Also not a user of classic Photoshop. Unless you are designing the cover for a rock album or are doing the graphics for a coffee table book, why run Photoshop? You can spend as much on books describing the latest tips and tricks as you do on the software. Elements 10 is at least affordable but has the same drawbacks as the biggie. They are both pigs in terms of resources.
As you might guess, I’m a big fan of Picture Window from Digital Light & Color. You can talk with the owner and initial developer (who developed Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day), his principal programmer, and a host of skilled users on their BB. Try to get that from Adobe! And the program runs fine on my relatively antique machine. A quad core processor might help, of course, if you have the $$.
Computer graphics have advanced. The fact is, you cannot make the features of photoshop "lighter". Sure, a lot of the window chrome and fancy stuff surrounding the application UI is "heavier" but it's also easier to use. Additionally, I use Photoshop CS5 myself for the creation of wallpapers and I've yet to purchase a single book on the subject. In fact, I'm surprised there is even a market for books on Photoshop at all. At first it was difficult to use, but 90% of usability is experience, and I hadn't used any version of Photoshop yet (instead using Paint Shop Pro for many of the same reasons you likely use Picture Window.)
There are typically two arguments against photoshop- one is that it's a "resource hog" which is a non-argument since image processing is resource heavy and- at least in my experience- Photoshop typically lags behind firefox, Visual Studio 2008, and even Winamp for memory usage on my machine, unless I happen to have a number of my 2880x1800 images open. The second is that a lot of it's "appeal" is more or less driven by inertia, which is something I used to believe myself until I used the product for a short while. I figured that the reason so many people think Photoshop is the "go to" professional image processing application was based on their earlier domination of their competition with features and that at that much of their appeal lies in their verbalizing of the word "Photoshop" (expressions like "looks shopped") However, while I often went wanting for features in Paint Shop Pro 5, PSP 9, or Corel Paint Shop Photo Pro X3, I've yet to find myself wanting of a feature in CS5. It's UI was overwhelming somewhat, but if you ask me that's a limitation of the common UI design paradigms like menus and toolbars at representing the vast functionality of a product like photoshop. Also, Photoshop's functionality is more or less a superset of Picture Window's, so naturally it is going to use more resources. The people that use Picture Window don't need the other features, so they don't miss them.
As to the performance issues raised by the original Poster, I've run CS5 (which to my understanding is the "full product"while Elements is the somewhat stripped version for more general consumption at a cheaper price point) on both my Quad
[email protected] with 8GB and my older Dual Core@2Ghz laptop with 4GB of RAM and had no appreciable performance issues to speak of. It's important to note, that regardless of your system, filters and large images will take time. I work with 2880x1800 images and often use full-image filters and depending on the settings they can take a full minute or longer to process. Some might call it slow- I call it inevitable. And since people were sometimes able to get up, brew a pot of coffee, and drink a cup of it before a filter completed with earlier hardware and software I still consider it an improvement.
Picture Window is a different product from Photoshop altogether and requires a different mindset altogether; it doesn't have layers, because they aren't conducive to the prime purpose of Picture Window, Which is for working with digital photographs, while Photoshop is for dealing with the more general domain of Digital imagery and Digital Graphics. Trying to use Picture Window for many of the tasks that one might use for Photoshop is a fools errand; With photoshop, changing your mind about a drop shadow a few days down the line just means toggling the drop shadow option in Layer blending options. changing your mind on a drop shadow in Picture Window often means restarting the image from scratch, or loading up a saved backup image. The workflow is different, and from what I've gathered Picture Window's workflow seems to center around a "digital darkroom" metaphor, consistent with it's primary design goal and purpose of dealing with digital photographs; Photoshop is less focussed and tends to provide a lot of functionality with regard to the entire domain, which is useful if that is what you need. For a lot of the tasks revolving around manipulation of Digital Photographs themselves, the implementations are often more advanced in Picture Window than they are in Photoshop, things like the Histogram functionality and it's perfect blending with the curves functions. This of course comes with a trade-off. Picture Window is designed as a niche product, designed exclusively to specialize in a given task that happens to be a subset of what another popular product is capable of. Thankfully, it is this specialization that allows the tools used within that smaller domain to be more advanced as well as allow it to be less "heavy" overall, since it doesn't need as many extra things to load. The trade-off is that if you need functionality outside the realm of Digital Photography, you'll be pulling your hair out trying to find or invent workarounds, simply because what you want to achieve isn't part of the products workflow.
