Photoshop vs microsoft office picture manager

Scotttyd · Mar 3, 2008

This may be a dumb question, but I am brand spankin new to u/w photography. Is there a lot of difference between photoshop and microsoft office picture manager? I have never used photoshop before and I was just messing around with the microsoft program and saw some fairly significant improvements. Since microsoft is already loaded onto my computer I did not want to shell out $70 + for photoshop if it did not have any additional features.

RAWalker · Mar 3, 2008

It's like comparing tic-tac-toe and Monopoly. Photoshop is a professional level photo editing package. Picture manager is a viewer with some basic editing features.

mike_s · Mar 3, 2008

If you're getting Photoshop for $70 bucks, then it's PhotoShop Elements, not the full version.

Basically with PhotoShop you can edit the picture itself and change pixels, edit out blemishes, etc. It's a pretty powerful picture editing program.

With MS OFfice Picture Manager all you can do is crop, resize, adjust brightness and color. you can't edit the picture. Of course its free also. It's basically a "picture manager" as the program name implies. It lets you manage size, brightness, etc. It's not an editor. Its value is that it is a quick free program that lets you resize and crop pics to put up on a webpage or send out via email so you don't have to send out a 3mb-5mb pic that's 10 or 12 megapixel in size.

If you're not familiar with Photoshop Elements, it's a good program to start with. For the $70 bucks you get a pretty good program. Photo Shop CS (full version) is more like $400 plus.

Scotttyd · Mar 3, 2008

RAWalker:
It's like comparing tic-tac-toe and Monopoly. Photoshop is a professional level photo editing package. Picture manager is a viewer with some basic editing features.

that is what I thought but I wanted to confirm before dropping the money.

randini · Mar 3, 2008

Also take a look at the Gimp. It's a Open Source image manipulation program that will let you do eveything you can do in Photoshop, but it's Free. If nothing else it will give you an idea of what you can do in photoshop before shelling out the $ to buy it.

paradicio · Mar 3, 2008

Another alternative may be Adobe Lightroom.

herman · Mar 3, 2008

Scotty,

I have Photoshop Elements 4 on my laptop...and home PC for that matter, I would be happy to get with you when you return and show you what I know about the program. Then you can decide if the cost is worth it for you.

Eskasi · Mar 3, 2008

paradicio:
Another alternative may be Adobe Lightroom.

Agreed. No masks and stuff like that to deal with......Adobe lightroom allows you to fine tune photos and do touch ups......it does not do a lot of the heavy image manipulation like photoshop. IMHO, if thats all you want to do (play with colors, WB, sharpness, etc), Lightroom is way easier to understand.....all you do is fiddle with each control to see how it affects the image...for photoshop, you will need to learn it. They have terms like "Unsharp Mask" which drove me crazy....I spent a full hour scratching my head asking why I would want to "unsharpen" anything! lol.....

diver 85 · Mar 3, 2008

I use Pacasa 2(free) & Elements 5.0(about ?$75) on my pictures(see sig)..............

mike_s · Mar 3, 2008

Elements 6.0 is out now...FYI.

Photoshop vs microsoft office picture manager

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