Photo editing

[pitre]

Have been using photoscape with fair results before buying any other software. Photoshop seems to be the favourite amongst most people ,hoe difficult is the programme to work considering that I'm a relative novice in photography?

[Jim Ford]

The 'full-blown' Photoshop suite is very expensive and has very many facilities and options that newcomers find daunting. Many people are quite happy with the cut-down version 'Photoshop Elements', which does 99% of what they need.

Jim

[slimrbp]

I have used both full blown Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and of the two, for what I needed I preferred Elements as I didn't really need all the bells and whistles.
I think Elements gives you a great number of tools to play with, I think for most people it is more than adequate (the Elements catalogue is almost worth the money in itself a great way of organising photographs).

I now use Lightroom a choice mostly based on workflow reasons.

[big bill]

In the past I have used many different editing packages and started using elements 5 then went onto Photoshop 6 ,I have went back a couple of times over the years to see how they compared and always came back to Photoshop .
I now use Photoshop CS3 going up through all the suites of Photoshop from ^ to CS3 and will never go back ,it is a great editing package but can be quite daunting for the first time user until you get used to it ,I gave my friend Elements 6 and loaded a copy onto my pc as well and am taking him thru it using telephone and Msn and he is starting to get the hang of it ,it all depends on how quickly you can absorb and learn the material ,going from CS3 to Elements 6 I had to stop and think again on certain aspects of the program but it soon registers .
Best of luck with what ever you decide but Photoshop Elements would be a good starting point to see if you like the programm before spending out on the full program.

[Geoff F]

There are almost as many options as there are photographers!

I tried Elements but never really got on with it. I found that if you want to use all the available tools and settings the workspace becomes cluttered and cumbersome to use.

Now I use Serif Photo Plus X3 which find find more userfriendly; and has all the same tools and settings.

But many people like the free Gimp.

At the end of the day, I don't think there is a best programme; it is more a case of finding which one suits you best.

[Tringa]

Have a look at Silkypix and Gimp. Silkypix is useful beacuse it will read a lot of RAW formats and Gimp looks as if it is very comprehensive.

Dave

BTW both of these are free.

[Ollie]

Originally Posted by Geoff F

There are almost as many options as there are photographers!

At the end of the day, I don't think there is a best programme; it is more a case of finding which one suits you best.

I agree with Geoff. I personally use Elements as it suits my work flow way of editing.

[shenk1]

As a novice (and a tight wad) I like to try a few of the freebie ones out there.
Gimp is good for learning more complicated stuff,PhotoFiltre is good for simple stuff (resizing,cropping,basic tweeks) and Paint.NET is a decent halfway house.
As they are all free download them all,use them for what you think will come in handy most and then decide whether you need or are capable of using a more complicated program.
I still haven't worked out all the features in any of them yet so my moneys still in my pocket

[Jim Ford]

As a side note, FastStone 4.1 has just come out.

Jim

[Elean0r]

Gimp is good, and it's free.