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RESOURCES FOR DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHERS

By Kathleen Maher, Jon Peddie Research

As enthusiasm for digital photography has grown, so has the lineup of tools available for photo editing and management and many of them are free. In essence, photography tools fall into three categories with a wide gulf in the middle. At the top is Photoshop and its plug ins used widely by professional photographers. There is a mid-range of tools that generally cost no more than $100 and many that offer suites of capabilities including video and audio in addition to photo imaging. The leading competitors include Paint Shop Pro from Corel, Digital Image Suite from Microsoft (you can at least hope it interoperates with your operating system well) and iPhoto for the Mac (ditto on the compatibility issue).

The usefulness of these tools vary with some adding so many “features” to increase “ease of use” that they’re neither easy or useful. However, there are several tools delivered with cameras or available at very low prices that do deliver lightweight imaging tools. Many photographers find they can accomplish everything they routinely do—crop, adjust lighting/exposure/white balance etc.—faster with lightweight tools than they can with Photoshop.

Finally, there are free tools. Almost by definitions these tools continue to be lightweight—there is little impetus to develop them. Surprisingly, though, there are tools that are regularly updated and even tools that offer plug ins.

I’ve tried to list some of the best known tools with no real attempt to rank them or review them in depth. If I have used the tool, I’ll mention the pluses and minuses but otherwise, I can’t vouch for their usefulness or ease of use. I did check to be sure there are no complaints online about the software causing crashes or other crimes.

Sitting somewhere between free/low cost tools for consumers and the highend Adobe CS 3 suite are new tools for management with some imaging capabilities.

This category includes Lightroom from Adobe and Aperture from Apple. These tools are an interesting compromise between the high-end tools offered by Adobe and the low-end products. They’re designed for professionals but they try to pare down the feature list to only the most useful features. Many photographers working under deadline are finding these tools more than sufficient compared to Photoshop.

Photo management—Free

First of all, there are the tools built into the operating system. In this case, Microsoft shines with Vista’s file directory. Photos can be organized, tagged and output as slide shows or DVDs. The interface looks a lot like the professional tools available from Adobe and Apple. I’ve played with Vista slightly— but like most people with an ounce of caution I’m not using it on any working computer until the code settles down. Any new operating system is going to be a challenge—it’s best to buy it with a new machine rather than install it on a machine using an earlier operating system. (I say that because I know there are smug Apple users out there telling each other none of these problems will crop up with Leopard. They may be right, but don’t forget the arrival of OS X. It was not pretty.)

Apple is very busily revamping its directory structure and I’m willing to bet that there are going to be very nice digital management tools available when Leopard slinks its way into town as well.

My main camera is a Canon and it shipped with its own software —Digital Darkroom. It’s good, and it recognizes Canon’s RAW format. It’s free and its color management tools are very good —obviously, they’re in tune with the Canon.

If you’re a Canon user and would like to try it out, go looking back in your box for the CD that came with the camera. I have not had a whole lot of luck downloading the program from Canon’s website (not that you can’t necessarily, but it was confusing and tedious enough that I said to hell with it.) If you don’t have the CD that came with the camera, it may be a matter of calling Product Support for help. Please do, Canon owes their users better.

In the absence of much help from Canon, I came to use Picasa and become pretty enamored of it. Picasa is a Google program, it’s free. It has minimal editing and organizing. It doesn’t conflict with other systems but I find that it’s relatively painless to use compared to other programs and so I tend to maintain my data better using it. As is probably obvious from my comments so far, I have come to value lightweight programs—they may not do as much but they can be fast and efficient. When I know what I want to do and how to do it, I’ve got lots better things to do with my time than wait for software to load.

Photo management for a price

Lightroom, Adobe—Adobe will tell you that they were developing Lightroom long before Aperture came along but the arrival and fanfare of Aperture forced them to introduce the product earlier than they would have liked. That much was apparent in a very rough rollout. However, now the program is very solid and appeals to many photographers who are already committed to Adobe and Photoshop. I use this program quite a bit on Windows. The organizational tools are very nice. (But it does often require re-indexing when I’ve moved a lot of photos to external hard drives or NAS drives.) It’s far from free at $268.

Aperture, Apple—Apple introduced Aperture as a tool for its large community of digital photographers. True to Apple’s superior sense of design, it’s a gorgeous program.—easy to look at, easy to work with. Many users find that it is very hungry for computer resources. If you have an older computer, you might want to hold off. Personally, I find the actual file management to be a tad opaque. I would wish it was more easy to get to my photos directly. The Apple point of view (and Adobe to a certain extent) is that as long as you live in Aperture (or Lightroom in the case of Adobe), you’ll be happy because everything is at your fingertips. I tend to use a lot of different tools—partly in my job as a reviewer and partly because I just don’t seem to know any better. As a result, I have several photo databases on my Mac and I have pretty much defeated the purpose of photo organizing in general. But that’s just me. Again, Aperture is priced like a professional tool at $299.

