Railfan Technology > Photo editors, your choice?

This question is asked from time to time. And as new members share their experiences and technology marches on, the recommendations change.

What is a good general purpose photo editor that isnt as powerful and expensive as Photoshop, but still does a good job for most tasks?

gimp. It's a linux program, but it has been ported to
windows and mac. Because there are hardly any windows
or mac developers in the project, attention to problems
on those systems is slow.

The 16 bit edition of gimp is great.

John.

Adobe Lightroom is used by about 90% of the professional documentary photographers and serious amateurs I work with.  The experience replicates an actual darkroom more effectively than Adobe Photoshop.  Lightroom can be easily used for all the basics: exposure, contrast, cropping, etc. as well as very sophisticated image adjustment if needed.  I recommend watching some of the dozens of Lightroom tutorials on Youtube, especially the introducton to Lightroom videos, to see if it fits your needs. Amazon's price just now was $142.  



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/05/16 15:59 by lanewsman.

Put in my vote for Lightroom and Photoshop Elements.  See the discussion on these two programs from a couple of months ago - Lightroom/Photoshop discussion

Gimp for basic railfan needs
Lightroom for serious amateurs or professionals.

Dennis Livesey
New York, NY

Another vote for Photoshop Elements.

TCnR Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Another vote for Photoshop Elements.

Seconded.  Or thirded.  This has become my main editor.

Mary McPherson
Dongola, IL
Diverging Clear Productions

I have used Paint Shop Pro forever, since it was JASC. Now that it is part of Corel, hard to know what to expect, BUT, consider me the anti-Adobe. (Follow the various threads about licensing their products and costs...)

​You might want to look into the basic Windows function, MS Paint which has grown in competence. And the freeware of Irfanview is very useful. The plugins have a lot of nice features such as color brightening which works well and simply.


 

Lightroom if you work with RAW image formats.

Jim B

I know several guys who use Zoner and recommend it.  It can be used for editing and arranging pics for presentations.

Being a Mac guy, I've been using Aperture, which is now going away.  It's been replaced by Photos, which I'm not liking so much.  How does Lightroom compare to Aperture?  I've had people recommend it to me as a replacment.  I really enjoyed Aperture.  It did everything I wanted, and organizing pictures was so easy.

I find it puzzling that Adobe Lightroom has features and capabilites that seem to outperform Adobe Photoshop - but,
ironically, I still find Photoshop more intuitive - should be the other way around!

Lightroom does seem to be quickly becoming the standard - and it IS much faster than editing in Photoshop once you
get the basics down.

/Mitch

I'll second that! I use Photo Shop Elements for all of my editing. For beginners, there's a 'Guided Edit' to lead a new person through editing photos step by step until they're ready to take the training wheels off... You can find the next older version on Amazon for less than $100.

BRAtkinson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Put in my vote for Lightroom and Photoshop
> Elements.  See the discussion on these two
> programs from a couple of months ago -
> Lightroom/Photoshop discussion

James Nelson
Thornton, CO
www.flickr.com/mojaveflyer

mojaveflyer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You can find the next older version on Amazon for less than $100.

That reminded me of 'tricks' I've done when I upgrade Windows from one version to the next.  I saved big $$$ by finding older 'used' software versions on ebay and elsewhere to replace programs that no longer worked under the new version of Windows.  I have over 40 paid programs installed on my computer and typically, each upgrade costs me at least $200 on up to get updated versions.  Finding out, for example, that Photoshop Elements 10 or 11 works under Windows 10 might be a way to avoid the 'new' cost of Photoshop Elements 13.  The only 'risk' is that if you have a camera less than about 4 years old, PE 10 might not support RAW files from that camera, forcing an upgrade to 11 or later.

I also have a couple of programs that either the vendor went out of business or they want two arms and two legs for an upgrade version.  So, I keep my old XP box running as one of the computers on my KVM.