Photo editing software

[craig333]

Been looking online and frankly theres too many choices. Ease of use is important. I downloaded photoscape and played around a little and can see just how important it is to have an editor. My original pic you can just barely make out burning man.

Without knowing what I'm doing he shows up pretty well.

I was looking at photoshop elements and there are 12 versions. Do I really need the latest version?

Second question is, can I teach myself this (book or online tutorial) or might it be more worthwhile to take a class?

 

[Wandering Sagebrush]

Craig, yes get the newest version for your computer. Or... Consider Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud) and Lightroom, which is a subscription. Adobe is always updating their products to give better functionality.

A class will fast track you, but self learning works, too.

 

[Lighthawk]

It depends upon how much editing you want to do, Craig. You have gotten a glimpse of how powerful the ability to adjust the parameters of your image in your BM photo. However, if you really do want to work on your images, then you must shoot RAW images, which is simply a more robust file than the out of camera jpegs.

If you go the Lightroom / Photoshop route, they now rent for $20/mo. It seems a lot, but when I looked at what I was paying to buy software with each newer, faster computer, it's a wash. For me. The other major benefit of Lightroom is that you will be able to catalog all your photos (past and present), applying keywords and other forms of organizing. I hope that the legacy of my photo database will be for my enjoyment for decades to come.

All that said, there are simple editors like picassa or iphoto and others. But, if you continue to shoot jpegs, you can only operate within a small bandwidth of editing choices before you block out the blacks and blow out the highlights, with ugly artifacts. (Warning: Photo Geek Talk)

 

[craig333]

Shooting raw isn't an issue, I have plenty of storage. Organizing? You mean tossing everything into one big pile isn't the way to go? Actually I've been meaning to do some picture housekeeping and feeling pretty crappy at the moment I might just do some in between football games tomorrow.

Like I said, I don't plan on making a career or even a hobby out of it (gotta be careful, hobbies sneak up on ya) so professional grade software seems a stretch.

Curious for the hardcore here, do you edit all your pics or just some?

 

[Lighthawk]

When I import my files off the camera card, I see if I can apply some global keywording, like "Death Valley", "FWC", etc. Lightroom also let's me apply a preset of adjustments upon import, which can save time. It could auto tone every shot automatically, but that would slow things down. I choose to have the files organized by date on my hard drive.

Once they are imported I quickly review them, marking anywhere from 20-50% for immediate deletion. I've got too many hard drives filled up, and backed up so data reduction is a constant goal for me. If I'm bored, I can filter a whole year of photos for images that are 2 stars or less, and delete, delete, delete!

Next I rank my photos, 2-4 stars and start marking images I think are good enough to publish to my website. I'll also refine my keywords, marking individual or series of images quickly. Other software refers to this as tagging. In other words, think how cool it might be to show all your photos that were marked "FWC" or "Tahoe". Keywording is a chore, but can become powerful.

Now, I'm ready to do some editing.
Again, Lightroom will let me adjust one photo to my liking, then I can sync those settings with other shots which are similar. Example: a night shot with iso 3200 is going to need some serious noise reduction, crank the clarity up, etc. I do that once, then sync to the other night shots.

Everybody develops their own workflow, specific to the software they use. I tried iphoto a long time ago, but quickly ditched it when I realized it was duplicating every image I edited, filling my little 12" powerbook up. Lightroom using RAW does editing differently. I use the analogy that LR remembers the recipe to develop your RAW image, but without changing the original file. When I used photoshop in the old days, I had to constantly keep track of which version of an edited file was the correct one.

I've had good luck researching photography on dpreview. Here's an article that might help. Photoshop Elements might be a good choice.

 

[MarkBC]

I agree about Lightroom -- it's what I use (the stand-alone version, not the subscription/"cloud" version). If you're into it enough that you're willing to spend up to $150 it will provide all the photo editing you'll ever need.

I'll also mention the absolutely free and still worthwhile Irfanview for basic image editing. If all you want to do is crop a photo or add text or arrows it works great. It's what I use to crop and annotate screenshots and clips of maps, etc. And Irfanview can import/read raw files, too. Irfanview has a lot of other features: contrast, brightness, gamma, saturation, etc...but I use Lightroom for those kind of edits.

 

[CraggyMan]

As MarkBC says, the new versions of Lightroom are pretty much all you need. PhotoShop is great for more advanced processing and printing but LR can do most quite well. As I watch a friend and his similar struggles at the moment, I might suggest figuring out your in camera JPEG processing settings and shoot both jpeg/raw till you decide how commited you are to the whole editing "black hole" of time/learning curve.
You can always come back to the raw files later on when your interest or skills have progressed.
I also tend to be pretty conservative on deleting image files. I find myself going back to older folders and finding gems I had overlooked on many earlier reviews, especially as my processing skills move along. The downside to this is storage size and backup of course.
Have fun!!

 

[craig333]

Good advice. I made a lot of progress today. I knew I had duplicates but i had no clue it was that many. The nikon software defaults to deleting the images on the camera when they're imported so that should eliminate most of that. I spent many hours on organizing today but that'll happen when you just toss ten years of pics in one file. I'm going to try and make it a habit to take of that every time I return from a trip. Kind of like I try and clean all my gear, the camper, wash the truck etc. We'll see how successful that is! Lightroom sounds good if I can find it for a bit less.

 

[Wandering Sagebrush]

Craig,

There is a lot of great information in Mark's, Andy's and Craggy's posts. One organization trick I use is to put the date - location - camera in the file name to help me keep things in chronological order. For example if I were at Crater Lake today, it would be something like 2014 09 07 Crater Lake D800.

