I still remember my teachers telling me that Photoshop is a design tool important not only for designers but also for people from different fields.
A great example is the grandmother’s old photo example where you have to clean-up a little bit a photo in order to be placed in your parents’ living room. It’s simple and with a little knowledge of Photoshop almost everybody can make that job!
This is a print-screen photo from a forum where a guy asks for Photoshop help… Unfortunately he hadn’t the “little knowledgeâ€!!!
Oh man, this reminds me of the lecture Michael Johnson of Pixar just gave at the UX Week 2008 conference. He creates software that Pixar uses in-house.
A colleague at Pixar fell asleep in a really awkward position on a sofa, and they got a picture. Next thing you know it’s flying around email and everyone is photoshopping it to hilarious results.
The moral of his story was that it was the best possible way to teach everyone at Pixar how to use Photoshop. …Better than any class!
If you want to flex your p.shop humor skills or just kill tons of hours go to fark.com and check out any thread with a Photoshop tag. They’re usually pretty good about keeping it safe for work…usually.
I think Corel is popular outside the US. In North America, Adobe is king.
BTW though, anyone looking for a free app, type inkscape.org. Open source alternative to Illustrator. It has moved a long way since it’s buggy past. I’d say 80% of illustrator without crashing.
I use CorelDraw fairly frequently for a few tasks. You can draw things to scale without plug-ins and it’s really great for detailed line work that you’re going to output via lasercutter, waterjet, etc. It’s missing most of Illustrator’s shading capabilities, and filters, but it gets the job done for little things.
I haven’t touched Painter since at least '98 myself either.
