Photo editing software [Archive]

Big Shed

7th April 2009, 11:52 AM

Having bought a DSLR recently I find myself using photo editing software to a greater extent.

When using my "happy snapper" I was satisfied with using AcDSee, a basic photo editing program that also allowed quick and easy change of image size for uploading to the forum.

It does not however handle RAW (later versions might). I have played with Adobe Photoshop Elements (6) but my computer slows down to a crawl (512Mb RAM). Am in the process of ordering more RAM, but in the meantime I have played with Picasa 3, which does a good job, particularly with organising pictures. When downsizing photos in Picasa 3 to 800x600, it finishes up with image around the 200Kb mark, from the original 4.5Mb.

I have read good things about the open source (free) GIMPShop program.

Does anyone here use this, and how do you find it compared to the Photoshop type programs, either the full blown version or Elements?

BobL

7th April 2009, 12:00 PM

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.

Ozkaban

7th April 2009, 12:11 PM

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.

Waldo

7th April 2009, 12:25 PM

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

:whs: :2tsup:

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. :U

Big Shed

7th April 2009, 12:35 PM

Sorry guys, I haven't got esoteric hardware:D

BobL

7th April 2009, 12:42 PM

Sorry guys, I haven't got esoteric hardware:D

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.

petersemple

7th April 2009, 12:48 PM

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

Ron Dunn

7th April 2009, 12:52 PM

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.

Ozkaban

7th April 2009, 12:54 PM

forgot about lightroom...

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

Cheers,
Dave

Ron Dunn

7th April 2009, 12:57 PM

Ozkaban, Windows too. I run it on Vista.

rotten_66

7th April 2009, 12:59 PM

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.

Big Shed

7th April 2009, 01:04 PM

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.

rsser

7th April 2009, 01:25 PM

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

Ozkaban

7th April 2009, 01:29 PM

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

Jack E

7th April 2009, 01:32 PM

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.

Ron Dunn

7th April 2009, 01:38 PM

You might only need Photoshop if you're going to make changes to the image. This is stuff like:

* Adding text
* Merging elements of two pictures
* Making people thinner (or fatter!)
* Remove power lines from house photos
* etc.

In Lightroom you can crop images, tilt/align images, remove blemishes, change spot or gradient exposures, adjust colour balances, adjust sharpness, stuff like that. Once you want to modify the image content, you're probably best with another program.

rsser

7th April 2009, 02:12 PM

Fred, I can't answer your q. about GIMPshop cp to the others. It's free so obviously your only investment is time.

I've been using PSP 9 for cleaning up and resizing images, and Irfan for basic batch processing, but recently upgraded Elements 2 to 7 for a paltry $115 or so and am really liking it. (IIRC you can change the skin if you don't like the default dark colour).

The 'heal' tool is great for removing spots and scratches from the transparencies I'm scanning in, and the Save to Web function alone is worth the money. What would speed up my scanning and archiving would be the option to save an edit in two file formats: a large TIFF and a compact JPEG for sharing. Maybe it has it; must chk the help file.

Non volatile memory is also needed in large quantities. The slide scanner produces images from 40 to 70 meg using the highest res so a terrabyte drive is going to be needed soon.

Master Splinter

7th April 2009, 10:59 PM

Waldo

7th April 2009, 11:11 PM

If you've only got 512meg of RAM, I'd suggest adding more as Photoshop really likes its memory space.

DDR2 RAM is only about $40 per gig these days, so a stick or two of that (ditch the 512meg stick as its probably slower than the current DDR2 stuff on the market) will make a massive improvement in speed.

:aro-u: Very good advice.

Alternatively you can record actions - I use a few to make workloads quicker, but still charge the client the same amount of time to do it prior to creating specific actions for batch processing. :U

Skew ChiDAMN!!

7th April 2009, 11:19 PM

More RAM is always good.

It also helps - if you have several Hard Drives - to run some disk access tests and allocate Photoshop's swapfile(s) to the fastest drive, not just accept the defaults.

