[Recovered Thread: 70599]

[culveric]

Hi All-

I'm thinking about getting a photo editor or some other program that I can use to manipulate photos to change brightness, contrast etc. I downloaded a free Serif PhotoPlus application but it ran incredibly slow (to the point that I couldn't even really use it). I have never had a problem like that with my computer so I am wondering if you have heard of this problem with Serif.

Also, is there anything else out there you'd recommend I try? I'd prefer to start with freeware so that I can better judge which features I will use and how I may prefer the setup.



Thanks

[pterrr]

Try the GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/). That's free and has quite a comprehensive set of features AFAIK. I find the interface annoying, though.

Also, picasa has some decent basic image editing functions and is useful for organising images (could be improved, though...). Picasa is also free, very fast and very simple to use.

[culveric]

thanks for the comments. i just quickly went and got picasa and it's a great place to start. i'll be trying your other recommendation when i get some time

[taliaben]

But with picasa, if I edit the photos, they appear edited when I view within Picasa, but if I send them elsewhere, they retain their original properties. Is there a way to save the changes?

[pterrr]

taliaben wrote:

But with picasa, if I edit the photos, they appear edited when I view within Picasa, but if I send them elsewhere, they retain their original properties. Is there a way to save the changes?

Use the 'export' option, making sure to keep original image size. This also encourages you not to alter the originals, which is something you would probably want to avoid anyway (if you use a normal destructive editor, you save any modifications in a separate file, as a general rule).

[sedges]

I got Photoshop Elements packaged with a scanner a few years ago. I certainly does everything I seem to need in photo editing. I have used the full Photoshop version in school and find that it is just too much, unless you are doing this professionally. The only other software I use is Silverfast for scanning color negatives. You can set it for the type of film used and it automatically compensates for the color cast of the film.

For editing images from your digital camera, scanned photos or positive transparencies Elements seems a good choice.

[JimC]

culveric wrote:

Hi All-

I'm thinking about getting a photo editor or some other program that I can use to manipulate photos to change brightness, contrast etc. I downloaded a free Serif PhotoPlus application but it ran incredibly slow (to the point that I couldn't even really use it). I have never had a problem like that with my computer so I am wondering if you have heard of this problem with Serif.

Also, is there anything else out there you'd recommend I try? I'd prefer to start with freeware so that I can better judge which features I will use and how I may prefer the setup.



Thanks

For basic stuff (especially viewing, resizing, renaming, "quick and dirty" corrections), download Irfanview (see http://www.irfanview.com ). Makesure to download the free plugins, too). It should be in everyone's tool box (and it's very fast to load). I use it virtually every single day for something (despite more powerful editors on my PC).

Also check out thefree Picasa from Google. It's a fast way to browse your images and also includes some pretty good basic editing and cropping functions (use the "export" function to get them into other applications), although there is a lot of room for improvement (as always with any software of this type).

There are many more free tools around, too (and many of the ones I use are now discontinued, with the companies that produced them out of business). But, I stil use some pretty old stuff quite often.

[pterrr]

Personally, I would choose Paintshop Pro over Photoshop Elements. It's probably much of a muchness really, but I've found PSP to be pretty capable, and didn't think much of Elements when I tried it very briefly. GIMP can do most of what either can do, for free, but I'm not a big fan of the interface.

While I recommended PSP though, Jasc have been bought by Corel, which is almost certainly a Bad Thing, IMHO. I've already heard reports of bugs in PSP X... I've had some bad experiences with Corel software in the past.

[[email protected]]

I use Microsoft Picture It! for most of my editing.

I think you can get it online and it's free and easy to use.

Once in a while I use Photoshop Elements for more advanced stuff.

-- Terry

[vIZnquest]

PhotoFiltre is what I use for quick edits and resizing for web.

It is a French program but has English equivalent.