Fotoshop

I desire the ability to make cool photos with photoshop. This desire is becoming burning. But like so many desires, once fulfilled could leave me empty with a piece of software I never use. That happened to me with Quicken. I was convinced it would change my life. That I would magically become responsible with money and that magically, I wouldn't have to wonder if I could afford my over-priced hair do. And it didn't. In fact, it just pissed me off: "why can't it just do it like my spreadsheet does it" was the oft repeated lament. It just takes up space on my hard drive.


As with all my burning desires, I have become slightly inquisitive. Which is to say that my level of research is becoming obsessive. Now, Adobe's website is not very helpful. You go here and there are these people who are all: "We use Photoshop and our lives are perfect. See Photoshop make men want to fuck me. See Photoshop make me a successful person with power and money." Whatevs. There's no entry for dorky wannablogger who wants to paste her face next to Brad Pitt's nipples with amazing realism. So now we list our options:

1. Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended ($999) - Cause that $1 will really make the shit expensive. Basically, with this version I could not only paste my face next to Brad Pitt's nipples, but I could animate it so I was chomping down on them in 3D and then busting Angelina's ass just for fun. It's good for film, video and multimedia professionals. I'm none of those, but I could be if I were as creative and visual as I am anal retentive and engineer-like.
2. Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended ($999) - Ok, so this is listed as a different thing, but it really looks like the same fucking thing to me. Again, cause I'm not creative. Or, in this case cause I'm not a manufacturing and design engineer, medical professional, architect or engineer/scientific researcher.
3. Adobe Photoshop CS3 ($649) - This is not extended. This is good for graphic designers, web designers, and artists. I am none of those. According to the webiste with this product, I can: "Experience powerful, multilayer editing with live, re-editable Smart Objects and more than 100 effects filters, including new, nondestructive Smart Filters." Which in English translates to: we had someone who knows nothing about explaining technical things to non-technical people write this cause we are a bunch of dipshits here at Adobe marketing.
4. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom ($199) - This is an add-on to number 3 for professional and serious amateur photographers. What this thing does is turn your house into a dark room. Seriously, it's totally fucking cool. It takes over your light bulbs, turns them all off and allows you to feel like you are really developing photographs when you are, in fact, doing no such thing. But it's totally worth that $199 to feel like an old-fashioned photographer. It's called nostalgia bitches.
5. Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 ($99.99) - Cause the $0.01 will make that shit out of reach. They wrote the description for this product in English: "Make your photos look their best with step-by-step editing assistance and amazing compositing capabilities." Words like step-by-step are much more enticing to me than multilayer editing. And I will make my photos "look their best" not "enable 3D editing while tweaking Brad's nipples".
6. Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 Starter Edition (Free) - This is made for housewives who want to look at pictures of their kids. This product is probably one of those things that has a bunch of greyed out buttons that when you roll the mouse over them say "Available with Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 which costs less than $100"

What these people need is an application that let's you enter your requirements for the system and then spits out which one you should use. Like this:

Now listen up Adobe, I'll sell this idea for a web form to you for less than $1000.