Photoshop versus Sumopaint

What a quandary!  I love making mandalas and have been using this old tutorial from Earth Mandalas.  Learning how to use Photoshop has been one of my goals and with my school lessons, I am slowly, but surely, learning how to use Photoshop more and more.  However, one of my favorite, inspirational blogs, iHanna's made this posting using Sumopaint.  The quandary is, in playing with Sumopaint for just a few minutes, you can easily make mandalas and change them with a mere flick of a slide on the toolbar.  So which do I use?

I experimented briefly (have too much sewing to do to do more) and this is what happened.....

Original picture....

My yellow knapweed from an earlier post.  I really love the bright yellow contrasting with the brown and green.

This is the quick mandala made with Sumopaint....

I haven't figured out (yet) how to add a background color and some borders, etc.  But very easy and quick.  One plus is that you easily pick a different section of the picture to use for the effect.

Now, my 'traditional' method using the Earth Mandala's tutorial.

Of course, my Photoshop effort is more finished than the Sumopaint mandala.  But my initial thought about the difference in processes.  I think I will stay with Photoshop for awhile.  Creating my mandalas is a time for me to sit and 'create' and reflect.  I choose pictures which speak to me and play with the image until I have the part I want to use.  There is more of a meditational aspect to creating with Photoshop due to it's more technical aspects.  And that mediation and contemplation is really what I am looking for.

So I will play with Sumopaint some more to see what all it can do.  It seems to have some really cool effects you can create very easily without the high learning curve of Photoshop.