help with photo editing softwares ?

[rookie wizard]

hi..i just started teaching myself a bit of photoshop. i also use picasa and photoshop for editing snaps. but looking at snaps here at DPS i wonder if there are other softwares for editing. please tell me some good ones, with specific uses for them, if any.

thanks a lot..

[ramirez0715]

Originally Posted by rookie wizard

hi..i just started teaching myself a bit of photoshop. i also use picasa and photoshop for editing snaps. but looking at snaps here at DPS i wonder if there are other softwares for editing. please tell me some good ones, with specific uses for them, if any.

thanks a lot..

I think if you are committed to learning photoshop is your answer. If your just cleaning up some images them Elements might do the trick. There are tons of plugins out there for photoshop that will give you different effects you see around here. But photoshop is still your primary software. Also, Camera Raw that comes with photoshop does a great job.

If you want to go a cheaper route try GIMP from google. Never used it, but it's suppose to be similiar to photoshop. Also, www.photoshop.com (free) might help with some touch up work.

Hope this helps.

[clrv]

Depending on how far you want to dive into this I have a couple of scenarios for you. When I started a few years back bought elements its and it was a great learning tool but after about 6 months I upgraded to Photo Shop CS4. I wish I would have just bought it in the first place and saved the $200, but if you don't think you will ever need the advanced tools of PS then elements would be first on my list.

You could also get Lightroom to help manage your photos and help with your workflow. There are plugins that you can purchase and download for free. There are so many tools out there that it is hard to point you in the right direction with out knowing which way you want to go.

[Samanax]

Originally Posted by rookie wizard

hi..i just started teaching myself a bit of photoshop. i also use picasa and photoshop for editing snaps. but looking at snaps here at DPS i wonder if there are other softwares for editing. please tell me some good ones, with specific uses for them, if any.

thanks a lot..

Really depends on what you're trying to do.

It's hard to beat Photoshop as a full blown image editor. You can pretty much do whatever you want with it but the learning curve is steep.

Photoshop Elements 8 is a very stripped down version of Photoshop...it's a capable image editor and nice to learn on but you may feel hampered by it in the future.

Paint Shop Pro is decent alternative. Some people prefer it to Photoshop.

GIMP is similar to Photoshop...it's powerful and it's free. But learning to use it takes time.

There are several other free alternatives that work fine for simple image editing. You can read more about them here.

[LightStalking]

Don't forget about Picnik - Photo editing the easy way, online in your browser either - it's online (nothing to download) and has a lot of great features.

[rookie wizard]

thanks a lot all u people. i really appreciate it