For the past ten years or so I’ve predominantly been using Photoshop for all of my photo editing needs. However, since for the most of these years I’ve been fortunate enough to have access to this advanced photo and image manipulation software more or less for free though either my school or work, I never had to give its price a lot of consideration. Photoshop is expansive, and even though in my opinion the high quality and power of this product justifies its price, it also means that it is beyond the reach of most armature photographers.

There are many inexpensive and free alternatives to Photoshop. When I got a trial version of PaintShop I was hoping to be able to evaluate it and compare it to the other software packages that I had used. However, after seeing the complaints about its EULA, and reading the details of it myself, I decided not to install it on my computer. I am usually not the kind of person who frets too much over privacy, and am willing to make the tradeoffs between giving some of my personal and usage information for the sake of bettering the product, but PaintShop EULA verges on scammy and phishy. This is unfortunate, and it will certainly not inspire confidence in Coral and its products. This was once a very respectable software company, and its regrettable that they have been reduced to using all sorts of underhanded tricks and tactics in order to increase their profitability. I sincerely hope that this was an exception, and that they’ll be able to come up with much more transparent EULA in the future. In the meanwhile, two lower end photo-editing programs that I’d recommend are Photshop Elements and GIMP. The latter one of these is free, and over the years it has become a very sophisticated and capable alternative to the commercial programs.