Looking For Alternatives

Two things happened recently which made me look at options to PS. First I had a virus attack, which wiped one of my drives, fortunately it was the drive with all the programs on so my work in progress on the other drive was OK. I was not worried as after I'd dealt with the virus I had all the discs and codes to reinstall my programs, or so I thought. When I came install CS3 I found the disk was damaged, Adobe apparently no longer supports CS3 so it was buy the new CC version or was it? 

I object to being forced to use 'the cloud' I just don't trust it and at £8'sh a month it's dammed expensive in the long run. I got LR5, which is fine as far as it goes; Irfanview is a good free program for batch processing but is limited in other ways.

In the end I got Serif's PhotoPlus X7 at just under £90. The interface is very familiar to anyone who has used PS. X7 will do most of what PS does and a few things it don't do. The layout for the different tools is not quite so intuitive and the names can be different but you soon get used to that. Pano's need an other Serif prog, which does a great job at less than £30. So for under £120 or just over a year’s subscription to PS CC you have a full professional tool, wish I'd known about a few years ago it would have saved me a fortune.

There are several Serif programs which provide good alternatives to the market leaders.

Tony Middleton