Garlic. Beitou Traditional Market, Taiwan.
Not everybody wants or needs to fork a few hundred dollars for Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture or any of the other alternatives available for editing photographs. A lot of the time, the only thing people actually use these pieces of software for is to apply some auto edits and maybe a crop. Why go to the expense of purchasing a software license when you rarely use it? Why go to the expense of purchasing a license when you only use it for the most basic of editing tasks? There are other, legal options out there and that’s what the focus of todays phototip will be.
Chances are, when you bought your camera it came bundled with software of some kind. The included software more than likely is all you need to get your photographs from camera to computer, apply some tweaks and correction, and then output them either online or to a printer. I’ve used Canon’s Digital Photo Pro that comes bundled with their DSLR’s and it is a more than capable item of software that will meet the needs of probably the vast majority of photographers. While I don’t have hands-on experience with the offerings from rival manufacturers, I’d guess that they would also be up to most tasks.
If you do want something else though, consider Irfanview. It’s a Windows only application however according to its FAQ, it should run under Mac or Linux using the necessary emulators or software that you’d normally use to run Windows programs. Irfanview allows users to view, resize, convert, scan, print, create slideshows and a whole lot more.
Another possible option is Gimp. This too is free for non-commerical users and is a very powerful piece of software. It supports a variety of file formats and offers color correction and retouching abilities.
The software mentioned above is great, but a lot of people won’t even need to a lot of what they offer. If that’s the case, consider online photo editors. There are a lot of possibilities here and all offer a range of basic adjustments, effects and more. Some of them are even options built in to photo sharing sites, such as Flickr’s use of Picnik, while others work the opposite way, allowing you to upload and retouch and then share, such as with Photoshop Express. Other options include editing photos that you’ve already uploaded to Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket etc. If online editing sounds interesting, be sure to check out
Google has a lot more listings for online photo editors, so feel free to search out some more if you don’t like the options above.
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