I am contemplating purchasing one of the Adobe programs. I know that many digital artists and photographers use Photoshop. My question is simple - which Photoshop software is the most versatile for post render and photo manipulations?

Thanks in advance for your help.

veritas2210

Adobe photoshop (CC which I think is the newest version) is the most widely used by magazine publishers as well as many artists and studios. That said I have to say Adobe currently has a subscription based price model that goes month to month. In some cases this can be a good thing, however I do like having a phsyical copy installed on my pc as Adobe had recent issues with their cloud storage (it might be integrated into the service). I read elsewhere about a magazine who failed to meet their publishing deadline due to the service having an outage, and them being unable to access many in house created elements (as well as their concern about Adobe's data breach a few years back and them possibly having work stolen).

You could do the monthly trial for a limited or use to use basis. The other option would be Gimp for Windows. An Adobe alternate. There was a shop for Gimp which changed the front end of Gimp to sort of look like Adobe.

I've used previous versions of Corel Painter and that's nice too. I will say I'm only a hobby person, nowhere near as professional as many of the artists here. Hopefully one of them will provide a more detailed and helpful answer :)

Thank you for your insight.

+1 for The Gimp

It doesn't have everything pohotoshop has, but it has most everything the average user needs. I'd say you should give it a good solid trial run to see if you like it and can do what you want. If you like it, you can't beat the price!

http://www.gimp.org/

GIMP is the poor man's photoshop. Has many of the same features, but it's free, open source software. The only thing it lacks is the plethera of brushes available to photoshop users, but if you do a web search, you can find a lot of them that were converted to work in GIMP.

EDIT: cross posted!

Ps is great for sure, but you have some free options that are great and works like ps way, gimp is one, but if you want something more similar in the ui with ps, you can try :

paint  http://www.getpaint.net/ 

I use it and it is great, and free.