Grafik Glossary

Ask most designers, and they'll tell you that Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard. End of story. What they won't tell you is that Photoshop is expensive and can be difficult to learn for a beginner. There are powerful alternatives that won't empty out your wallet. If you have the budget, though, I suggest at least trying Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the grand-daddy of photo imaging software. Packed full of features for both print and Web, this industry standard program gets better and better all the time. It comes bundled with Adobe ImageReady, which will make creating Web graphics a snap. The downside is that it's expensive, memory hungry, and has a steep learning curve.

Corel PhotoPaint

PhotoPaint is Corel's entry into the photo editing software arena. You can buy it by as a stand-alone program, or by the CorelDRAW! bundle which includes CorelDRAW!, PhotoPaint, clipart, photos, and other utilities. PhotoPaint can certainly give Photoshop a run for its money, but you'll find less support for it at printers and service bureaus.

JASC Paint Shop Pro

While you'll shell out less for Paint Ship Pro (PSP) than you will for Photoshop, you won't be sacrificing too much in features. PSP is a smaller program (file size) and less memory hungry than more expensive programs, allowing you to open it quicker and run more programs alongside it. PSP doesn't have the print support that higher end programs do: no duotones, no PMS colors, no CMYK support.

Ulead PhotoImpact

Most professional designers probably don't give Ulead PhotoImpact a thought. If you're a new designer who works mainly with Web graphics and who doesn't have a large budget for software, PhotoImpact is worth a look. You can create rollovers, animations and even entire Web pages without having to know HTML.

Macromedia Fireworks

Macromedia Fireworks comes bundled with Dreamweaver (an WYSIWYG HTML editor). Fireworks is used to create Web graphics. You can slice, optimize and animate graphics. You can also create rollovers. Fireworks also works well with Macromedia Flash..

Corel Painter

If you're a fine artist, you're going to love Painter. Painter is similar to having a palette and oils, watercolors, acrylics and more sitting on your desktop.