Photo Mechanic, Camera Bits— Lightroom and Aperture are entering a market that has been served by Photo Mechanic for years. It has long had several important features for managing images most useful to the organizationally challenged. Its ability to maintain several databases so that images can be ingested to back up drives as well as to the working computer are helpful. The company was a little slow to add RAW support, but now most cameras are supported. So, when you start talking about Lightroom or Aperture, you’ll tend to hear someone mutter darkly, you’ll pry my Photo Mechanic from my cold dead fingers. Photo Mechanic can be downloaded for free and tried out for 30 days. The program costs $150.

Photo Editing

I tend to use a variety of programs depending on what I am trying to do. I publish a newsletter for print—most of the photos I use are about 1/8 page so I find that I don’t need to sweat the DPI much and I’m finding that JPEG and our printer (printer as in the human kind) are able to produce accurate colors for our purposes. Believe me, we’re not creating art here—just communicating. So, most of my editing work is cropping, straightening, and some lighting fixes. I can do most of what I have to do in any of these programs: Picasa, Lightroom, Aperture, PaintShop Pro.

Camera support is likely to be the Achilles heel from some of these programs. However, Microsoft and Apple both have perfectly functional built-in tools for import. It can be a lot to expect free or low-cost software to offer support for RAW, CMYK, or non-destructive editing and there are very good reasons for wanting these things.

One huge value of free software, especially the well-designed tools with simple features, is as a learning aid. There are people who aren’t sure how much photo editing they really want to do or can do. Playing around with these tools could well offer inspiration to the reluctant digital photographer.

Free photo editing

GIMP is the best known, and most widely used freeware tool for photographers on the Windows platform. It’s interface is similar to that of Photoshop — not necessarily a good thing in some people’s minds. Others like working with a familiar tool. More important though, GIMP offers layers, channels, paths, and painting tools. http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

IrfanView—is a free tool available for Windows users. It’s a lightweight tool fro viewing files in a variety of formats. It supports Adobe Photoshop’s filters and offers batch converting and slide show creation among its long list of features. If you’re curious, it’s named for its programmer, Irfan Skiljan from Bosnia who not only offers IrfanView for free, he regularly updates it. http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm.

Photofiltre—a free tool that adds filters to the usual list of editing features. It does not support layers but then again, it’s free. It too brags about being lightweight and fast to load. It supports numerous formats and batch conversions. http://photofiltre.en.softonic.com/

PhotoPlus, FreeSerif—Serif offers the earlier version of its software for free. It gets good reviews and can be upgraded to add more features for $9.99. The list of tools include layers, deform tool, texts, tools for GIF animation, tools for creating web images, and export optimizer. The most recent version of PhotoPlus is available for $79.99. http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/software/PhotoPlus/default.asp.

Acorn—a straightforward imaging tool for the Mac that uses an interface similar to the products in the iLife suite. http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Graphics/Acorn.shtml.

The above programs are just the start. What has happened is that programs like GIMP spawn new tools that work with them and can be added on as plug-ins. The search for these tools and trying them out is wildly entertaining for those with a tinkering bent. And, fearing mightily to call down grief upon all our heads, it’s truly remarkable how stable and disease free these tools are. Possibly, it’s because it just doesn’t seem honorable to undermine the Open Source movement. Possibly, it’s because the movement is self-policing. If word gets out about a dangerous or compromised program, the community will step in and either cure it or kill it. Or, more cynically, perhaps it’s just a matter of time until evil-doers do manage to destroy the free software network by making it too risky to trust the software. For now, however, I intend to keep experimenting with it and I don’t feel bad about suggesting you do too. Just be sure to download from reliable sites and keep an eye out for warnings.

For more information about free resources for photographers see About. com. Sue Chastain has wrriten an article listing several programs. http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pixelbasedwin/tp/freephotoedw.htm.

For a list of all kinds of freeware, including photo imaging, see Freeware Home: http://www.freewarehome.com/index.html?http%3A//www.freewarehome.com/Graphics/Graphic_Manipulation/Digital_Photos_t.html.

Apple offers information about low cost and free downloadable software at http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/imaging_3d/.

There are plenty more programs available and the above links will keep you busy. What is clear is that the photo imaging software business is a tough one especially on the low end. It goes a long way towards explaining why programs costing $99 are becoming suites with a wealth of tools. In fact, if you’re interested in video editing keep an eye on that market because more free tools are appearing in that space as well.

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