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

Not true. 32-bit WinXp has 4GB address space, but after all HW devices (System ROM, APICs, PCI devices, graphics cards, etc.) are allocated at boot you only have around 3.2-3.5GB left available for use. (64-bit XP will address 128GB of RAM, but common consensus is that x64 is a dog anyway. :rolleyes:)

Because only the program-accessible RAM is used in Device Manager's "Total RAM" figure, people assume that XP can't see the rest of it. Bzzzt. Wrong.

It is worth installing 4GB in XP.

(BTW, if fully populated with 4GB there is a /3GB switch you can set in the boot.ini which modifies the virtual address space, allocating 3GB for programs to run and the remaining 1GB for the system, but this "squeezes" the OS & degrades overall performance. Really, it should only be used for dedicated systems that only run one memory intensive program all the time. Such as rendering farms.)

Rattrap

8th April 2009, 09:08 AM

I use paint shop pro to do all my photo editing. Its very similar to photoshop, just a different brand. & as has already been said, once you've used it you won't ever want to go back.

Brown Dog

8th April 2009, 11:06 AM

Hi bigshed

I have been using the Gimp for about 6 months now and now am comfortable enough with it to use it for any of my photo editing needs. First I started using it on my old PC which had a Pentium 4 with 512M ram, it worked but for some functions were painfully slow(processing files from a 6M pixel image). For the last couple of months I have been using it on a new PC with a dual core and 2G ram.....now I never wait for more than 2-3 seconds for any image processing function, most of the time its instantaneous.

As for Gimp compared to photoshop...I think the Gimp is great...you cant beat the price :wink: and it seems to able to do most things photoshop does. I have worked through a few photshop techniques from magazines and the net using gimp and found it pretty much equivalent.

The major difference I see is in the layering functions. Photoshop has a thing called adjustment layers which means instead of duplicating an image to create a new layer to perform some function on, it just creates a layer that stores the settings for that particular function there for making the file smaller.....As far a I can tell Gimp doesn't have this, but it doesn't actually stop you preforming similar techniques. It just means until you combine or your layers and convert to JPEG the file will be larger. Obviously there are probably many other differences but from what I have seen so far the differences only effect how things are done not what you can actually do.....the gimp is a very powerful piece of software and in the right hands (someone with patience to learn) it will do everything photoshop does.....

P.S. the latest thing I have tried in gimp is the RAW converter plugin....it is way better than the software that came with my camera (Nikon viewNX) and works seamlessly with the Gimp.

As an example here is the original and an image I created from it using gimp....following a photoshop tutorial
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3294/3026511202_9a64a5d401.jpg?v=0http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3308/3253095188_9759825f32.jpg?v=0

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 12:25 PM

Thank you all for your input, lots to think about.

One thing that comes through loud and clear is that I need more RAM and to that end I have ordered 2x1Gb, and will be ditching the 512Mb.

I have looked in Adobe Elements 6 to see whether one can change the skin colour, and haven't been able to find a way of doing that.

Like all Adobe products, it is very memory intensive, and not a good memory manager either. I use Adobe Acrobat a lot and eventually it ties up so much memory, and doesn't release it on exit, that you have to actually shut down the computer and start again.

I will have a look at Lightroom, there is a trial version, but before I do that I will look at GIMPShop.

Brown Dogs' glowing testimonial has certainly convinced me that it is worth investing some time in. The investment of time is the main reason that I asked the question here, I am aware that all these programs involve a huge learning curve and I would rather start with the "right" one.

Having seen some of Brown Dog's photos, both here and on another forum, I am convinved that GIMPShop is capable of producing the goods, even if I may not be so capable.

I am certainly impressed with Picasa 3 for organising photos and doing quick edits and fix-ups, it requires virtually no learning curve whatsoever. Things that take me ages to work out how to do in Elements I can do without thinking in Picasa and I only downloaded that when I bought the camera! So it is certainly much more user friendly than the Adobe product and the number of books on how to use Adobe Elements is certainly testimony to that.

So, as soon as my new memory arrives (and I get my new monthly download limit-I am almost out!) I will download GIMPShop and "have a go".

