Image Editing Software
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 Recommended
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 is by far the best value for money (available from Conns Cameras) and an excellent, cheaper alternative to its big brother, Adobe Photoshop. Essentially, it is a stripped down version of Photoshop, retaining all of the key features for powerful image editing for the beginner to the more advanced user. Crop, adjust, remove red eye, resize, manipulate your images however you choose. It also has an image management tool for categorizing and storing your photos for easy access.
- Categorize by tagging
- Find photos faster than ever
- Select effects and apply with a single stroke
- Quickly clean your scene of unwanted elements
- Create the perfect group shot with photomerge
- Create photo books with ease and flexibility
- Share experiences in fresh, exciting ways on the web
- Share with family and friends using integrated online offerings
You can watch tutorials on Photoshop Elements here.
Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2
Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 software is essential for today’s digital photography workflow. Now you can quickly import, process, manage, and showcase your images — from one shot to an entire shoot. With Lightroom 2, you spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.
It serves as a good alternative to purchasing the full Photoshop package and has a more intuitive interface, with photography specifically in mind.
For tutorials on some of the tasks that can be performed by Lightroom please visit the Tutorials section.
Adobe® Photoshop® CS4
Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the current and primary market leader for commercial bitmap and image manipulation, and is the flagship product of Adobe Systems.
Although being the most powerful application on the market, it also requires the most experience, and to the average photographer, many of the features are not required.
If you intend on entering image manipulation (ie. restoring damaged photographs, removing unwanted items, adding elements to images) then this is the best application available. If however, you want to work with the exposure, colours, levels, (ie. developing a digital image) then Lightroom is a better choice.
Cropping and resizing (important tools) are done very easily in Photoshop and will be covered in the Tutorials.
For Tutorials on some of the tasks that can be performed by Photoshop please visit the Tutorials section.
Picasa
Picasa is a free software tool for organizing, and editing your photos. This software is released by Google and is currently available for Windows and as a beta for Mac users. For organizing photos, Picasa has file importing and tracking features, as well as tags and collections for further sorting. It also offers several basic photo editing functions, including color enhancement, red eye reduction and cropping. Other features include slide shows, printing and image timelines. Images can also be prepared for external use, such as for e-mailing or printing, by reducing file size and setting up page layouts.
You can watch tutorials on Picasa here.
Faststone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image browser, converter and editor. It has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. Its innovative but intuitive full-screen mode provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and major functionalities via hidden toolbars that pop up when your mouse touches the four edges of the screen. Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more. It supports all major graphic formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).
For Tutorials on some of the tasks that can be performed by Faststone please visit the Tutorials section.
