Beginner Editing software for beginners

Jake Doran

Jake Doran

Messages
10
Name
Jake
Edit My Images
Yes
Hey all!

I'm a fairly new photographer and I'm starting to think about getting some editing software to be able to edit my photos.

Just wondered what people recommended both on how complex it is for a novice to use and the variety of features on offer.

I've been looking at adobe photoshop elements.

Would love to hear what people think.

Thanks in advance!
 
Adobe lightroom is my preferred choice, has basic to very advanced features and is geared towards photography. Also it has a great cataloguing and tagging system. You can subscribe to adobe CC in which you get lightroom and photoshop (plus a few others) for about £8/month. I do about 99% of my editing in lightroom and 1% in photoshop for those times I need the odd thing that LR can't offer.
 
Elements is great, and you can have a free trial to see if you get on with it. It comes with a catalogue, "Organiser", as well. LR and Elements do similar things, but I personally get on much better with Elements.
 
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I use the very powerful Capture One as RAW converter and partial editor,
Affinity Photo as pixel editor and OnOne Perfect Photo Suite for imaging
(works RAWs as well!) All offer free trials!

Since two years now, I do without anything from Adobe, I sold my Master Collection!
 
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MadWoman said:
Elements is great, and you can have a free trial to see if you get on with it. It comes with a catalogue, "Organiser", as well. LR and Elements do similar things, but I personally get on much better with Elements.
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I do think in large we tend to prefer what software we started out with. People who started with PS and PSE using layers and masks will always tend to prefer these, likewise those that start with LR will tend to always prefer LR and find layers and masks a bit confusing, for a while at least ;)
 
I started with Aperture on Mac OSX but now use Lightroom. Lightroom was a little daunting to begin with as it looked very complex but I soon got used to it. I only use it for basic editing but it serves my needs.
 
Google's Picasa is free, designed for simplicity & ease of use, lacks complex sophisticated features, but does what it does very well. A good starter while you make up your mind just how much post processing you want to get involved with.
 
Gimp is another free editor you might want to try ?
 
Both Elements and LR are available for a trail, use both see which you like.
 
You don't mention your platform (Windows PC / Mac OS X / Linux)?

If on a Mac, you could try Pixelmator. It delivers about the same as Elements for less than half the price, looks a whole lot better, and has a vector graphics component to boot. It too has a 30 day trial :

http://www.pixelmator.com/mac/try/
 
I think the amount of photos your going to be shooting would probably influence your choice of software, for the odd photo I would say elements but I would have thought of you were regularly editing lots of photos the cataloging and workflow style of lightroom would be more suitable
 
ljphil78 said:
I think the amount of photos your going to be shooting would probably influence your choice of software, for the odd photo I would say elements but I would have thought of you were regularly editing lots of photos the cataloging and workflow style of lightroom would be more suitable
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Is PSE like PS where you can't batch process, or copy and paste edit changes onto other pics? This is one thing I love LR for when I've done a shoot with a lot of similar images.
 
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I don't get the Idea of requiring a "beginner's" software when one could get
a pro software for the same money and more features than any and all the
other together.
 
More features often get in the way. And to do the simplest thing may require learning complicated functions that could done automatically and better in a program designed for casual users. You can get 'lost in the sliders' when you don't know what they do.

The choice also depends if they will stay a casual user or intend to get deeper into it. It often helps to use one of the free programs until you get a feel for which direction to take. And not just a short trial period of an expensive, 'pound per use' program.
 
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snerkler said:
Is PSE like PS where you can't batch process, or copy and paste edit changes onto other pics? This is one thing I love LR for when I've done a shoot with a lot of similar images.
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Oh, but you CAN batch process in Photoshop! You also don't have to be within Photoshop if you create what Adobe calls a 'droplet' which sits (e.g.) on your desktop; you can drop a load of pictures on them and they batch process the enclosed action set.
 
Chrisphoter said:
Oh, but you CAN batch process in Photoshop! You also don't have to be within Photoshop if you create what Adobe calls a 'droplet' which sits (e.g.) on your desktop; you can drop a load of pictures on them and they batch process the enclosed action set.
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Cool, thanks for the info. I'll have to look into this.
 
For the vast majority of things that you need to do, Lightroom is an excellent choice whether you buy it or subsrcribe to it. There are many tutorials for it on You Tube and also for Photoshop and most other editing programmes as well. In fact I find that watching tutorials on You Tube are a good way of finding out about any software that I'm considering.
 
personally I like lightzone which i find does everything i need and has the benefit of being free http://lightzoneproject.org/content/about ... that said I used Elements and lightroom for many years, only moving to LZ because i bought a computer without a CD drive and baulked at paying adobe again for downloads

Darktable is reputedly another good open source editor, but it only runs on linux or mac , whereas LZ has a windows version
 
Phiggys said:
Gimp is another free editor
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Does Gimp still have that dog ugly GUI and more important does it still have that ultra bizarre installation process where you install gimp and you have to download and install another program to get it to work?

big soft moose said:
only moving to LZ because i bought a computer without a CD drive and baulked at paying adobe again for downloads
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All you had to do is download the trial versions of your software from adobe and insert the key code you already have.
 
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Gimp looks a bit dated. Most software looked like that a while back. But it still works well. And runs straight out of the box. But there are plenty of plug ins that are quite useful.
 
