Sunday, February 10, 2013

Experimenting with Photo Editing Software

So with my new fun camera, I’ve been experimenting a bit with photo editing software. I decided to have you people (you people!) help me out. I like simple and I like cheap inexpensive. What do you guys use?

 

Here’s a typical picture for me. It’s inside with no flash. I hate the flash but what do you do? Alaska has very little natural light most of the time so it’s hard to get decent pictures with natural light. Original picture taken inside with no flash.
canon_1 085

 

 

Here’s the same picture using the autocorrect on my software that came with the camera. I think it’s actually pretty nice. It’s cumbersome software though making me save separately every time I crop, edit, etc.
canon_1 085_1

 

Here’s Adobe Lightroom (I have the 30 day free trial) and the autocorrect. The skin tone may be more accurate in this photo than the one above.
canon_1 085

 

Adobe Lightroom again with a few tweaks from me. I changed the exposure, contrast, and added a gradient filter to the bottom left of the photo to give the cards a little more detail. The problems with Lightroom? Well, it’s expensive (not too bad, about $200), has a pretty big learning curve, and I can’t easily add lines and text when I need to (or maybe I can and don’t know how).
canon_1 085-2

 

 

Here’s Paint.net which is free and I’ve been using it for years. The autocorrect feature is bad though and I never use it. I can add lines, text, and adjust most things easily.
paintdotnet

 

 

Original : Canon Software : Lightroom Auto : Lightroom with tweaks : Paint.net
canon_1 085canon_1 085_1canon_1 085canon_1 085-2paintdotnet

 

Any suggestions? I don’t have time to learn Adobe Photoshop. I want something easy and fast and preferably inexpensive. What do you guys use?

10 comments:

Marie said...

Photoshop Elements. Love it. Learning curve not to steep. Lots of free
tutorials online to help you master it. And the price isn't to bad.

Lucy said...

GIMP! It's a free, open-source Photoshop-lite, basically, and pretty intuitive to use. I adjust lighting by going to Colours\ Curves... , although it does give you the opportunity to manually adjust the Hue, Saturation etc.

The only slightly annoying thing is that in order to save as an image file, you have to Export rather than just Save. But it's not a big deal once you remember to do so!

Lori VanMaanen said...

I like picmonkey.com online, it does a nice job and the "extras" are the only thing that costs with a subscription.
I also use Photoshop elements with good success.

theperfectnose said...

Lightroom is the best there is for photo adjustments. If you have a mac I'd suggest Aperture (but that will have a learning curve and costs about $90 here in Oz). However, none of these are meant for adding text etc they are only for photo manipulation ie. changing exposure, contrast, brightness etc. You will still need an editor (I use Acorn on a Mac) for adding text, speech bubbles etc. If you want easy and cheap (and have a Mac) iphoto is the way to go. I would not recommend Photoshop for your needs because it is bloat ware (every time you open it it loads shitloads of brushes, effects etc that slow down your computer when all you need to use the text function-it will also save a lot more info so your image files will be massive-there are ways to get around this but it's more time and effort).
If you have Powerpoint (or Keynote on a Mac) just start a new presentation at whatever size you want, import the adjusted photo in there and then go nuts with text, shapes, speech bubbles, borders etc then save/ export the file the final version as a .png (works best for web, .jpg loses info and .gif isn't the best idea unless you want animated images). If you have a white border open the .png in any other program (Preview works fine on the Mac) and crop that off then save.
Best of luck.

Ripple Dandelion said...

Pixlr.com! Totally online and free--I've been using it for several months and I have been very happy with it. The controls are similar to Photoshop.

Renae said...

I've been using picmonkey for fast adjustments when I can't be bothered starting up photoshop. I like it so much I paid for the annual subscription.

CelesteSummers said...

For small adjustments I use Picasa. If I wanted to get more detailed I would use GIMP.

Karen Prengaman said...

Photo editing makes a big difference! I recently switched to Photoshop Elements (still learning!), but before that I got good results using Picasa (the downloaded app, not the web site). It's free and I found it to be pretty easy to learn.

Rachel said...

For quick and easy fixes I use picasa, it has a lot of the basic stuff built in and easy to use. It has also really helped with my photo management, and i can upload to picasa web albums direct within it to use on my blog.

LauraM62 said...

Years ago I started using Paint Shop Pro --- it was later bought by Corel --- I still use it because I know it :) --- but it also has a steep learning curve but it does so much once you realize it --- they usually have free trials ---