I am nowhere near a good photographer, but I figure the best way to get better is to keep shooting, and to share my photos for comments. Comments are welcome, though that’s not the point of this thread.
I am also uploading my photos to a different site, and for both sites I need to resize them. I keep them fairly small on flickr, but quite a bit larger on the other site. I am looking for a photo resizer that would work for both accounts, and is free. Right now I’m just uploading straight out of camera shots to both places, with the exception of resizing them. While I have no problem using my current tool for one or two photos, when I have 30+ I want to upload, doing them one at a time gives me a headache. Since I post significantly more at a time to flickr, I haven’t updated my flickr site in ages. The pro account was a gift from a friend, so I’d like to use it more.
Beat me to it. I use Irfanview (usually through the Thumbnails program) an awful lot to manage large amounts of photographs. I am in the process of down sizing 18GB to under 2GB, and it’s been working like a champ.
Oh, and in the Tilted pictures - you’re not spot on 90 degrees from the subjects, so they’re tilted. Change your angle so you’re perpendicular to the building and it should straighten out.
Thank you both! I downloaded it, and it seems to have done exactly what I needed.
JustAnotherGeek, I will try that, if I can. If I recall correctly, there have been times when I couldn’t get myself in an ideal position, and I fired the shot off anyway, just to see what happened. Thanks again.
Failing being able to retake the pictures, how for or against photoshopping are you? Using skew or distort transformations may allow you to “fix” the problem.
I’m not really at all against photoshopping. It’s just that 1) I don’t know how to do it, 2) I’m not sure I have the visual acuity to see what a photo needs or how to do it and 3) I am hoping to improve my raw images, and I’m not sure how much photoshopping will help with that. I see it going two ways on the last one. One possibility is that it makes me lazy, “Eh, I can photoshop it and fix it.” The other is that it improves my idea of what looks good, and so helps enhance my learning curve.
I’m a big fan of Paint Shop Pro. I’m not unbiased because a friend of mine was the lead programmer on it. The goal was to have “90% of the capability of Photoshop for 1/10th the price”. Eventually PSP had features that Photoshop lacked and Adobe has been playing catch-up - scripting and browsing were a couple that PSP had long before PS. I’ve lost track of him since JASC was sold to Corel and don’t know if he’s still connected to the company.
Another that is very obscure is QFX. I’ve been using this one since Photoshop was Barneyscan. The thing that is different is that QFX was originally a set of command-line utilities that eventually developed GUI - so everything it can do could be batch-processed and it eventually developed it’s own scripting language. It’s behind the times now as it’s developed by one guy, but on the other hand if you are processing a huge number of images in complicated ways it can be customized like nobody’s business. And it has been truly multi-threaded and multi-processor oriented in ways that even Photoshop CS3 is not. For instance, if you run QFX on a dual processor machine, it splits the image in half and processes each half on a different processor.
Personally, I don’t use Photoshop at all. It has some clunky ways of doing things that have tragically become accepted as the only way those things should be done. It’s popularity has actually retarded development in image editing programs. Even the open-source program GIMP has been infected by the “but that’s not the way it’s done in Photoshop” virus.