Photoshop
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/
© 2008 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All rights reserved.
$699.00
One of the granddaddies of the commercial software world, even loyal users not switching to Linux are beginning to drop the image editing giant. I actually don’t use Photoshop much- I find it to be slow to load even on a great computer and the interface to be a jumble of features.
And allow me to spend a moment ranting about their licensing policies. Adobe makes this for Windows® and Mac OS X. Yet when you buy it, you can only install on one or the other. You can pay a small fee to switch, but then of course you can’t go back. And in my case, since they had just released the next version a month before, they were unwilling to do this and wanted me to pay the Creative Suite upgrade price of about $500.
I am not sure whether the Macromedia policy of limiting the number of times a legitimate license can be installed is in effect in the Adobe products now.
Lack of interoperability in file formats combined with restrictive licensing and a huge price tag earns Photoshop the lowest score I can give.
Migration Score
BAD
Migration Options
the GIMP
The GIMP is an extremely powerful image editing tool. It's extensible and available on a multitude of platforms.
Photoshop's .psd file format can be partially understood by the GIMP, but advanced layer effects, etc., will probably go missing.