Waldo

8th April 2009, 12:30 PM

G'day Big Shed,

So your PC doesn't only use the memory needed for an application at the time of usage? Bugger.

Good idea to use the freebie before diving in and spending what you mightn't need to. :2tsup: If you were on a Mac I could give you P/Shop v9, CS2 or if I was really nice CS3, but not CS4 - that's what I use daily. The rest are in the cupboard playing hide-e-go-seek.

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 12:31 PM

Hi bigshed

P.S. the latest thing I have tried in gimp is the RAW converter plugin....it is way better than the software that came with my camera (Nikon viewNX) and works seamlessly with the Gimp.

As an example here is the original and an image I created from it using gimp....following a photoshop tutorial
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3294/3026511202_9a64a5d401.jpg?v=0http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3308/3253095188_9759825f32.jpg?v=0

Great images, even the original one! Well done!:2tsup:

I have done some RAW conversion with Digital Photo Professional that came with my cCanon camera, and it seems to work OK, but would rather have an "all -in-one" program that can do it all.
The editing functions in DPP are rather basic, but then again, it was free and it is easy to use (haven't had to resort toreading the manual yet!)

Thanks for your comprehensive answer BD, I appreciate you taking the time.:2tsup:

Woodwould

8th April 2009, 01:58 PM

I've been using PhotoShop Pro for a few years, but following an article in last week's Green Guide, I've just downloaded the newer version of Gimp to see if it's anymore user friendly than it used to be.

Like all Adobe products, it is very memory intensive, and not a good memory manager either. I use Adobe Acrobat a lot and eventually it ties up so much memory, and doesn't release it on exit, that you have to actually shut down the computer and start again.

Have a look at Foxit reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/). It's free and has a tiny footprint on your puter compared with Acrobat.

marvel25

8th April 2009, 02:20 PM

Brown Dog

8th April 2009, 02:49 PM

Brown Dogs' glowing testimonial has certainly convinced me that it is worth investing some time in. The investment of time is the main reason that I asked the question here, I am aware that all these programs involve a huge learning curve and I would rather start with the "right" one.

Dont get me wrong....If I could afford Photoshop....I would get it. I would also probably get lightroom 2 (that looks like a really nice program) but for the hundreds of dollars it would cost... I would rather spend that on a new lens or speedlight or one of the hundred other things would love to get for my camera :;. So unless I get a massive cash injection from somewhere...I will have to stick with the free stuff :D

Even down the track if you do decide to switch to photoshop (you would have to go to the full blown version not elemmets).....the stuff you learn in Gimp wont be wasted. It has all the same basic but powerful tools that you will use most in editing photos. Things like levels, curves, layers and layer masks....once you undestand how to use them it wont mater if you use Gimp or Photoshop.

I have done some RAW conversion with Digital Photo Professional that came with my cCanon camera, and it seems to work OK, but would rather have an "all -in-one" program that can do it all.
The editing functions in DPP are rather basic, but then again, it was free and it is easy to use (haven't had to resort toreading the manual yet!)

I was very impressed with the gimp plugin( think it is called ufRAw). The main reason i downloaded it was because the Nikon converter I have doesn't have a "slider" control for adjusting WB it only uses pre-set settings that were complicated to set up. And even though the plugin doesn't actually run inside gimp (its a separate program) once you have you photo the way you want it...you just hit the gimp button in the corner and it opens up gimp with your photo (in TIFF format) ready to edit...too easy :2tsup:

Thanks for your comprehensive answer BD, I appreciate you taking the time.:2tsup:

No problem ...glad I could help:cool:

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 04:02 PM

I've been using PhotoShop Pro for a few years, but following an article in last week's Green Guide, I've just downloaded the newer version of Gimp to see if it's anymore user friendly than it used to be.

Have a look at Foxit reader (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/). It's free and has a tiny footprint on your puter compared with Acrobat.

Thanks WW, be interested in your impressions of GIMP:2tsup:

As for an Adobe Acrobat Reader, I hadn't seen the Foxit reader, but a lot of my work is producing pdf documents in Acrobat, but I'll see whether the reader is a bit faster and smaller than Adobe's.

