Photoshop vs Reaper

Photoshop is used by professionals everywhere in a wide variety of fields including photography, graphic design and digital art. It is the de facto standard for image manipulation. If you've seen a magazine ad featuring a model, you've probably seen the effects of Photoshop. You won't be alone when using Photoshop.

A wide variety of plugins that add new effects, improve existing functionality and simplify workflow are available.

There's a huge number of both free and paid tutorials available online. Websites like Lynda.com offer premium high-quality, in-depth tutorials, but there are plenty of free alternatives to be found on YouTube, blogs and specialized sites on the Internet.

A stripped down version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Elements can be bought as a standalone application for $100.

Photoshop includes content-aware tools such as content-aware fill that can fill in a select area based on what surrounds it.

Photoshop is the most fully featured image editing software available today allowing you to perform highly advanced image manipulation.

It has tools for RAW image adjustments, lens correction, retouching, image stitching, HDR, fixing framing. It supports most professional color modes and file formats. It includes extensive lists of filters, styles, effects, fonts as well as tools for painting, sketching and typography work. It understands both raster and vector graphics. It even includes tools for video editing, working with 3D objects and support for 3D printing.

You can save all projects directly to the Creative Cloud allowing you to access them from any device and with any relevant Adobe software.

Lightroom is another image editing software from Adobe that's specifically designed for photo editing and managing of large quantities of digital images.

There's a free mobile app available for iOS, Android & Windows Phone.

You can easily customize a GUI.

Reaper receives high praise for its stability. It's one of the many talking points of the software.

There are no limits to the amount of tracks or effects that Reaper can run. Reaper is stable enough to handle comically dense projects with style.

Reaper's developers add features based on user request at lightspeed. This is what makes Reaper reliable and trustworthy. Fans of Reaper are so adamant about the software because of this.

Contrary to Music Radar's review of FL Studio, Reaper is the true "People's DAW".

Reaper's will tailor itself to fit your computer's processing power by automatically using the "anticipative FX processing" feature.

No complex activation shenanigans. No dongle and such.

Records in WAV, AIFF, FLAC, WAVPACK, OGG and MP3.

When using a 64-bit installation of Reaper, all 32-bit plugins will still work alongside 64-bit plugins. On computers with an x86-64 CPU and an OS that supports multi-architecture, you can also run bridged 64-bit plugins on 32-bit Reaper.

In addition to its powerful inbuilt plugins, Reaper comes bundled with about 300 little plugins written in its own EEL2 (aka Jesusonic) scripting language. This is also open-source so the end user can create or edit preexisting ones to get exactly what they want.

Reaper is lightweight enough to be run off of a flash drive; the installer weights less than 20 MB and the portable installation option is included in it.

Reaper has no limitations. Once you understand it, Reaper becomes a mixing, mastering and editing mainstay. Reaper punches way above its price range in terms of sheer brevity.

Although it may seem otherwise, Reaper is shareware. After your 60-day free trial runs out, the program remains full-featured. Like WinRAR, the only person forcing you to get a license is you.

Without prior experience with DAW, you can install Reaper, set up ASIO drivers, connect to your amp and mikes, get the hang of recording/re-recording tracks, and render an mp3 in just a few hours. You can accomplish the basics very fast.

Reaper can be purchased in two different ways: A commercial license (225 USD) and a discounted license (60 USD).

You can use Reaper unhindered with either license. You can only get the discount if your salary does not exceed 20,000 USD.

Thought has been given to many time-saving features and shortcuts which speed up workflow considerably.

In Reaper, you can record MIDI and Audio onto the same track. As well, there are no distinctions between any form of audio. Surround Sound, Mono, Stereo files, and anything else you can think of; all of this can be recorded onto the same track.

You can have multiple projects open via tabs at the top left. You can then drag and drop clips, instruments or ideas between projects with ease.

If you want to use it as a glorified tape machine and nothing else, you'll still be able to get work done. If you want to learn all the shortcuts, scripts, custom actions and macros and really unlock what Reaper can do, you can do that as well. Either way, you'll still be able to make music.

You can customize Reaper with hundreds of themes, or make them yourself.

A freeze can be applied to a group, and then picked apart track by track.

Miraculously, composition-focused musicians can now find a home in Reaper.

No need to install Wine, Reaper supports Linux natively!

Allows usage of the basic bundled like EQ's and comp plugins in any DAW.

While some may disagree, the GUI has been widely celebrated for its informative nature. Everything you need to see is there or reachable. For more analytical types, Reaper can be of use.

You don't have to go to a separate editor to edit audio files. You can work directly on the track, and drop/drag pieces to other tracks, sew them together. It's a fun sandbox and easy peasy.

You can control almost everything via OSC (and MIDI, too).

Set the cursor, press a key, done. Reaper's cursor is extremely intuitive. A monkey could understand it.

Unlike Cakewalk, Bitwig, etc., there is no need to switch cursor editing modes or work around "smart" cursors.

Running smoothly with 50 tracks on i5 gen3 RAM 4GB laptop (mixing and mastering work done separately).

These two things are the biggest advantage of Reaper. No other DAW can beat it based on CPU efficiency. Some people say Reaper isn't a professional DAW by look, but it's not true. Reaper is a full-featured professional DAW. You can do anything whatever you want for music production.
The price is also reasonable. They are even generous with the evaluation policy. If they offer the simple and intuitive version, I'll be back to Reaper.

While other DAWs drag their feet on Windows, Reaper hits a solid stride even on Linux.

You can have one version and the future version when its out .

Reaper allows editing while you're recording for a performative and fluid workflow. This feature can also help save time when mixing.

Can run edited Script tools programmed by users.

Not like Ableton which forces all master/track plugins chain to 1-core