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Gimp has a theme to make the UI look like photoshop CS6 - but this may only be available on the linux version
 
redsnappa said:
All you had to do is download the trial versions of your software from adobe and insert the key code you already have.
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Except that the versions of the software i had are no longer available, so i'd have had to pay again for the upto date downloads ... it would have been cheaper to buy a USB2 CD drive off of ebay , but as i say i'm happy with lightzone as a replacement. (Ive got darktable running on a linux box as well - i actually prefer it to LZ or LR but my main computer is windows and DT doesnt run on the MS platform
 
redsnappa said:
Does Gimp still have that dog ugly GUI and more important does it still have that ultra bizarre installation process where you install gimp and you have to download and install another program to get it to work?
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Yes, to both. On a Mac, the extra software you need is X1 but it's on the OS Install DVD (Extras?) so you may already have it.
 
big soft moose said:
personally I like lightzone which i find does everything i need and has the benefit of being free http://lightzoneproject.org/content/about ... that said I used Elements and lightroom for many years, only moving to LZ because i bought a computer without a CD drive and baulked at paying adobe again for downloads

Darktable is reputedly another good open source editor, but it only runs on linux or mac , whereas LZ has a windows version
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I'll have to check this out when I'm on the laptop tomorrow, hate not having an editing program, love lightroom but I don't want to pay cc prices until I know I'm shooting enough to warrant it....
 
Do it - you may find you don't need to pay adobe prices ever again - other options include irfanview and seriffreesoftware (which are full copies of serif packages from a couple of itterations ago - so for example photoplus6 (where the current itteration is i think 8) - I'm not sure about the raw support on these two though
 
big soft moose said:
Except that the versions of the software i had are no longer available, so i'd have had to pay again for the upto date downloads ... it would have been cheaper to buy a USB2 CD drive off of ebay , but as i say i'm happy with lightzone as a replacement. (Ive got darktable running on a linux box as well - i actually prefer it to LZ or LR but my main computer is windows and DT doesnt run on the MS platform
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Borrow someone else's machine and copy the disc to an ISO on a usb drive.

If you get stuck I can do it for you.
 
Thanks for the offer brian but i've just discovered that i can get a USB2 CD burner for £25 (less if i go with random wtf brands) so i shall probably go that route - I may not bother loading up LR though as i'm pretty happy with LZ so if its not broke, why fix it
 
big soft moose said:
Do it - you may find you don't need to pay adobe prices ever again - other options include irfanview and seriffreesoftware (which are full copies of serif packages from a couple of itterations ago - so for example photoplus6 (where the current itteration is i think 8) - I'm not sure about the raw support on these two though
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I did... I got so used to lightroom and elements, anything new seems weird..having a look around it but the only thing I noticed was I got a malware alert.
 
Cg_Girl said:
I got a malware alert.
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thats odd - did it say what it was ? (sometimes AV software will give false positves on open source software where the security certificates arent necessarily 100% ) also was it from the site or the download (I ask that because the other common issue is that sites offering free dowloads have to pay their hosting feess via adverts and advert links can sometimes throw alerts) -suffice to say ive downloaded bothe lightzone and darktable without catching anything nasty

If you decide its not for you serif photoplus is very similar in UI to elements, so you might find that more comfortable
 
big soft moose said:
thats odd - did it say what it was ? (sometimes AV software will give false positves on open source software where the security certificates arent necessarily 100% ) also was it from the site or the download (I ask that because the other common issue is that sites offering free dowloads have to pay their hosting feess via adverts and advert links can sometimes throw alerts) -suffice to say ive downloaded bothe lightzone and darktable without catching anything nasty

If you decide its not for you serif photoplus is very similar in UI to elements, so you might find that more comfortable
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It was once downloaded and opened, I'll have to look into the avast folder and see, I did read about the false positive thing somewhere and being a download like that it could well be.
 
There are several different software program's out there, Lightroom and Photoshop seem to be the two main ones.

I started out with Picasso first for basic JPEG processing. Soon I moved on to Photoshop Elements as I wanted to change to RAW files. After around 18 months I got a copy of Lightroom, 3-4 years on I wish had changed sooner. Lightroom reduced my complex workflow (RAW to Tiff using Nikon RAW software, edit the Tiffs in PSE then output final images as JPEGs), now I import RAWs to Lightroom that saves them in a catalogue and on my hard drive. I can edit the images as much as I like then export various sizes/types as required to different places like directly to my hidden photo storage folders on my website or to my hard drive to upload to flickr when I want to. If i want to print an image I can export a file suitable for printing as required. The best thing about Lightroom I only have to keep the RAW file on my hard drive as I can produce a file image as required at any point. There is now no storing of RAWs, Tiffs and processed JPEGs.

I can do most of my processing in Lightroom, I very rarely use PSE. Last night was the first in months and only because I wanted to increase the canvass size to change an image from portrait to landscape (full black background).

Another thing to think about is the possibility of picking up an older version of Lightroom could be cheaper introduction. The only thing to check is your camera raw files are compatible with the version of LR. If you have a canon 1200D LR5 should be ok by the looks of it. If it wasn't for changing to a newer camera I would still be using LR4 as it did what I wanted it to. There isn't really too many changes between the versions.

https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/camera-raw-plug-supported-cameras.html

The only downside of software like Lightroom is once you have been using it for a few years and all of your image catalogue is on it then you are kind of tied in to it. Changing could be problematic for the time it would take re-editing historical images in new software. That said if I don't change camera and have a standalone version of Lightroom this isn't too much of an issue for me as I like to have all of my images in one catalogue.
 
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