This actually angers me a lot, but I understand people who run case sensitive file systems on their mac's are a strong minority. I can't help but think it's due to Adobe being lazy.
I actually do use Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit, but mostly because I work with a few people who are quite skilled at these programs. Personally I'd stick with graphicsmagick.
Illustrator is the most confusing program I have ever seen, but that's because I don't know what I'm doing. If you do vector art for a living it's features cannot be beat. It's mainly because its so feature rich that once you learn the subset that will be useful for your workflow, you're golden. I haven't been able to get a comparison to inkscape yet.
Photoshop is pretty intuitive, I mostly use it for resizing and touching up pictures. I'm far from a power user. The Gimp is like a 5 year old photoshop, I can't stand it.
if you do vector art, use Inkscape. it is easier to pick up and has more features than Illustrator, and it supports SVG.
I also find many of the Gimps features more intuitive than Photoshop's. For instance, to rotate an image in The Gimp, it is under the Image menu, which is also where resize is. Resize is also in the Image menu in potoshop, but to resize you need to go to the Edit menu, the the Transform submenu. It took me far too long to figure that one out.
Frankly i think the most confusing aspect of The Gimp is its windowing model on desktops that don't properly support toolboxes. They are working on a SWM though, and it will be out in a year.
I actually do use Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit, but mostly because I work with a few people who are quite skilled at these programs. Personally I'd stick with graphicsmagick.
Illustrator is the most confusing program I have ever seen, but that's because I don't know what I'm doing. If you do vector art for a living it's features cannot be beat. It's mainly because its so feature rich that once you learn the subset that will be useful for your workflow, you're golden. I haven't been able to get a comparison to inkscape yet.
Photoshop is pretty intuitive, I mostly use it for resizing and touching up pictures. I'm far from a power user. The Gimp is like a 5 year old photoshop, I can't stand it.