Adobe Photoshop

"This is kind of difficult to rate properly when Photoshop is pretty much THE thing going for industry level graphics. As a professional graphic designer and illustrator, I haven't heard of other professionals using anything else.

I've used some other similar software, like Painter, but Painter isn't meant for photo manipulation - it is for digital painting, so there *is* overlap but only in the way that both cars and trucks have four wheels. ;) Many people I come across pit Photoshop against GIMP. My sister used to be a GIMP user and I used to try to help her design things for fun but what a headache! GIMP may be free and it may be WAY more powerful than Windows Paint but 5 minutes of trying to mask efficiently or apply any kind of relevant adjustment layers totally sealed my respect for Photoshop.

The other thing about writing up pros and cons for Photoshop is that if a person doesn't know about all the things Photoshop can do, they aren't going to recognize them in a list. And because Photoshop is pretty much THE image manipulation software, most pros and cons I can think of only compare it to earlier versions of itself.

I dunno - I just feel bad for ol' Photoshop. ;) Most everyday folks can't afford it (student loans! woo!) and will probably never use it but it gets compared with all the cheap or free stuff, which honestly don't reach quite the same standards, so Photoshop takes a hit for it. Me, I am not even on good income but I will dish out the money for the upgrades and everything; I can think of using nothing less."