If you’ve been thinking of investing in Photoshop now could be the time; Adobe have a one day offer on the 19th October (Wednesday) taking a whopping 30% off the regular price. In the UK that equates to a saving of around £200, so the 19th is definitely the day to buy if you’re going to! I’ve posted this a little early to give you a couple of nights to sleep on it, if you do decide to buy CS5 wait until Wednesday as its a one day only offer.

Even with this great discount CS5 is still a significant investment. If you’re looking for alternatives have a read here.

Adobe don’t only produce excellent software, they are also masters at marketing their products. The release of each new version is preceeded by the calculated leaking of info on new features to create the kind of buzz that makes it hard to resist gear lust.

With the build up to the release of Photoshop CS5 the feature that has sparked the most interest is the much touted ‘content aware fill’. Like a clone brush on steroids its potential to quickly and easily fix images by intelligently removing unwanted elements has both excited and worried photographers.

While the thought of saving hours of painstaking labour in post production is obviously appealing the obvious flip side is the worry that the same tool will make it ridiculously easy for the unscrupulous to remove watermarks on images they wish to steal.

Here’s the ‘sneak peek’ video released by Adobe in the run up to release;  it is easy to see how the technology can be turned against its intended users!

Well Photoshop CS5 is now available (you can get a free trial version here) so we can now try this double edged sword out for ourselves. So far the reality seems to be somewhere between the hype and the fear in that the tool isn’t always quite the magic solution it was suggested/hoped/feared it would be.

As it works by sampling surrounding pixels its effectiveness seems to vary according to the complexity of the image being worked on. So the images it works brilliantly on are the ones that a competent user of existing tools could handle already. Many watermarks, such as the one I use on my images and the Alamy crosshair are already relatively easy to remove from many images, especially if the intended use is only a low resolution web use where the picture wont be subjected to close scrutiny.

The entire image overlay style of watermark, as used by agefotostock for instance, isn’t going to succumb to the power of content aware fill as easily! Obviously this style of watermark isn’t acceptable to many to many people wishing to showcase their work but it does illustrate that the content aware fill doesn’t entirely render watermarks redundant as an image theft prevention measure. To an extent I feel watermarks have for sometime already been as much about branding and providing contact details for legitimate image users interested in licensing a photo as they are about preventing photo pilfering.

So in essence content aware fill is another tool in your image editing tool box and may be good enough to make you pause and reflect on your own current approach to the use of watermarks and how you publish your work online generally. Is it worth upgrading for? Take photoshop CS5 for a test drive and decide for yourself!

For Adobe’s current specials on Photoshop and CS5 click here. Or click here for free alternatives to Photoshop.

While Adobe Photoshop is justifably the industry standard photo editing application it does come with a price tag to match. Like a lot of software there will be many users who only really use maybe 10% of what it can do and really can’t justify its cost. I’m all for minimising costs when possible and there are some very practical alternatives to Photoshop that are completely free.

A quick google search will reveal the choices available for photo editing can be quite daunting in their sheer scale and variety. While it can be tempting to grab all the free stuff you can this can quickly lead to a lot of wasted time installing and playing around with multiple applications, many of which will probably become rarely used. When too much of your time is getting sucked up the quest for a free or cheap alternative starts becoming expensive!

So here are three free Photoshop replacements.

Irfanview
Irfanview is described as a graphic viewer which, while it isn’t a full image editor, I think does it a great disservice as it does a lot more than that implies. It supports Photoshop filters and can be used for common basic adjustments that are often all that a photo requires. With plugins installed a host of extra features like IPTC editing are included. I like Irfanview for its simplicity and speed. I have it as my default application for image files to load into when clicked and often use it for batch processing and resizing. It is free for non-commercial use and only a US$12 donation is requested if you’re getting serious with it! On its own though it doesn’t replace Photoshop, so you need more editing power to complement its file management.

Paint
If you’re on Windows you’ll be familiar with the basic paint program that has featured in the accessories through its evolution. This is not that paint! Originally it was intended to replace the painting software that comes with windows and has gone way beyond that. You get a pretty full featured application that supports layers and has an active community developing tutorails, plugins etc, for free.

GIMP
Of course I have to mention the the GIMP. You can’t go past this software if you’re a demanding user that wants an alternative to Photoshop. It is available on multiple operating systems and broadly speaking is a match for Photoshop just without the expense; it is free open source software. The catch for many people, is in getting to grips with it. I know when I first played with it (while experimenting with Linux at the same time, so possibly too much for me at once) I found it frustrating figuring out how to do things I knew I could have dome in moments back in photoshop. As I said if you’re wasting a lot of time trying to get to grips with free sofware it isn’t so free anymore. However investing time in getting to grips with the GIMP is definitly worth the effort if you plan to use it as long term alternative, which it is certainly capable of being.

I’m pleased to say I’m not the only person who must have found GIMP a bit of a steep climb at first because there is a hack that makes it a much more comfortable transition for users used to Photoshop. Gimpshop basically makes the user interface of GIMP much more friendly for anyone used to photo editing in Photoshop. If you’re familiar with photoshop and want a fairly painless (saving hundreds of dollars helps with a little discomfort) transition Gimpshop is the way to go.

These are my presonal recommendations for use as photo editors. Paint and GIMP are also great for graphics work but there are others worth considering for this too. I’ve no doubt there are other extremely good alternatives for photo editing too that I haven’t noticed or fully appreciated. One area I haven’t touched on in this post is the increasingly good options available from web based editing applications. If you think I’ve missed something feel free to add suggestions in the comments.