and use it for a variety of tasks. You also need to have a good sense of file organization so you can find files quickly without losing track of them.
Well-suited to working on presentations or PowerPoint-style documents, including setting up templated slides and working collaboratively on presentations. It's less well-suited to setting up printable documents, though I have used it for simple printable documents, you just need to remember to set the slide size to A4 (or your preferred paper size) measurements.
We get a lot of use out of this software. It's vital for work with production in our industry and has a lot of cross-functionality - creating social media images, retouching photos, editing photos, creating gradients, and more. It's pretty fuss-free in that we haven't had to reach out to support and the program hasn't crashed on us. We are trained on the software (so again, this isn't for beginners), but for detail-oriented designers and creatives like ourselves - it's a no-brainer.
The popularity for Google Slides among the casual technology tool users is so great that we are not in a position to replace this tool with anything else. Every other tool either doesn't have the popularity, or doesn't match the ease of sharing level of Slides. The training needed to learn a different tool is too great. Google Slides is very easy to pick up and master.
Adobe PhotoShop is a professional-grade tool that requires months/years to get a grasp of how to use it well. Even then, after over a decade of using Adobe PhotoShop both casually and professionally, I feel like I'm still unfamiliar with a large percentage of the available tools. Without a dedicated training program, it can be extremely overwhelming and/or you may not get good use out of it. That being said, once you do get comfortable with it, the layout and workspace are excellent with myriad shortcuts that speed up your workflow exponentially. Put in the time to learn it, and you'll love it.
Google Slides is very easy and intuitive for creating simple, straightforward presentations. Its limitations make for less decision making. Being part of the Google Suite makes for easy sharing and collaboration, auto-saving, and time-stamped versions/edit history. However, unlike a platform like Canva, there's no icon library, photos, graphics, or elements built-in, so if you're wanting more creative designs, you have to import or create yourself.
Adobe Photoshop is very reliable, but is never 100%. There have been times when Adobe Photoshop has had trouble opening, but nothing a little computer restart couldn't fix. I use Adobe Photoshop on a Mac for both work and at home on a daily basis, and I would be lost without it.
Speed can be an issue when you are dealing with large files for large format printing or billboards. When working on web images, speed is not an issue.
While I never contacted Adobe directly, there is so much content out there in the form of YouTube videos, Lynda/LinkedIn learning that almost any issue, including bugs, can be worked around (and this method is generally faster as there's no turnaround time involved).
I took a course so it really helped. I didn’t take the course until much later after beginning to use it, so I wish work would have sent me right off the bat. It would have alleviated a lot of frustratinon
[Adobe] Photoshop offers the best photo editing as well as content creation. The layer-by-layer approach of [Adobe] Photoshop helps to work between two apps or even two PCs of entirely different Creative Cloud apps seamlessly. The stability and the speed of the tools in photoshop make it even better to make a canvas of creativity.
Google Slides works both online and offline, they are free to use if you have a Google account. Easy to share and are supported by most web browsers. A great addition to your arsenal of interactive educational online platforms.
It does take a long time for the program to start up, however
The most difficult task is onboarding new employees into Adobe PhotoShop who don't have experience with it. It's an investment for their future so we see value in it.
