Believing in legal software can often be a bit of a pain—especially when it comes to Apples and graphics packages.

As a Windows user, I was always content with Jasc Paint Shop Pro. It’s a fantastic piece of software; doing everything I need and still not costing a fortune. Alas, there exists no mid-range equivalent for Mac OS X: Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 comes close, but helpfully misses out the all-important pen tool for vector editing; Macromedia Fireworks is a lost cause, offering very little functionality. I’ve also played around with an open source alternative, the GIMP, on numerous occasions but found that this too is under-endowed in the field of vector graphics, leaving me with one, extremely expensive, option… Adobe Photoshop.

Much trawling around lead me to believe that the only affordable way to obtain Photoshop CS was to purchase a previous version second-hand and then buy the CS upgrade—while £175 (isn’t eBay great!) still feels a little steep, I don’t think I did too badly:

Despite what feels to be a small victory in finding a vaguely sane price for Photoshop, it doesn’t deal with the crucial issue—while Apples are cited as being great for graphics editing, there is previous little software available for the home user.