What the best program for handling pic's??

[disruptfam]

I'm in need for a picture handling app...

I have no experience in these matter so any help is appreciated...

I only one i know of is Photoshop...But there's several i wouldn't know which one to purchase...

Any suggestions?

are they any other decent app's around that won't break the bank??

cheers!! :up:

[Soulburner]

Photoshop CS3, followed by CS2, followed by CS, followed by...well you get the idea.

There are cheaper alternatives but I don't have much experience with them...narrow minded I know, but hey it's hard enough keeping up with all the other aspects of technology day to day, I'll stick with what I know.

[Magnj]

Photoshop is for photo-editing. If your looking for a way to organize your photos your going to want to look into Lightroom, especially if your shooting RAW. Also check out Picassa

[Scubar]

xnview is currently the best picture viewing application , for photo editing though photoshop wins hands down.

[Vapor]

Loving Lightroom....great workflow and RAW handling (ACR built in).

[disruptfam]

how much am i looking @ with cs3 or lightroom?

:)

[shazza]

Adobe Photoshop Elements is a good place to start ... it has plenty of juice for beginners, and is good training for Photoshop CS3.

[Nate P.]

GIMP for photo editing (basically an open-source version of PhotoShop) and Picasa for photo organizing. That's what I use.

[disruptfam]

i downloaded gimp the other day.... don't know how to use it yet... haven't any time to play around with it...

[Magnj]

Lightroom is 300 and elements is 150 @ adobe. You can probably find it cheaper though.

[deepsilver]

Photoshop for the last finish and ACD-See Pro 2 for ordering the pictures. :)

[Fujimitsu]

i downloaded gimp the other day.... don't know how to use it yet... haven't any time to play around with it...

GIMP is a pretty good intro to photoshop, there is also a GIMP mod called "gimpshop" that rearranges the GIMP UI to look like PS. Might be handy if you're looking to move to PS.

Photoshop wins hands down. You are, however, looking at a few thousand USD for the full creative suite package... which honestly is worth it.
GIMP is about as close as any application comes to photoshop, and it's free.
If you're just doing very basic editing... paint.net is great. It's like MS paint on steroids, insanely easy to use & fast (PS and GIMP can get very resource heavy).

[irev210]

I love lightroom, excellent for us RAW shooters.

picasa is a good program to start -- it works, it is effective, and it is free.

[Grinch]

Loving Lightroom....great workflow and RAW handling (ACR built in).

:up:

[Magnj]

how do you all categorize your shots. I used explorer and just name folders buy upload date and let lightroom do the rest. I was gonna start meta tagging, but my 10K plus shots are overwhelming.

[MaxxxRacer]

for organizing photos, the best I have found is breeze Browser Pro. I use it to sort my photos when I dump them from the camera. For Editing photos I use Photoshop CS3.

[STEvil]

Editing I use PSP 6 (just easy for me compared to newer programs)

Sorting use Scanner and Camera wizard (retardedly easy).

[Cold Fussion]

Photoshop CS3, followed by CS2, followed by CS, followed by...well you get the idea.

Photoshop CS is rubbish. It offers nothing over photoshop 7 other than worse performance.

[Magnj]

Photoshop CS is rubbish. It offers nothing over photoshop 7 other than worse performance.

Does 7 have heal? Heal is nice.

[Cold Fussion]

i imagine it does. I haven't used 7 in a couple years.

[Vapor]

Quick list of stuff that CS has over 7:

-7 does not have healing brush, CS does.
-File Browser had a huge update.
-CS also has a huge advantage with 16-bit image handling.
-ACR had a huge update for CS.
-Color mapping was made SOOOO much easier with "Match Color" function.
-Shadow/Highlight tool was introduced (**one of my FAVORITE tools**)
-Photo Filter (coloring) and Lens Blur functions were added
-Filter Gallery introduced (where are the artistic filters are previewed and grouped)
-Text manipulation improved a lot (lots of options taken from Illustrator and even Pagemaker/InDesign)
-Export layers to file.
-Histogram palette was intro'd in CS as well (love that :D).

There's more stuff too, but those are the ones that I feel are the most important. Also, performance was not changed a lot...like 2-3% faster overall....at least in OS X.

[Soulburner]

Quick list of stuff that CS has over 7:

-7 does not have healing brush, CS does.
-File Browser had a huge update.
-CS also has a huge advantage with 16-bit image handling.
-ACR had a huge update for CS.
-Color mapping was made SOOOO much easier with "Match Color" function.
-Shadow/Highlight tool was introduced (**one of my FAVORITE tools**)
-Photo Filter (coloring) and Lens Blur functions were added
-Filter Gallery introduced (where are the artistic filters are previewed and grouped)
-Text manipulation improved a lot (lots of options taken from Illustrator and even Pagemaker/InDesign)
-Export layers to file.
-Histogram palette was intro'd in CS as well (love that :D).

There's more stuff too, but those are the ones that I feel are the most important. Also, performance was not changed a lot...like 2-3% faster overall....at least in OS X.
Bolded are the ones I use every time I open up PS for photo editing. I'd say CS was a good upgrade.

Shadow/Highlight can make some shots possible where they were considered "bad" or "unusable" out of the camera.

[MaxxxRacer]

If you want to fix shadows or highlighting, try DxO Optics. If you use an SLR from Canon or Nikon with their respective lenses, the program will recognize this (exif data) and manipulate the image based on the distortion/vinetting/etc that DxO found while testing that lens/body combo in their labs. Its pretty amazing what the software can do. Its not the best for noise reduction, but for everything else, its simply extraordinary.