I am in need of a good image editor to replace my aging copy of Paint Shop Pro 7. However, I can't seem to find something that fits my requirements. Does anyone know of a good image editor that can:

- Diff images relatively easily.
- Apply convolutions and various non-linear filters.
- UI that doesn't suck (that means you: GIMP).
- Supports file load/save plugins.
- View/edit alpha channels as grayscale (and not as transparency, although that's good option too).
- Price under 1000 USD.
- Site licensing option for ~500-1000 engineers.

Thanks!

Paint.NET?

On which planet do you actually live ? ;-p

Really ? huhuhuhu

[url http://www.getpaint.net/roadmap.html]Paint.NET v1.0
Released: May 6th, 2004
The original project that started it all. This was completed in 15 weeks as an undergraduate senior design project at WSU, and was 36,000 lines of code.[/url]

Then you are not enough curious.

The time it tooks to write this post could have been optimised testing paint.net .

You

Fail

!

Personally, I haven't found GIMP very intuitive. I feel that if a "serious" programmer (or user) were to use GIMP, they'd find out how to use all the quirks and features after time. When I look at a paint program, I usually like to quickly understand enough to be "dangerous" and start right into drawing.

MS Paint has never been something I felt I could be "dangerous" with... it was entirely too simple, so I've been using PSP 7 (which is getting on in years, now) since I was able to just jump in feet-first and understand all I was working with.

If Paint.NET has a simple-enough (and relatively easy) learning curve, I'd probably move to that over PSP. Once the learning curve is conquered for the "simpler things" I have no problem moving onto the more difficult ones.

I take it like programming: I started with QBasic because some people posted QBasic games on the internet, and I was able to see what their source code was doing. Then I began to understand what the code was doing. Then I began to fix what their code meant to do (but wasn't doing).

The way I started to learn C for the first time was take someone's game and read all the code, tweak here and there, watch something crash miserably because of a change I made, then figure out what happened.

Paint programs aren't exactly that intuitive. You can't really see how an artist was able to create a specific look or effect by looking at the picture. If you get a tutorial that explains the steps of how to do that, then you climb the learning curve more quickly until you can comfortably make pictures with those features/effects yourself.

GIMP, unfortunately, hasn't been all that intuitive for me...

Yeah, I can't stand the Gimp; I never looked back after I got I got Photoshop Elements. Use it if you're broke, otherwise use anything else.

It costs an arm and two legs. I was hoping to find a cheaper solution, especially since the product only needs to cater to us poor engineers.

Ooooh, shiney!

Actually, this looks pretty good. I'll be playing around with it, and see if we can add plugins for the functioanlity we need. If so, then we'll definitely go that route.

It's a GTK app. 'nuff said.

Though I personally don't like all the seperate windows. I like having them all under "one roof", as it were. It keeps them from getting too cluttered and inter-twined with other programs. The image window can be on top, the tool window down below my IRC client, and the layer window below that and my web-browser. Just a total mess.

Were it not for a commercial application I have (which I need to use more than I really do), I wouldn't have a reason to have .NET 1.x installed. I only have 2.0 because of MSVC2005 (the free one), and I don't see that going away anytime soon.

For the love of <insert diety here>, where?

I don't remember but I think there's a plugin repository somewhere which google should be able to find. I'm also not entirely sure if the plugin actually works on Linux or if it is Windows-only, but I do remember that it does work at least on Windows.

I had used Paint Shop Pro since around version 3 or 4 until 7 and I've seen Photoshop (older versions) as well and as far as I could see the only difference in GIMP was the separate windows. That's why I'm asking. What other non-obvious differences are there?