Processing Program
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From: Alan Lichtenstein on 23 Feb 2010 07:52 I'm a neophyte as far as digital photography is concerned, however, after having purchased my dSLR three years ago and finally deciding that I ought to learn how to use it, realized that photography can be very rewarding and interesting. Keeping in mind that I am still a neophyte, I am considering purchasing a processing program. The majority of salespeople in the camera store that I deal with, knowing that I am a neophyte, recommended either Lightroom or Aperature. Are there any recommendations that may help me? Additionally, if in your comments, you can comment on how each program provides for HDR that would be appreciated, although from my reading, it does seem that there are other programs which will do that well. Also, can anyone recommend a basic book on HDR, low on technical aspects and easy on explanations, for a beginner? Any advice will be appreciated.
From: Chris Malcolm on 23 Feb 2010 08:44 In rec.photo.digital Alan Lichtenstein <arl(a)erols.com> wrote: > I'm a neophyte as far as digital photography is concerned, however, > after having purchased my dSLR three years ago and finally deciding that > I ought to learn how to use it, realized that photography can be very > rewarding and interesting. Keeping in mind that I am still a neophyte, > I am considering purchasing a processing program. The majority of > salespeople in the camera store that I deal with, knowing that I am a > neophyte, recommended either Lightroom or Aperature. Are there any > recommendations that may help me? Salespeople will naturally recommend something to buy. But there's a lot of good free software out there. Try Picasa for a start. Aimed at beginners, and what it does it does very well. > Additionally, if in your comments, you can comment on how each program > provides for HDR that would be appreciated, although from my reading, it > does seem that there are other programs which will do that well. Also, > can anyone recommend a basic book on HDR, low on technical aspects and > easy on explanations, for a beginner? Stay out of HDR until you know what you can do without it with such things as RAW "curves" tone mapping and dynamic range optimisation. -- Chris Malcolm
From: Chris H on 23 Feb 2010 10:02 In message <4b83cff0$0$22519$607ed4bc(a)cv.net>, Alan Lichtenstein <arl(a)erols.com> writes >I'm a neophyte as far as digital photography is concerned, however, >after having purchased my dSLR three years ago and finally deciding >that I ought to learn how to use it, realized that photography can be >very rewarding and interesting. Keeping in mind that I am still a >neophyte, I am considering purchasing a processing program. The >majority of salespeople in the camera store that I deal with, knowing >that I am a neophyte, recommended either Lightroom or Aperature. Are >there any recommendations that may help me? Both of those programs are cataloguing programs with modules for printing, generating web galleries etc and some developing. They are NOT a replacement for Photoshop. It does depends what you want to do. I use Lightroom (having looked carefully at Aperture, iPhoto and several others about 18 months ago) on a PPC Mac. As Lightroom comes from Adobe it works very well with Photoshop and I assume Photoshop elements. Also it is available on both Mac and PC. Aperture was mac only when I looked. For editing 99.9% of the pros use Photoshop as do the vast majority of the serious amateurs. So there is more support and help for that than any other program. BTW elements is good for most things and is virtually free these days. So I use Lightroom partly because it works well with Photoshop and there because is a lot of support for Lightroom from professional down to amateur. Also I tend to shoot reportage, PR, news, etc where the developing in Lightroom (WB, curves, colour and cropping is enough. I only need Photoshop occasionally for "art" pictures. I find lightroom easy to use and you only use the bits you are happy with. I now use a lot more of it. there are also a lot of good books for it as well as several forums and on line (free) video tutorials. Lots of presets and ad in modules tool. I have never been stuck for help. I don't think the same level of support is available for the free tools. BTW if you use Lightroom always shoot in RAW. It does non destructive editing. Lightroom has a neat trick of prompting for a destination when importing photos AND asking for a backup location as well (all good catalogue programs should do this). I have an external hard drive and now as a matter of course I import to the main library and a back up at the same time. It pushes you into good habits. :-) Another good thing it does is makes keywords easy. Another good habit to get into! Again most cataloguing programs do this. It is also easy to retro fit keywords in Lightroom. Hope this helps. -- \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/ \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
From: Better Info on 23 Feb 2010 10:14 On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:52:34 -0500, Alan Lichtenstein <arl(a)erols.com> wrote: >I'm a neophyte as far as digital photography is concerned, however, >after having purchased my dSLR three years ago and finally deciding that >I ought to learn how to use it, realized that photography can be very >rewarding and interesting. Keeping in mind that I am still a neophyte, >I am considering purchasing a processing program. The majority of >salespeople in the camera store that I deal with, knowing that I am a >neophyte, recommended either Lightroom or Aperature. Are there any >recommendations that may help me? > >Additionally, if in your comments, you can comment on how each program >provides for HDR that would be appreciated, although from my reading, it >does seem that there are other programs which will do that well. Also, >can anyone recommend a basic book on HDR, low on technical aspects and >easy on explanations, for a beginner? > >Any advice will be appreciated. For a beginner photo-editor, I wouldn't suggest investing any money in any software at this point. There is much freeware that is better than most cost-ware these days. If you want to play with RAW files, then check out "RAW Therapee". It has the latest advanced interpolation algorithms for the last few years that still aren't even included in the very expensive programs yet. Though you would probably do just as well by setting your camera to its lowest contrast setting and tweaking your custom color balance so as not to blow out any color channels. This way the full dynamic range of your sensor should be represented in the JPG files and there'll be no need to muck about in RAW data if you properly expose and color-balance your images while taking them. (Like any decent photographer should already know how to do.) Any of the freeware image editors, GIMP (considered the free equal to PhotoSlop in the right hands), IrfanView, FastStone Viewer (the latter has some good but basic editing tools built in and supports nearly all RAW formats), etc. will also accept all the freeware "plugins" that you can find all over the net. With a collection of