Which software is better? (1 Viewer)

[Keith Reeder]

I don't think anyone's dismissing PSE, Keith - just pointing out that there's life outside of Adobe, and that for the money, PSP arguably gives you more.

Cap One 4 is a very good RAW converter, but really that's all it is, and in terms of end results is no better for that job than Raw Therapee - although it has a pretty slick interface, to be sure.

Most of us will still need a PSE/PSP type of program too.

I must admit that I can see the appeal in LightRoom, but I don't use its DAM capabilities, and like the idea of a RAW converter I can just fire up from a right click on an image, convert the image and close again - LightRoom isn't really that kind of application.

It is very good however, and I don't doubt that I'll think about a LR based workflow one day.

I'll still need PSP, though..!

 

[birdnSWF]

I never could get into LightRoom either... CS3 and the Canon tools meets all our needs.

 

[Carless]

I've just finally been making some headway in being able to "polish turds". I was following some of the "Photo Editing" tutorials on the page http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/

Finally I've been able to make big improvements to photos. The two tutorials that I found useful were "Reducing CCD noise", and "Smart Sharpening". In both cases, I ended up doing something different from what the tutorial suggested. In the "Reducing CCD noise" tutorial, a selective Gaussian blur is used to reduce CCD noise, while not affecting edges too much. I could see big improvements in various parts of my sample images, but never found a good compromise between loss of CCD noise, and loss of detail, particularly the grass in the background. So I ended up doing the selective blur to fix some parts of the image, then free selecting the regions of the image where this "worked", and pasting them back into the unprocessed version of the same image. Best of both worlds.

But the tutorial that really impressed me was the selective sharpening one. Basically, you decompose the image into Luminosity-A-B format, then use an edge detect on the Luminosity channel. You play around with levels quite a bit, blur a bit, fiddle with levels a bit, and eventually you get an image with the crucial edges in white, and the other areas in black.

The tutorial went on quite a bit here but I was losing track. But I'd spotted the idea, which was to use the edge selected image to create a selection, which is then used for sharpening.

So, I created a duplicate layer for my original image, and then cut and pasted the edge detected image as the layer mask for the duplicate, which was above the original. I then applied some pretty radical sharpening to the duplicate.

The result was fantastic. Comparing the original image to the highly selectively sharpened image is really impressive. The edited image is considerably better than the original. So much detail pops into clear view that was indistinct before. And I can't see anything where the quality drops with the sharpening.

So from now on I am afraid I have to disagree with those who say that you can't polish a turd. It's certainly possible to dramatically improve an image through post-processing.

And I haven't even completed that tutorial properly, let alone become expert at photo retouching. I hope to be able to do even more in the future. And I haven't even tried working from RAW images, although I can take them with my S3 using additional software. Hopefully that will get me even better images.

 

[Clive Watson]

I agree that it's possible to do some wonderful things with artefacts, exposure inaccuracies, excessive noise etc, but I cannot believe that if the subject, i.e. the bird, is out of focus to start with, then it is possible to recover an acceptable image. But I'm not an expert, anything I take that's out of focus just gets binned. Am I right?

 

[666taz]

Your right ,if its out of focus you carnt correct it bin it

 

[iveljay]

Trouble is its very much like selecting 'best' bins.
Take PSP... V7 Excellent, 8 a prototype for 9... 9 also Very good having sorted 8.
Now Corel owned.
X & X1 useful for developing X2 which seems to have sorted the problems in the previous 2 releases.

All were very useable and would do what most users would want - just IMHO - some were better than others, same with any family of products.

Also depends on what you are producing - I use Serif Page Plus for document design and so it makes sense to back-end it with Photo Plus as you can swap between the two instantly. If you are using an Adobe suite then you will stick with Adobe.

As I said just like finding a 'best' bin...

J

 

[Carless]

I agree that it's possible to do some wonderful things with artefacts, exposure inaccuracies, excessive noise etc, but I cannot believe that if the subject, i.e. the bird, is out of focus to start with, then it is possible to recover an acceptable image. But I'm not an expert, anything I take that's out of focus just gets binned. Am I right?

My sharpening exercise managed to get things in the background that were slightly out of focus into focus. But I'd agree that anything way out of focus isn't going to be fixed. Though I'm no expert.

After I took a photo of a red panda where the panda's out of focus, but the tree behind it is, I'm planning to use focus bracketing more often. Because I primarily use my camera for video, I've bought memory cards large enough that I could take thousands and thousands of shots on the highest resolution, and focus bracketing wouldn't chew into that much.

 

[Carless]

<£100 - PS Elements or Capture One
£100-200 - PS CS2 or Adobe Lightroom
£200+ - CS2 and Capture One/Lightroom. CS3 if you have £600 lying around with nothing to do.

Hope that helps.

Why no GIMP?

 

[The gaffer]

....and the winner is?

Thank you very much for the advice about all of the available software and the pros and cons associated with each one. Having taken this all on board I have decided to go with RAW Therapee and Paint Shop Pro X2.

I got PSP X2 for £21 from e-bay and my first impressions are that it has everything that I need and quite frankly is a bargain at that price. Once I get more experienced I may well move onto Photoshop bit I think at present PSP has enough bell and whistles on it to keep me wide eyed for quite a while!!:t:

Brian

 

[Jay23]

Heres another vote for Lightroom. Took a little while to get used to but once understood is fabulous. My workflow is now almost all as RAW, only coverting to TIFF if I want to fiddle about in PSP. Lightroom is digital photography specific software and has been designed from the ground up as a tool for photographer rather than graphic artists. I am not necessarily an Adobe fan, can't get on with PS but have to admit that Lightroom has revolutionized the way I work.

 

[TBMike]

An in expensive option is Photoshop Elements 5.0 an OEM package from Ebay. Once it is installed go to help and update and download the latest Adobe Camera Raw. Then you have the best of photoshop and one of the best raw converters without all the cost.