Photoshop - the one and the only! Alternatives really can't compete.
August 05, 2016
Photoshop - the one and the only! Alternatives really can't compete.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Photoshop
We currently use Adobe Photoshop CC for digital design (mostly web), publications, and also some social media work. It is being used to enhance our web news stories and to improve the look and feel of our marketing efforts. One of the major business problems it addresses is making sure we are moving forward in this fast-paced digital world with a fresh, new look to our communications and marketing.
- If you know Adobe products already, it's pretty easy to navigate and use.
- One of the best uses for it at the moment is for generating animated GIFs (although, this seems to be going into legacy now and might be gone in future versions).
- It's easy to manipulate and fix images with problem areas. The stamp tool and background eraser have helped us many times!
- For people who are looking for special effects or to work with vectors, it's not really easy to transfer back and forth from Adobe Illustrator without losing some quality.
- There have been times where if I'm not saving what I'm working on, it crashes really quickly. This can be endlessly frustrating when you're in the middle of a hard job. Always save your work frequently because if the program gets overwhelmed, it will crash.
- I wish they would keep animated GIFs! These are big right now for us for our marketing efforts. I'm sure there's another program that will take over this functionality, but when Adobe keeps shifting those functions to other programs, it forces you to have to switch back and forth too much.
- Positive: We have been able to really enhance our social media efforts by adding more photos to our posts with some design added. It helps to keep our brand consistent for our members.
- Negative: There have been times where - because a user isn't trained, it takes them hours to figure out how to fix something. We only have a handful of staff fully trained, therefore some people need to wait a long time to get a finished product because it's not the most intuitive program for users (or accessible).
- Positive: Since we've been able to add more animated marketing banners and GIFs to our campaigns, we get more activity and engagement!
There are a few alternatives to Photoshop, however they are usually not able to produce the best output for your needs. Pixelmator is an example of this. It may be $40 total on the Apple Store - but you don't get all of the bells and whistles of Photoshop and it leaves you with the feeling like you *wish* you had Photoshop, but just had to settle and do the best you can.