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 04:04 PM

Hi Big Shed,

Good day!

I'm curious as what brand of DSLR you bought? I think some brands such as Nikon and Canon provide a bundle software in some of their DSLR product lines.

I don't own a DSLR, and am really wanting a Nikon D90. I have a point and shoot Sony DSC-H5. I both use Photoshop and GIMP, mostly for adjusting the images levels and resizing for sharing the photos with relatives and friends, but nothing more complex than that.

Cheers!
Archie

G'day Archie and welcome.
I finished yp buying a Canon 450D with 2 kit lenses, very happy so far and I have used the LiveView a lot so far (love the grid lines for my pen photography)
It came with Digital Photo Professional, which is quite easy to use, but has limits to its' editing functions.
If you are only doing basic edits, have a look at Picasa 3, very easy to use.

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 04:08 PM

Dont get me wrong....If I could afford Photoshop....I would get it. I would also probably get lightroom 2 (that looks like a really nice program) but for the hundreds of dollars it would cost... I would rather spend that on a new lens or speedlight or one of the hundred other things would love to get for my camera :;. So unless I get a massive cash injection from somewhere...I will have to stick with the free stuff :D

Even down the track if you do decide to switch to photoshop (you would have to go to the full blown version not elemmets).....the stuff you learn in Gimp wont be wasted. It has all the same basic but powerful tools that you will use most in editing photos. Things like levels, curves, layers and layer masks....once you undestand how to use them it wont mater if you use Gimp or Photoshop.

I was very impressed with the gimp plugin( think it is called ufRAw). The main reason i downloaded it was because the Nikon converter I have doesn't have a "slider" control for adjusting WB it only uses pre-set settings that were complicated to set up. And even though the plugin doesn't actually run inside gimp (its a separate program) once you have you photo the way you want it...you just hit the gimp button in the corner and it opens up gimp with your photo (in TIFF format) ready to edit...too easy :2tsup:

No problem ...glad I could help:cool:

Thanks BD (again)

On another note I have just been advised that my notebook, an Acer Travelmate 662LCI can only have 2x512Mb of RAM, so it looks like I'll have to settle for that.

Woodwould

8th April 2009, 04:09 PM

As for an Adobe Acrobat Reader, I hadn't seen the Foxit reader, but a lot of my work is producing pdf documents in Acrobat, but I'll see whether the reader is a bit faster and smaller than Adobe's.

I gave up on Acrobat long ago. I have been using PDF Factory Pro as my PDF writer since it came out in 199? and have been using Foxit as my reader for some years now.

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 04:48 PM

Thanks BD (again)

On another note I have just been advised that my notebook, an Acer Travelmate 662LCI can only have 2x512Mb of RAM, so it looks like I'll have to settle for that.

Lord save me from "experts".

Company (shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) where I ordered 2x1Gb DDR RAM for my Acer Travelmate 662LCi came back to me and advised me (positively) that it would only take 2x512Mb DDR RAM maximum.

After my first disappointment, I decided to check for myself.

Acer website states quite clearly that it will take 2048Mb RAM (ie 2x1Gb), guess I need to find a supplier who knows what he is talking about, not one that is a "plucker"!:(

Brown Dog

8th April 2009, 08:09 PM

guess I need to find a supplier who knows what he is talking about, not one that is a "plucker"!:yes::U

Was just cleaning up some of my photo directories and came across one of your pen photos that i had a crack at....forgot i did this:doh:

so here is what one of your pens from the other day would look like with the Gimp treatment
101837

Big Shed

8th April 2009, 09:16 PM

:yes::U

Was just cleaning up some of my photo directories and came across one of your pen photos that i had a crack at....forgot i did this:doh:

so here is what one of your pens from the other day would look like with the Gimp treatment

Certainly looks better than my effort, especially considering you only had an 800pixel photo to wok with, you got the Black Ti looking more natural. Like the black border as well, is that done in GIMP as well?