Some people feel uncomfortable about manipulating their images and you’ll often hear the purists grumbling about cheating. The truth is, we’ve always made creative decisions that influenced the final picture – whether in the darkrooms of old, through our choice of film or the use of filters, flashes and so on. Digital image processing is really no different – although even I get a little uneasy when photographers add rhinos to their pictures that weren’t there when they pressed the shutter. That aside, the biggest problem faced by most photographers is which software to use. Here are five options for you to consider.
Adobe Lightroom
This is the software package of choice for all Getaway photographers. If budget is not a concern and you want one package that can both organise your images and provide you with tremendous processing power, then look no further than Lightroom. Specifi cally designed for photographers, the controls are intuitive, making even complex adjustments easy. Furthermore, its ability to organise your pictures makes it an extremely powerful all-in-one package. www.adobe.com
Adobe Photoshop
This is the king of image processing packages and the go-to-guy for all professional image manipulators. Ideally, it’s the perfect addition to Lightroom because it’s far more powerful – there is very little you can’t do to an image with Photoshop. However, it can’t compete with Lightroom in terms of the ability to organise your photographs and many of the functions are complicated, requiring a large time investment in learning the subtler nuances of the programme. www.photoshop.com
Gimp
This free software gives anyone keen on the open source/freeware movement reason to celebrate. It may not be as powerful as Photoshop and is not really suitable for organising your images, but it’s free, mahala, for nix. What’s the catch? PC users will enjoy it best because there is still no native package for Mac OS, so installing it and getting it to work on Mac can be a pain. This is a good option if you’re just starting out, but it won’t be long before you’ll be lusting after one of the commercial packages. www.gimp.org
Aperture
This is similar to Lightroom, but limited to the Apple Mac operating system. Many Apple fanatics swear by it – claiming it’s the best image manipulation and organisation software around. If you’re an Apple zealot and can’t foresee a change to PC anytime in your future, you’ll be very happy with Aperture. However, if you may change suddenly between operating systems, you’ll be frustrated trying to convert all your aperture images to a suitable alternative. www.apple.com/aperture
Google’s Picasa is free, easy to use and is powerful enough for most entry-level photographers. The great advantage of Picasa is the ease of integration with other Google products, such as Gmail, alongside its ability to share images with family and friends through free web albums (1 GB free space is available). The only downside comes when you want to push the processing envelope. If you’re after serious image manipulation ability, you’ll need to invest in Photoshop or one of the more advanced packages such as Lightroom or Aperture. www.picasa.google.com
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