@benseven, I can see that you have a very strong opinion here, but money talks, and for the kind of money Adobe wants for CS3, you’ll need a good deal more than your opinion to convince me or anyone else that it’s worth it. I’ll allow that it could be the best graphics editor out there, but it is undeniably the most expensive. It is, in fact, one of the most obscenely expensive applications I know of. $649.00??? You can buy a pretty good camera for that.
As to your specific points:
1) Photo-Paint has an option to combine multiple images to produce seamless panoramas from multiple images. It’s been in there since version 9.0, at least. They call it “stitch,” not “panorama treatment,” so you must have missed it.
2) HDR Treatment – “isn’t necessary for amateurs” – you made my point for me, so I don’t need to.
3) User Interface. This is pure, unsupported opinion on your part; PP wasn’t particularly hard for me to learn. See opening paragraph.
And no, Corel is not free, but you can pick up used versions of it very cheaply. I suggested it because we are somewhat in agreement on one point; there isn’t much out there that’s both free and suitable to task. GiMP looks promising, but all things Gnu tend to be somewhat user-unfriendly. I’m happy with Corel, but I would have to download GiMP to kick the tires, before I could recommend it to someone. Support for .PSD files is a non-issue, as Photo$hop is the only application that produces them, and if you already have it, you don’t need GiMP.
Incidentally, I don’t feel like I’m losing this argument. Anybody else think I’m losing the argument?