Photo Editing Software

[NickNick]

Afternoon all,

I've never had the time in the past to post process any of my images, but now it looks like I have some spare hours to touch up a few of them. So any recommendations for software?

TIA
NN

 

[Platypus]

Photoshop Elements (that's the cheapo version of Photoshop) - A friend of mine has it. He says that all you need to know is available on YouTube (plenty how-to videos). What he can do with it beggars belief - and he's just an amateur enthusiast.

I bought a copy for £25 but haven't used it in anger yet - just noodled.

 

[expat]

Photoshop Elements (that's the cheapo version of Photoshop) - A friend of mine has it. He says that all you need to know is available on YouTube (plenty how-to videos). What he can do with it beggars belief - and he's just an amateur enthusiast.

I bought a copy for £25 but haven't used it in anger yet - just noodled.

It is true, Photoshop Elements now does all that you are likely to need to do. The big brother version is for professional graphics artists.

I use it, and also Lightzone, which is my preferred program for digital photo post-processing, it lets me get to results with more wow factor more quickly and more intuitively (e.g. to shift a colour cast in Photoshop, use numerical values or sliders on 3 different colour channels; in Lightzone, drag a point about on a colour wheel till it looks right).

Depends on what you want to do (which you mostly don't know yet), but much as I love Lightzone, I'd say that PS Elements is the right answer for most people.

GIMP is free and a great achievement on the part of the open source developers; but also IMHO a good example of how commercial developers scratch the customer's itch, open source developers scratch the developer's itch.

Edit: so if I love Lightzone, why did I then buy PS Elements? For the Healing Brush, and the panorama stitching.

 

[dinker]

Photoshop is a free download from the Adobe site. All you need is a product key and I have some spare. PM me if you want one. Otherwise you could try Paint.NET, it does everything you could ask for.

 

[NickNick]

Thanks all,

I've previously used Picassa which was fine for basic tweaking etc, but wanted to move on. Looks like I take a gander at PSE.

 

[Torrango]

Paint.net does the job for me and is free.

 

[blacjac]

WTS


I recently purchased PSE and am well please with it, done some nifty photo edits with the minimum of fuss.

 

[Grinder]

How about http://www.sumopaint.com ?

 

[NickNick]

No idea, the site needs flash which client site pc does not have.

 

[Grinder]

Ah maybe you need http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures/gimp_portable then.