Compared to Photoshop's latest added features for CS6, it really looks like PP is an after thought. The new features in CD look great but PP leaves me scratching my head. I won't be upgrading to X6. I love using PP but it really looks like Ps is running ahead into the distance.
To the Product Manager of PP,
What exactly is your strategy? Rather than PP being a competitor to Ps, it really looks like it's just meant to be a complimentary add-on to CD. I really expected a host of other imrpovements than just the editing of object groups. Does anyone in product development actually look at the market, customers and competitors? I love the potential PP has but I'm afraid I'll be buying Ps this year and upgrading CD a lot later.
I've been buying Photoshop magazines and practising their tutorials in PP, replicating most of them to one degree or another. But in doing so though, there's quite a number of features PP lacks against Ps. I now understand why Adobe charges the prices they do because they know they have no real serious competition. Foster has a cornered market with his PP Unleashed DVDs. Gary Bouton covers some key areas in his Official Guide, but aside from that, there's simply nothing else out there; and I mean "nothing" out there to get you creating in PP. That's because Ps has so many more features to offer. My comments might sound hard but they're the truth.
Maybe PP should be realeased as a stand alone program like Paint Shop Pro with it's own dedicated engineers with a more liberal mandate from product management to really express their coding skills and imagination.
Maybe someone from withiin Corel can enlighten me. If the product manager reads this, then lets open a discussion, get some market feedback happening. Maybe I'm missing somehting.
I know I've learn't so much from Ps and I don't even own it. The publishers of Practical Photoshop, Photoshop Creative and Better Photoshop Techniques do a magnificent job of educating and inspiring me with my image editing in PP (to a feature limited dregree).
PP, you seem so close, yet so far away.
Cheers, Steve.
Hi Foster, there might be a few overpaid executives there who've taken their eye off the ball I think. It's easy to criticize from a back seat, but WOW. They've had 18 months to get their programming juices flowing and this is all they've come up with. I was dumbfounded when I downloaded X6 to try PP. I wonder how sales generally are going for them? If I was PP's product manager and saw the vast array of Photoshop-centric tools and peripherals out there in the market, I'd be buring the midnight oil creating product differentiation strategies and numerous development plans to steal market share. But that's me. Maybe a poor performing economy might sort them out and sharpen their business senses. Who knows. Cheers.
Hi Steve, I totally agree with your post, but I think corel has already acknowledged their defeat on creating a PS competitor.
opdiefiets said:their defeat on creating a PS competitor
I disagree I never saw the Corel strategy as making PP a PS competitior. I always saw PP as a pre-press image editor for the graphics suite and as that it is wonderful, infact my tool of choice for pre-press since Photoshops display got s soft.
PhotoPaint was a competitor until version 9.0, after this release it was stored only as a complement of CorelDRAW for bitmap manipulation. Corel has focused their energy and resources on Corel PaintShop Pro, who has a lot of users, independent than CorelDRAW.
Ariel said: PhotoPaint was a competitor until version 9.0, after this release it was stored only as a complement of CorelDRAW for bitmap manipulation. Corel has focused their energy and resources on Corel PaintShop Pro, who has a lot of users, independent than CorelDRAW.
That's very interesting. I was wondering why they developed the two image editing programs side by side, and what the ultimate strategy is between them. I own both of them and, on balance, I've migrated from PSP to PP as my default editor but I still find PSP has some features I love over PP. Heck, I just buy everything because ultimately, no one program does everything the best. They each offer something that's better than the rest.
I guess well see where this product journey ultimately takes us. I'd love to sit and chat though with the product managers.