Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Choosing a Computer System for Digital Imaging
Printer manufacturers and third parties have improved their inks and papers to the
point where inkjet prints can often exceed the life of minilab prints.
That's a really tall claim. Have you done real tests? What papers and printers were
tested? Any links? Were Fuji Crystal Archive and Kodak Royal tested? Who did
the testing and under what conditions? What kind of accelerated aging tests were
done?
-- Vincent J M, December 19, 2002
I thought I'd had a few comments on Corel PhotoPaint, a rather nice digital imaging
program.
My first encounter with a real graphic program was with CorelDraw 3, something
like 10 years ago. (CorelDraw is Corel's vector imaging program, counterpart to
Adobe Illustrator.) My uncle was using it at the time, and I decided to learn about
how it worked. At that time PhotoPaint was a minor add-on to CorelDraw and only
a minor improvement on Windows 3.1 Paint program. As the versions went, Corel
progressively expanded and developped the Corel Draw graphics suite, turning
PhotoPaint in an amazingly powerful program without actually inflating the price
tag.
I haven't tried the latest version (PhotoPaint 12 I believe.) but I've work quite a lot
with versions 7, 9 and 10 and they were all real good. Every time I read a tutorial
about photo editing, it was based on Adobe PhotoShop. Everytime I was able to do
the same thing with PhotoPaint. The tools have the same name. The settings are
very similar. The set of commands in a picture editing program can only vary so
much.
Now I understand that some people really need some of the arcane functions found
only in Adobe PhotoShop. It is also true that for a professional potographer, the
digital editing program is a rather minor part of the investment. But me, I'd rather
pay one third of the price, use the remainder for a bigger monitor or a new lens and
get a nice vector drawing program as an added bonus.
In case I didn't really get my point across, if you're building a digital editing
workstation from scratch, I suggest you take a real good look at Corel PhotoPaint.
Serge
-- Serge Boucher, February 2, 2003
http://www.photo.net/photo/computers (27 of 33)7/3/2005 2:19:07 AM