Regardless of which file type you shoot, I recommend making a duplicate as the first step in your workflow. There are two reasons for that. I never want to alter the original image, so that I have the baseline preserved, and when shooting jpegs, I don't want to degrade the image when editing and saving. Jpegs do a compression algorithm that squeezes data out of the photograph over time.

Like Craggy, I am a bit of a hog about keeping images. On nasty days when I don't feel like going out and shooting, I jump into the archives and look for the gem that got passed over in my first sort and ranking. One thing that will mitigate this practice is getting lots of external storage. You can pick up 2 terabyte Western Digital portable hard drives at Costco for practically nothing. When I first started my IT career, it was on a system that had a single 474 megabyte drive that formatted out to 400 megabytes. The drive and controller were about $14,000. Now you get several orders of magnitude more for under $200. I use one drive for my primary, and another for a backup, giving me two copies of every folder. Eventually, a drive will fail, so backup is advisable. Some people like backing up to a cloud service, but I don't mind doing it with a hammer and chisel. I do store the backup copy offsite.

I do recommend shooting raw, as there is so much more data that is available to work with, when compared to jpeg. You just need to ensure that your editing program is current for the camera model you use. Adobe uses an application called ACR (Adobe Camera Raw) that takes proprietary file formats, then converts it to something a bit more universal.

I was a bit shocked at the monthly fee that Andy mentioned. I thought it was something more like about $9/mo. I may be using Photoshop CS 6 for a long time before I go into the subscription service. When I upgrade my iMac, I will probably go the subscription route, but for now CS 6 is doing a good job.

One of these days, we should have some type of a WTW meet up that is focused (pun intended) on photography and workflow. I suspect there is a lot of talent lurking in the group, and I love to learn new stuff.

Steve

edit: To answer your question about do I edit all my photos... Just about each and every one. My workflow is pretty simple most of the time, but editing shows far better than SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera).

 

[craig333]

I more than suspect that. Seen too many nice pics posted here to doubt it. Just checked, we'll have a 90% moon for the start of the October Rally. I didn't think about the software version being appropriate for my camera. Luckily mine is old enough I shouldn't have any issues.

727 megs in my gallery so far. My first computer had a 120 meg hd.

 

[MarkBC]

With hard drives going for about a 4¢ a gigabyte there's not much financial reason to throw anything away. Might be other reasons, like too much clutter -- but you can decide later, if ever.

 

[craig333]

Putting the date on them sounds better and better. I'm organizing by subject but I still find myself going, umm, what year was this trip? Much easier than having to look at the exif data. Don't see why I can't utilize both. Picked up ps elements 9 off ebay for $30. Also saw lightroom 4 going for $70. Thats a bit more reasonable.

 

[MarkBC]

Putting the date on them sounds better and better. I'm organizing by subject but I still find myself going, umm, what year was this trip?...

Craig, you mentioned earlier in this thread that you're using Nikon software to import the pics into your computer. What software is it? If it's ViewNX/transfer there is an option to automatically put the images into new folders named with the date the image was taken; Vew/Transfer creates and names the folders. That's how I use mine. The individual images aren't date-stamped, but the folders are named with the date the images inside were taken.

Like these folders, subfolders in my Nikon Transfer folder, from my Utah trip when I was taking photos every day:

 

[MarkBC]

In Nikon View/Transfer, here's where the option is set:

 

[craig333]

Thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll try that and drag those as subfolders into my subject categories. At least until I have time to organize them further its better than folder 004 or such.

 

[MarkBC]

Thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll try that and drag those as subfolders into my subject categories. At least until I have time to organize them further its better than folder 004 or such.

For several years I had it set so that the new folders were named by date transferred to computer...before I discovered the option to name the folders by date the photo was shot, which makes a lot more sense.


I like this approach for how to organize where/how the photos are physically stored.
And with software, already mentioned, you can tag photos with labels (e.g., "eastern sierra" or "dog") that can group them together virtually without physically grouping them in folders.

Tagging images like this gets past the quandary of "this is a pic of the dog in the eastern sierra -- which folder do I put it in??"
You tag it with both -- "eastern sierra" and "dog".

FULL DISCLOSURE: I don't actually organize photos with tags like I'm describing -- I just use the date-shot folders. But I know I can and should organize them the way I suggest.

[Computer-nerd edit: Even in folders they're not actually physically stored together -- just tagged that way by the OS]

 

[craig333]

/sigh after going through and doing some more organizing and renaming it dawns on me I'm missing almost everything I shot with my old point and shoot. Arrr, I think those are still on my old computer. One more chore (its a huge tower, I really don't want to do it) but if they aren't there they're lost.

Odd thing, my pics from my cell phone, some have the exif data some don't. I assume theres some difference in the way they were imported?

 

[craig333]

Got em, another 325 pictures. Those also had all my Yuma pics, DV and rally pics. Makes me realize I really need to backup my files. Also while looking at my ps pics vs. the phone pics, I realize just what an absolutely crappy camera my phone is. Handy yes, but awful at anything thats not a closeup.

Unfortunately on my old camera it defaulted to 2005 anytime you took the batteries out so half my pics have no good dates. This one has a date and you can see its from a lookout but which one? I'm definitely not going to wait five years to label my pictures anymore.

 

[Ted]

We have been on the road for the last two weeks, so just getting caught up with WTW. Thanks for getting this started, Craig, as I need to get something also.

One of these days, we should have some type of a WTW meet up that is focused (pun intended) on photography and workflow. I suspect there is a lot of talent lurking in the group, and I love to learn new stuff.

Steve, an excellent idea. Something like a rally but with access to power so we can set up computers or projection screens for tutorials. Maybe a group site at a park that provides electrical hook-ups. I would be very interested in something like this.

 

[pvstoy]

Ted you and Misses Ted are always welcome here when you travel by for this kind of help .