Photo Editing Software
If you take digital photos and have a computer then some form of digital editing software is a must. If you can't afford to purchase software, you can still find lots of free software. Some free software may be developed by individuals, and may be feature limited or in some cases it may simply be an earlier version of an existing product.
If you are into photography in a serious way you may want to consider Adobe Photoshop, probably the best and most comprehensive photo editor on the market with quite a steep learning curve. If you cannot afford to purchase the full blown version of Photoshop you can always purchase Photoshop Elements (PSE). PSE is a knock down version of Photoshop offering almost 95% of its capability. It is missing some of the more advanced desk top publishing parts and that's about all. A comparable package is Paint Shop Pro by Corel in terms of capability.
If you don't want to purchase any software you can always download GIMP. This is a popular open-source image editor originally developed for Unix/Linux. It is often referred to as the "free Photoshop," because it's interface and features are similar to Photoshop. As with a lot of open source software it is volunteer developed and stability and frequency of updates may not be as good as purchased products. It must be said however, there are many happy users using GIMP for Windows without significant problems.
As an example of what can be easily accomplished using Photoshop Elements the second picture of the owl was edited using the blur tool and saved at a lower quality setting. The resulting picture is the same physical size but in terms of pixels it is half the size and the mans leg is blurred. Photoshop Elements is one of the most popular photo editors. It allows you to carry out photo editing at various levels from quite simple expert making it an ideal editor to learn.
Easy to use photo software
Another popular free piece of software is Picasa by Google. It can be used to Edit and add effects to your photos as well as organise organise all the photos on your computer.
Most photo editors have a variety of tools like: Red eye removal, lighting adjustment - How often have you taken the perfect picture but it's just a little dark or little washed out with too much light. Photo editors allow you to adjust it so the photo has perfect lighting. You can touch-up scratches and blemishes to make your photographs look flawless and much more!
The choice of software that I use is tailored to my personal needs and it is as follows:
- I use proprietary software by Nikon called NX2 to process RAW files and do basic editing. Almost 98% of all my editing is done with NX2.
- I then use Photoshop elements 9 specifically for layers, the clone tool, magic brush, and panorama maker.
- Topaz labs make a series of plug -ins for Photoshop and Photoshop elements which I use for creative work and noise reduction.
- Portrait Professional is another useful tool for faces which can do almost instantly what takes about 30 minutes to do in Photoshop.
- Easy HDR is another package I use to create HDR images.
There are other free packages which I have used and found fairly good, like RAW Therapee for processing RAW files, Picture Cooler for noise reduction, and Microsoft ICE for panorama stitching.