good plugins you can do almost anything in the freeware programs as you can do in expensive programs. If you eventually want to step up to the oft (wrongly) praised PhotoSlop, you might want to take a look at Photoline instead. It does more and does it better than PhotoSlop ever has. Its interface isn't as prettied-up, but it's an amazing work-horse of precision and professional tools. Not for the beginner, by any stretch of the imagination. Even people who have used PhotoSlop get lost in all that Photoline can do. I've been using it for over 10 years and I still haven't learned many of its multi-page layout, complex texture, and animation editing features. One of its remarkable features is the 100% lossless JPG editing feature. You can load, save, reload, resave a JPG image as many times as you want, and it will only change the pixels you edit in them, without ever introducing new JPG compression artifacts. It will even edit 64-bit color-depth CMYK images. It also offers 2 flavors of the Lanczos resampling algorithm for preserving image details in all resizings and rotations. Overpriced bloatware PhotoSlop still hasn't climbed out of the bicubic resampling dark-ages of last century. Even freeware IrfanView offers a version of Lanczos resampling algorithm for detail-preserving resizing and rotations for many years. Use a bicubic algorithm for downsizings and rotations and you might as well have bought a toy-store camera. The amount of detail resolution lost from a simple downsize or rotation in PhotoSlop would be the same. One other plus, Photoline also includes the same advanced interpolation algorithms for RAW files as is in RAW Therapee and will open RAW image formats that aren't even in existence yet. I've proved this to myself by using versions of Photoline from 2-3 years ago to open this years newer RAW file formats. An interesting but little-known freeware editor is one that used to be called LightBox v1.2. It might still might be found on the net on some freeware servers. It works on the zone-system for advanced photographers. There's even a one-click menu option to create a duplicate of itself for sharing with others freely. It's since been bought out and renamed to SageLight v3.0, no longer freeware. But if you can find the free LightBox version it can do some pretty interesting things from a pro-editor point of view. It's even a stand-alone single exe-file application so it can be used as a portable editor right from your flash-drives or in-camera memory cards running it right through the camera's USB connection. I always keep it handy as an external application that can be called up from within my other favorite editors because of its unique zone-system editing features, using it from my main editors as if it's some advanced professional plugin. (Worth mentioning that Photoline too can be used as a stand-alone application running it right from memory cards or flash drives, by simply creating a "UserSettings" sub-folder in its installation folder. No other tweaks needed. This way you can carry a very powerful editor with you everywhere you go with your camera. If you travel light then use any public access computer and your camera as your full kit, from photo to darkroom, all done from files stored right in your camera.) For a beginner you might also look into earlier versions of PaintShopPro. Buying them used, or even get them free from some places. V9 was the last good version, but it was only an 8-bit editor for all its tools. Corel bought out Jasc, and before they started to ruin much of its usefulness they released a V10 that started to get lots of 16-bit color-depth support for many of its tools. Then came along v11, X2, and X3, which are all an abysmal mess of hard to install bloatware. Along with the questionable "Protexis" service that it silently installs and is always running in the background, that many define as nothing but devious spyware. These later Corel versions constantly crashing or more often fail to run at all. I just got through 15 hours of nightmares, and finally quit trying to install version X3 of it. I was that curious to see if they fixed anything in it. I still can't even get it to run to see if they fixed anything within the program itself. After reading online reports of others all having similar problems, the few that did get it to install found it had the same crashing problems and major bugs as version X2. Leave it to Corel to buy up excellent software and pay their inane programmers to trash it like they did. Though I do I keep a version of PaintShopPro 9 and 10 installed due to some excellent tools it has that can't be found in any other program. Its somewhat misnamed "chromatic aberration" tool being the finest filter I've found anywhere for difficult sensor-blooming artifacts (not lateral nor longitudinal CA) from difficult lighting situations and subjects. And its "Manual Color Correction" tool (hidden on the toolbar editor list of "all commands", archived-tools from earlier versions) can't be beat for shifting a range of color-tones without making the rest of them ugly. It's capable of making flesh-tones look like flesh-tones in some of the more difficult lighting situations. Its "red-eye" correction tool also has options for unique other-color reflections from animal flash-photography shots. Something no other editor has. If you do a lot of pet or wildlife photography it can rescue a good image for you without a lot of hand-editing. If you have no decent external noise-removal filter, the one in PaintShopPro does a pretty good job too with a little practice. As good as some of the expensive ones after you've learned to use it well. A couple other decent low-cost beginner's editors I sometimes recommend are Serif PhotoPlus or PhotoImpact. There are others however. For a condensed and somewhat thorough overview of many other editors I've not mentioned, see this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_raster_graphics_editors
From: ray on 23 Feb 2010 10:35
On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:52:34 -0500, Alan Lichtenstein wrote: > I'm a neophyte as far as digital photography is concerned, however, > after having purchased my dSLR three years ago and finally deciding that > I ought to learn how to use it, realized that photography can be very > rewarding and interesting. Keeping in mind that I am still a neophyte, > I am considering purchasing a processing program. The majority of > salespeople in the camera store that I deal with, knowing that I am a > neophyte, recommended either Lightroom or Aperature. Are there any > recommendations that may help me? Why? I'd suggest you start with ufraw and GIMP (which are available as free downloads). Find out what they will do. Learn basic manipulation techniques. Put out money if, at some later date, you need or want to do more than they conveniently do. > > Additionally, if in your comments, you can comment on how each program > provides for HDR that would be appreciated, although from my reading, it > does seem that there are other programs which will do that well. Also, > can anyone recommend a basic book on HDR, low on technical aspects and > easy on explanations, for a beginner? > > Any advice will be appreciated. |