Advice on software!

[bongo]

Hello all!

This is my first post so be gentle with me!

I've been talking about getting into photography for a while as I do quite alot of travelling and am always disapppointed with my picture quality on a cheap compact. To stop me whinging my girlfriend bought me a Nikon D40 for my birthday.

I know its at the base level of digital SLR cmaeras but it seems really good compared to my old compact and has a large variety of options (most of which i don't understand yet!)

i was wondering if anyone had any advice for what would be a good, fairly simple software pakage to buy/download for a beginner like me. I had hoped to use the Picture Project 1.7 that came with the camera but its in Japanese and i've since discovered because the camera was from ebay that this is something which i cant get around.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated

Thanks

 

[davidbridges]

try picasa for now (jpeg shots) , but read up about RAW file format and then use RawShooter when you start (trust me you will ....)

Ive heard about some gimp program which is ment to be like photoshop but free, but i dont rate it as it was too slow on my computer and too complicated

 

[Slapo]

I would suggest keeping a decent file tree structure, Faststone MaxView, Raw Therapee and the GIMP (v. 2.4 is going to be out very soon, RC2 is out and it's lovely ^_^).

It's not as full featured as Photoshop, but it's very likely it'll do what you need to do for quite some time.

Ive heard about some gimp program which is ment to be like photoshop but free, but i dont rate it as it was too slow on my computer and too complicated

Use right click, group the tool windows into one and set the tile cache to be 1/4 to 1/2 of your actual RAM amount.
It's wise to set the number of steps to be kept in history to 12-16 in most cases. I use 12 and it's juuust fiiine.

If you want to try the 2.4 RC2 instead of the current 2.2.17, grab it here:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gimp-win/gimp-2.4.0-rc2-i586-setup.exe?use_mirror=mesh
Uninstall previous versions of the GIMP and GTK+ you have installed (if any) if possible.

 

[mho]

I would recommend you take a look at Adobe Elements, a lot of the functionality of Photoshop but at the fraction of the cost.

A free 30 day trial is available from Adobe.

I would not recommend anyone who is new, using old unsupported software like Rawshooter for a number of reasons (unless they want a free unsupported converter), it may not even process D40 files without converting to DNG first.

 

[bongo]

Thanks for your very quick replies! I'll have a go with these and see what happens.

I'll probably have to start with something fairly simple to use as previously i've just downloaded images straight to my PC and not tried using any programs so will have to see what happens!

Thanks