Baffled by editing software!

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jimmyb

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Edit My Images
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I've been taking digital pics for ages now but have never edited any of them.

I shoot with a canon 350d and find, especially in sunny weather, that images lack colour and appear washed out. Reading up in various places that some post processing is required to get the best out of digital images.

I'm only really interested in getting good colour and maybe putting a water mark on the image.

I want to spend as little as possible and certainly can't afford photoshop! I'm baffled by all the software out there and what each one does etc.

I've read the sticky on editing software but am not sure what each one does.

I also find that an image that looks great on various monitors when printed (at jessops or boots) comes out alot darker...is this something I'm doing wrong?
I don't shoot in RAW just the jpeg if that makes a difference.

Any pointers would be appreciated.
 
Hi Jimmy

if you are using jpg.. have you tried the picture styles on the camera (I think 350d has those?) you can use the ones they give you or tweak each on to your own style, ie by dragging the saturation up a bit till it gives you what you want.


Also, if your camera is taking them in ADOBE sgb and you put htem on the web they will look washed out. try changing this in your camera for the colour profile.... changing to srgb.
 
the 350D will have come from canon with 2 basic editors. Zoombrowser and Digital Photo Professional (DPP).
Neither tool allows selective area editing or adjustment, but deal with the whole photo, although both allow rectangular cropping.

- ZoomBrowser (last time I looked) was limited to jpegs, and could only dsisplay but not edit RAW files. It can also add text in a basic rectangular user defined area.

- DPP is quite a good tool, its handles RAW files and it works on the basis of storing a recipe of adjustments for a photo (raw or jpeg), so you can make adjustments, save them, change them later, revert to original photo etc, its only when you "convert and save" that you output a photo file that has the adjustements applied. DPP also has some nice "workflow" tools so you can quickly go through a batch of photos, picking and choosing, then cropping, sorting brightness, white balance, levels, lens corrections, noise reduction, dust edit, etc. Again its a whole photo editor, not selective areas. It does not have any text adding features.

Have you set your monitor properly and the computer's colour management, what and how depends on operating system, video card, monitor and printer.
 
Hi Jimmy, grab yourself a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 from Morgan Computers for £32 (we use it for training and loads of my clients have bought them) and you'll have the one stop solution to downloading, organising and editing you pictures.

A simple solution like this will allow you to use your time and energy to develop your photography without getting bogged down with Post-processing technology which I sense has no great appeal to you.

P.s. Raw shooting, layers (and masks with a nifty touch) and all those geeky things are incorporated in Elements 8 so if telly gets boring you'll be able to amuse yourself!!


Good luck

John
 
phototuition said:
Hi Jimmy, grab yourself a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 from Morgan Computers for £32 (we use it for training and loads of my clients have bought them) and you'll have the one stop solution to downloading, organising and editing you pictures.
Click to expand...

Without hijacking this thread, I would like to know John, (as you deal with all the editing software)

I have Capture NX and cant quite get my head around it, would I be better off with getting Elements 7 or 8 - as in would they be easier to use than NX :shrug:
 
If only shooting in jpg GIMP is a free software tool very similar to PS...
 
Steve, Unfortunately I don't deal with all of the editing software as I specialise in getting people started in digital SLR photography and work hard to keep things as simple as possible. I don't know Capture NX but I'm aware that it's advanced and can be complex so if you're getting started in dslr stuff perhaps elements 8 would be the simplest route to improving your pics.
The thing about elements is that it's fundamentally a disabled version of photoshop which is not suited to processing files in bulk to the same settings to ensure that the pros buy cs4 or 5 which, of course they can well afford.
Grab a copy of elements 8 which comes with adobe camera raw (might need to do fiddly but free update for 300s) and you might find things a little more straightforward.

I train with elements 6 and 8, lightroom and iphoto '09.

For work i use a canon 5d mk1 and sigma 50mm f1.4 and Canon 100m f2.8.

For fun I use a panny G1 plus a pocketful of tiny lenses and Lightroom.
 
John,

Cheers for that... One other thing, is there much difference between Elements 7 & 8 that you know of :shrug: - just that you haven't mentioned about elements 7.

I've read reviews about 7 & 8 & there's different views on both & some prefere 7 over 8 as the latter has a few problems...

Cheers again..
 
I just dumped GIMP used it for a year, i can see the benefits of PSE 8 already, it's making me think about shooting in RAW again.
 
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