When a die-hard Photoshop user tries new things

I'll admit it - I'm a creature of habit. Serious habits! And am resistant to change. Extremely resistant. (I'm still having issues with Blog Spot going to Blogger, and let's not even discuss Blogger's "new" interface. I say new because I fought it for so long and kept changing it back to the old layout.) I'm a creature of old, going with what I know. Some may say I play it safe. (I actually had a college English teacher tell me one time that I write well but am afraid to take risks and stay true to what I know. This was said after pointing out that I could easily identify with all of my fictional characters and settings.) So, yes, I hate changes (with a passion).

Recently I've made a few changes in my life, like getting married (after 8 years of saying I'm never getting married again), changed my Win XP machine into a Hackintosh, cleaned off my desk, and slowly but surely am making the change from Safari (and Firefox) to Google Chrome. (Still working on that one.) And after nearly 20 years of being a die-hard Adobe Photoshop user (since version 5.05), I thought I would give a few online photo editors a try. Now, I've tried other photo editors in the past, like Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo line, Phase One's Capture One for RAW editing, Apple's iPhoto, and GIMP, (My children, all fans of Ubuntu, absolutely love GIMP!) however, I always end up going back to Photoshop (in spite of the cost). I love Photoshop's tools, its flexibility, and the control it allows me over all aspects of editing. Photoshop is my number one graphic editor, web or print. I simply cannot live without it.

While opening up Chrome, you get something that looks kinda like the screen on my Android phone, or in my iPad with all of the apps icons. So, I click on the Chrome Web Store icon and what should I see before me but a few photo editors like PicMonkey, and I'm thinking, okay, in the spirit of the new year maybe I'll try a few of these. So, in the next few blog articles, I will be comparing and reviewing the features of a few of the browser based "free" photo editors. I've chosen the same image for use in all of the photo editors for comparison, one of my wedding photos. Each one began with the same unedited photo uploaded into the browser from my computer. The one below (left) is one I edited in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Each were then resized and reduced to 450 px by 299 (or 300) px for use on the web. The one on the right is the untouched image.