The best photo editing tool out there is Adobe Photoshop. If you're looking for the short answer you can stop reading and go buy it. I've been using it for a long time and I highly recommend it. It's not just another program, it's a tool that's been the industry standard for about 15 years so there's a lot of information available online.
The current version is Photoshop CS4 and it's $700. If you can find the previous version (CS3) you may be able to get it for cheaper. If you find it for a lot cheaper check to see if it's an "Educational Version". Educational Versions are pretty much the same as the regular version, except that you're not allowed to use it for profit. If you're ok with that you can probably get CS4 for a lot less.
Photoshop also comes with an application called Adobe Camera Raw. It enables you to do amazing things with pictures from your digital SLR, especially when you shoot in NEF mode (Nikon's RAW image format). Boosting certain colors, changing the hue of certain colors, altering the way color photos are converted to black and white and all sorts of other stuff. If you do a lot of photography this feature alone might be worth a couple hundred dollars.
Photoshop is great, but it'll take some time to learn. Here are a couple of resources:
- Here's a crash-course in Photoshop
- Lynda.com - this is a subscription service. $25/month, but it has a wealth of information. There's well over 100 hours of training materials specific to CS3 and over 40 hours of material specific to CS4. If you subscribed for only a month or two and "crammed" it would be a great value.
- Me - post your Photoshop questions in the comments of this post, and if I know how to do it I'll do another post on it.
- GIMP is a popular image editing application that's been around for a while.
- Artweaver is supposed not only have a lot of the same features as Photoshop, but also has the same layout.
- SumoPaint is a web based Photoshop clone. It certainly doesn't offer anywhere near the functionality of the real thing, but for a simple little project it might be worth a try.
Posts
7 comments:
i know I asked you this before, but I have forgotten- which one of the free Photoshop clones is available for Mac?
GIMP is available for OSX. I haven't used GIMP (on any platform) but I've heard a lot of great things about it. It you try it, let me know what you think of it.
I had this brilliant idea this morning:
You should have a Photoshop workshop day where all of us stay at home moms who like to piddle with picture taking can come and learn a thing or two.
We have had Photoshop for several years. Apart from making color photos into black and white, I am intimidated by Photoshop. Everything went downhill when I tried to do this Anne Gedes thing for Ben's mom by encircling all of her grandchildren's faces in sunflower petals. It was such a nightmare. And the results were sort of nightmare-ish, too.
Anyway. What was my point? Oh yes. A Photoshop class!
Okay this isn't Photoshop related persay... how do you take great night pictures? I will be doing some photography for a wedding in two weeks and the bride would like an outdoor picture of herself with Cincinnati in the back ground, at night. yikes.
Melissa - That sounds like an interesting idea. Are you thinking that I would lecture/demonstrate the whole time, or more workshop style where yall would each bring a list of "how do you do this" questions and I would go over them all? Anybody else interested in something like this?
Kris - That's a good question. My first thought is to her them to be very still, put your camera on a tripod and do a longer exposure. Another thought is to take 2 pictures, one of them in front of the city where you light and expose for the bride, then (without moving the camera) have her move out of the way and take a really long exposure of just the city. Then put them together in PS. Where will you be shooting this?
OK, so my GIMP download was a bust. It told me (after the download) that I didn't have X11. I have Tiger/ Intel, so I don't know what the deal is.
Anyway, in trying to research my problem, I realized that I dont really need a Photoshop app. I need something more like Illustrator. Do you know of anything?
Luckily I remember reading an article on Lifehacker recently about the best free Illustrator replacement. The application was Inkscape. Seems to be pretty popular.
Post a Comment