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Comment by Crinus | Hacker News Reader

I'll agree as long as you do not see Photoshop as the end goal for user friendliness :-P. Personally i have used Photoshop only a little and every time i used it i found it much harder than GIMP for the tasks i wanted it. I'd like it if GIMP became more user friendly but i'd really wouldn't want GIMP to become more like Photoshop as i do not see that program as user friendly.

(for reference, the image editor i see as the most user friendly is Paint Shop Pro, especially versions 5 to 7 - and note that i mean the most user friendly, not the most capable or robust)

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I personally found Corel Photopaint to be the most user friendly up until I stopped using it over a decade ago. I use Photoshop for work and sometimes Gimp but have never fully embraced either because the UI is so bad IMO.

I actually try to do as much as possible in Inkscape whose UI isn't perfect but the benefits of SVG make working with it a much more palpable.

*palatable

Normally I wouldn't get all grammar nazi on anyone but I figured you'd want to know :)

Note that i refer specifically to PSP versions 5 to 7. In version 8 (or 9, i do not remember) they rewrote the UI which was much slower and had several issues (not only the UI but also some of the tools) and last i heard after it was bought by Corel (after PSP9) it became even worse.

I haven't used Photopaint myself so i can't judge.

I still use PSP 5 to this day, its an amazing photo editor for 80% of the quick image editing tasks I do, and it is self contained in a folder so its natively a "portable" app.

I have a retail/boxed version of PSP7 and i really like how fast it opens. At some point i want to make my own "PSP clone" since i do not see any other image editor trying to use a similar UI (i think GraphicsGale is kinda inspired by it, but it is specialized to pixel art, not a generic image editor). But of course this is yet another thing for the "stuff i'd like to do" pile :-P.

My PSP5 is also the retail boxed version, one of my first few actual software purchases I made from way back. I'm also familiar with the "stuff I'd like to do pile" it sits next to the "games I have never played pile" both piles are quite large :)

Have not tried Paint Shop Pro since the 00's!! Maybe I'll try it again

Note that i mention, i haven't used any version above PSP7 (well, i have used 8 and 9 and i wasn't happy so i reverted to 7 and nowadays the use some onerous DRM so i do not even consider it). PSP7 works perfectly fine on Windows 10 though.

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