Saturday, October 09, 2010

About Photo Software

This is a response to a question I got on Facebook, based on a conversation I had with a friend several months ago. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it give you a place to start if you're looking for free photo software. Ultimately, I recommend Photoshop, or Photoshop Elements when you are sure you're going to do this more. There are many reasons that Adobe dominates this space, but the one that really stands out to me is the way their software integrates/lays out an efficient workflow. Also, if you have photoshop, take time to understand the workflow from Bridge, to ACR, to Photoshop, to me it's THE reason to use Adobe. However, Adobe is expensive and requires a nice fast and powerful computer, so the options below can be a great place to start your exploration of this photo-editing world.

RE: "What was that software you said was like Photoshop and can be downloaded from the internet?" (a paraphrase)

Well, there's GIMP which is open source but needs to be installed on the computer. It's pretty good, and getting better every year.

www.gimp.org

At "Aviary" you can actually use a web-app that is a pretty good as well. You want to use the "Image Editor."

www.aviary.com

I also like Faststone Image Viewer (www.faststone.org), Picasa which is good but I don't use it (picasa.google.com), and a very powerful free raw processing software Raw Therapee (rawtherapee.com) it can be used on JPG images as well. These last programs are not really a replacement for Photoshop as much as organizer/developing tools. Which is a very important task often overlooked when you first decide that you want to do something with your images.

Hope that helps,

Peter
9 minutes ago ·

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