Thread: Photo editing software

Once you use full Photoshop, . . . . . . everything else seems second rate.

If you want to work with RAW images and use the more or less unlimited undo then you need a lot of RAM. I'm using a 4 year old Mac with 2Gb of RAM and although the speed is OK the RAM is barely enough for serious work. I work a lot with panoramic images of ~200Mb each so I really need to update sometime.

Photshop is by far the best, but a full license is very expensive. Photoshop elements is pretty good for general home use and will set you back something like $150 (I think).

GIMP is really very powerful and can do some amazing stuff and is free, but i would say it is more of an image manipulation program rather than photo editing program. It's also fairly complex (as opposed to Photoshop CS3 which is very complex).

If it's for home use, go for Elements. It will do what you need it to without amazing complexity. If you crave complexity and a four-figure license fee, CS3 is the bees-knees...

For free stuff, Irfanview is also a very good, fast, lightweight program to do batch edits, cropping, etc, much in the same vein as ACDSee.

Oh, and Picasa is top shelf for organisation. I have tried plenty of apps for photo management and nothing comes close, free or otherwise, to the simplicity and ease of use with Picasa.

Hope this all helps.

Dave

PS. You are right - 512MB wont cut it with anything capable of doing decent editing (GIMP included). Go for 2GB - depending on how old the RAM is it should be fairly cheap.

Originally Posted by BobL

Once you use full Photoshop, . . . . . . everything else seems second rate.

2Gb at least, 4Gb is much better. But you can go crazy on Gb, on the new 8 core Mac you can add 32Gb, at a cost of $11,000.

Sorry guys, I haven't got esoteric hardware

Originally Posted by Big Shed

Sorry guys, I haven't got esoteric hardware

One way to look at this is that good quality image processing software and computers replaces film and processing. People thought nothing of spending X on a camera and then maybe even 10X on film and processing during the life of the camera. Good Software and a decent PC won't cost as much.

For me i's a bit like like buying a thicknesser without factoring in a decent DC and appropriate PPE.

I would try GIMP and see if it does what you need it to do. After all, given the price you have nothing to lose. You could do with more RAM though. I have 1GB and find most photo editing I do is OK, but I tend to edit JPGs not RAW. The card in the camera is too small to store RAW. I have sometimes purchased slightly older versions of software on eBay at significant savings, which could be a way to go if you want to use Photoshop.

Peter

Lightroom.

It is a digital darkroom, giving you the level of control you'd expect from a film-based darkroom, but not including the warp/text/fiddle-around stuff you get with image editors.

forgot about lightroom...

Is that a Mac only app or have they written it for Windows as well? (I'm too lazy to check )

Cheers,
Dave

Ozkaban, Windows too. I run it on Vista.

Upgrade the RAM most definitely, go to 4GB if you can but at least 2GB as a minimum.

You will notice that so many other things go faster and improve not just the photo software.

We use Elements at home and for most of the stuff we do it is fine, we got it as a bundle with a DVD/Video converrter software thing which seemed good value at the time, but as have never used it probsably wasn't worth the extra $40.

Have been reading about Lightroom and it seems that most people use this as a pre-quel to Photoshop. They do the RAW conversion to TIFF or JPG in Lightroom and then go to Photoshop.

Am I interpreting this correctly?

As an aside, I find the black background look of Lightroom, Photoshop and Elements very annoying, as I do websites that have text on a black background.

Just as a btw, Win XP will only address 3.2 gig so there's no point in installing more with this OS.

Originally Posted by rsser

Just as a btw, Win XP will only address 3.2 gig so there's no point in installing more with this OS.

And this 3.2GB will include your grahics card memory so if you have a 512mb graphics card the max becomes 2.7gb...

Cheers,
Dave

I have the full adobe suite including Photoshop, it is very complicated and I use it rarely.

I use Aperture on my Mac, very simple and cheap.