I recently dis­cussed the must haves / don’t needs of buy­ing a dig­i­tal cam­era, depend­ing on the stage of your pho­tog­ra­phy obses­sion . I would imag­ine that most of the time photo’s come straight out of the cam­era and onto paper, if at all. If you want to take your photo’s that lit­tle bit fur­ther, here are some soft­ware tools which can smooth the way…

I don’t know how many times I have had to rebuild my PC due to a glut of soft­ware. I must have tried nearly every pho­tog­ra­phy related soft­ware or util­ity on the mar­ket. Don’t waste time like I did… here are the winners:

First Steps

So you use a com­pact dig­i­tal cam­era, and you shoot exclu­sively JPEG files (though it may not mean much to you). Noth­ing beats Google Picasa for ease of use, power, and price… Free!

Pluses:

Picasa can pro­duce some amaz­ing effects, which would take many steps in either Pho­to­shop Ele­ments or CS3. It’s photo organ­is­ing capa­bil­i­ties are not bad either. And, did I men­tion it was free!

Minuses:

It cur­rently does not sup­port RAW files, and it’s edits are lim­ited to the entire pic­ture, so any advanced dig­i­tal edit­ing is out.

Brisk Walk

You are using an advanced com­pact dig­i­tal cam­era, and you are begin­ning to tin­ker with the RAW for­mat. Addi­tion­ally you see all these tuto­ri­als about dig­i­tal edit­ing, mostly refer­ring to Adobe Pho­to­shop, but the cost is out of your league. Give Pho­to­shop Ele­ments a whirl. It has most of the tools that its big brother has for Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phers, and has con­tin­u­ously updated RAW file sup­port due to Adobe Cam­era Raw.

I have used Adobe Pho­to­shop Ele­ments for years, and in many ways it is more pow­er­ful than many pro­fes­sion­als give it credit for.

Pluses:

For exam­ple, its inte­grated organ­i­sa­tion capa­bil­i­ties have only recently been matched by Adobe Light­room, sup­port­ing key­word tag­ging, col­lec­tions, ver­sion­ing, tight inte­gra­tion with the editor.

Minuses:

Doesn’t sup­port lay­ers, non destruc­tive edit­ing, advanced renam­ing, automation.

In fact, in my opin­ion, you really need a good rea­son to buy Pho­to­shop CS3 over Pho­to­shop Ele­ments, espe­cially since you can expand its capa­bil­i­ties with Pho­to­shop Com­pat­i­ble plugins.

Jog­ging

You are using an entry-level SLR, and shoot nearly exclu­sively in RAW. You have amassed a large image library, and are begin­ning to poke around in the murky world of dig­i­tal noise.  Here are some addi­tional tools which I have found useful:

• NeatIm­age - Very easy to use, intel­li­gent noise reduc­tion in your images.
• PTLens — Great at “straight­en­ing” out the photo’s pro­duced by imper­fect lenses.
• Ham­rick Vues­can - Got a scan­ner? Get this!
• Adobe DNG con­verter — When you start adding tags, and other meta­data to images, you will begin to see addi­tional “XMP” files appear. These files store the addi­tional data when Adobe does not know how to write back to a par­tic­u­lar image file, such as a pro­pri­etary RAW file. Con­vert­ing all your RAW files to DNG has many advan­tages, one of which is the abil­ity to store exten­sive metadata.
• Flickr Uploadr — The best photo shar­ing community.

I will leave the pluses and minuses of these as an exer­cise to the reader .

Sprint­ing

Ok the big kahuna! Despite it’s out­ra­geous price, you have decided that you absolutely need Pho­to­shop CS3 and Pho­to­shop Light­room. That said, if you are a pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­pher, and utilise any third-party stu­dio man­age­ment, colour man­age­ment, or any soft­ware, it is cer­tain to work with these. Tuto­ri­als in indus­try press — you guessed it, Adobe Pho­to­shop CS3. Many open source fans men­tion “The Gimp” as an alter­na­tive… but as good as it may be, it will never be taken seri­ously in the Pho­to­graphic indus­try as long as it is called “The Gimp”.

I know I recently upgraded… so what do these give me:

• Com­plex file renam­ing in Light­room
• Advanced meta­data capa­bil­i­ties, such as tem­plates, in Light­room
• Advanced colour management
• Automat­ing Pho­to­shop with Actions

Pluses:

Extremely pow­er­ful, and pretty much the indus­try standard.

Minuses:

Bloody expen­sive, and in Europe, it’s a rip off with prices which bear no rela­tion to sales tax, impor­ta­tion duties, cur­rency exchange etc. Buy a boxed prod­uct in the US and bring it home.