I don’t want to spend an arm & leg. I see that Adobe Photoshop is over 500 bucks!
I want to be able to move parts of the photo around or delete parts. Swithching faces around, taking the airplane out of the sky shot, etc., in addition to changing colors, brightness, and whatnot.
I want to be able to easily burn my photos to CD, make albums, and email photos. I want to avoid keeping any photos on my hard drive because I don’t have the space.
I want to be able to restore old photos. Maybe put the adult me and the child me in the same shot. (Not sexually! Dude, that’s gross! :dubious: )
It doesn’t have to be expert quality stuff. Fun, but not totally cheap quality.
I’m a big Photoshop fan, so I’ll recommend Photoshop’s “little sister”, Photoshop Elements. It’s very nice. It’s about $100, or much less, depending on if you get it on eBay, or get it with a coupon. (I know there were some coupons for Elements available on Amazon.com recently.)
I know a lot of Paint Shop Pro fans will come in and recommend it, and truth be told, it’s just fine too. But I believe there is more “support” (web sites, books, etc.) for Photoshop Elements. It is “related” to Photoshop (some of the Photoshop “styles” work with Elements too) and it benefits from that relationship.
I also don’t buy the contention that Photoshop is too hard to learn. I think it all depends on what you learned on first. If you start out with Photoshop Elements, and get yourself some nice friendly instructional books for it, you’ll probably have no trouble at all with it.
As far as CD burners go, I have an external burner—(well, two actually, long story) and they are wonderful for burning CDs. I am a big graphics image hog—in the last week or two I created 4.5 GB (yes, you read that right) of new digital images. I make files that are over 100 MB large each. In the last month I’ve probably made 10 GB of files. Backing them up and getting them off the hard drive (eventually) is a necessity. A CD burner is the only way to go. Maybe you won’t be eating up the hard drive space as fast and hard as I am (yet) but you never know!
In Windows, I think Roxio’s EZ CD Creator or Nero are the CD burner software of choice. I’ve also always done well with Sony external CD burners.
If you want free, but not expert quality (and indeed, an ongoing project) I recommend The Gimp (www.gimp.org). It’s released under the GNU general public license, and is available for both Linux and Windows systems, though I think the Linux version might be a little further along in the works. I know that the manipulated images done at this page were all done with the Linux version of the Gimp: http://seclub.cas.mcmaster.ca/main.perl?.state=council
It takes some time to mess around with it and learn how to use the features properly, but I imagine the same is true for any photoshop-type program.
I use Paint Shop Pro and have found it quite easy to use and perfectly adequate for basic photo manipulation. I’ve had a lot of success with it doing things like color correction and have used it to “clean up” photos by removing things like power lines (or even people) from shots. It’s from Jasc Software and is below $100.
I notice that, in addition to Adobe Photoshop Elements, they offer Adobe Photoshop Album. In addition to Jasc Paint Shop Pro, they offer Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album.
How much benefit, if any, can one get from the “album” software if one already has the primary image editing software?
All photo editing software provides the basics – cropping, resampling, brightness/contrast/color adjustment, filtering and so forth, so it doesn’t matter which software you choose. But photo manipulation requires much more advanced features such as precision selection, layering and blending, which are likely to be missing or poorly implemented in budget packages.
I use Photoshop Album for collection management because it integrates online and offline content into a single catalog. You can create and attach descriptor tags to photos that allow you easily find, say, pictures of your family that DON’T contain your sister but DO contain your favorite cousin AND were taken at the beach. It also has a good set of output formats (print, photofinisher, slideshow, web, PDF, video CD) that let you distribute the photos in a variety of media conveniently.
All things considered, Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Album are an unbeatable combination.
OK… I am looking at getting Adobe Photoshop Elements and Photoshop Album.
I assume the process works like this…
Take pics
Move pics from camera to hard drive
Edit pics with Elements
Tag pics with Album
When enough pics are generated, burn pics to CD (with backup copy)
Delete pics from hard drive
It looks like each CD has about 800 MB of available space and each pic is about 1 MB. That’s roughly 800 pics per CD. Do these numbers sound realistic?
Also, I would like to scan all my old photos onto CD. Where can I do that? How much is it?