Photography Software - Your Digital Darkroom
Minimum Equipment
A Digital Camera and Personal Computer
An Image Editor such as Gimp or Photoshop and an Image Manager like Picasa
A calibrated monitor which is essential for making prints which match your screen colours
A backup device such as a portable hard drive or UBS Stick for archiving your photo library
A log book and a willingness to experiment
Computers and Digital Photography
Your tools will be dictated by your choice of operating system - Windows, Linux or Mac
You can use free software (Gimp et al) or pay for brand name software - (Photoshop et al)
A fast processor and plenty of memory is a bonus if you want to batch process your images
A large monitor is far better than a small one
Image Editors and Image Management Software
Your choice of software is important and can quite literally determine whether you love your photography or end up becoming frustrated with it. Good photography software should be slick to use and make child's play of browsing large photo collections which you can categorise and/or tag for fast retrieval
This is an area where you will want to pick the best tools for your work and the best tools are the ones that satisfy all your requirements while being enjoyable to use
Basically you are doing three things with your images once they are on your computer - you are either editing them individually, managing them as collections or preparing them for output
You can use separate applications for image editing and management (I do) or you can use a single application that attempts to do both. If you are shooting in Camera RAW then you will also need an additional facility for viewing and tweaking RAW files before saving them as JPEG, TIFF or PNG files for the main editing sessions which usually take place in the image editor
An image editor does just what is says on the tin - it lets you change the look of your photos. Some image editors are much more powerful and flexible than others but for now I will stick to tools that offer a minimum slew of image editing features which I would expect in most decent photo editors
An image manager is a software application which scans and monitors the underlying folder structure you created initially for storing your image collection. It will have functions for further sorting the image collection into groups such as 'categories' or 'favourites' etc. Some image managers also offer image editing functions and some applications manage to implement this more successfully that others
Windows Photography Software
You don't need to spend money to have serious photography software. Lots of Photographers use Photoshop and Lightroom but these are expensive so it pays to look first at what you can get for free. Free software (as in zero cost) is often excellent could be just the ticket. If you choose Linux then free software means something entirely different while still being free of charge. I use Linux for all my Photography now as well as for creating everything you see on this site. It suits me perfectly
The Picasa photo application from Google is free, complete, a joy to use and runs on all operating systems. It allows you to browse large collections of images very quickly and it is far better than some of the programs that come bundled with digital cameras. Picasa also uploads images to online photo sharing sites like blogs, flickr, social networking sites like facebook and print services like photobox
I recommend Picasa to beginners because and I use it too and find it to be great for managing a large photo collection as well as offering some very useful editing features which are simple and fast. It is one of the most usable pieces of photography software I have ever seen and it's main strengths are it's comprehensive feature set and the fact that you can learn it intuitively without having to read the manual
Picasa's editing features include all the usual suspects - cropping, straightening, red eye reduction, exposure compensation, color correction, etc and it also reads RAW files. After each days shooting you create a new folder on your PC for that day and then transfer the images over from your camera. If you then open Picasa it should pick up your new folder easy as pie and you as are good to go
Photoscape is another free and very impressive photo application which be be used as both an image manager and a photo editor and it also reads RAW files. I figured it out in a hour or two without even looking at the manual and it was a lot of fun learning what it can do. The user interface is great and it invites you to just dive right in and start experimenting
Photoscape seems to have everything Picasa has plus a few other surprises up its sleeve such photo frames and print layouts. Some of the drop shadow effects you see on the illustrations on this site were created in seconds using Photoscape. Check out the screenshots and see what you think. Lots of new photographers rave about Photoscape and this is no wonder because it allows them to feel confident and get creative right away
Adobe Photoshop Elements (PE) is another Windows Photo Editor that has most of the functionality of it's bring brother Photoshop and it can be used as a one stop shop that offers all the features you are ever likely to need for managing and editing an image collection. The learning curve for PE is steeper than Picasa because there are so many more things you can do with it. If you are a Windows user who has Picasa and PE then you will have all the software you need at a total cost of around €70
Linux Photography Software
There is plenty of free and top quality Photography Software for Linux users. I have Linux Mint with a Gnome desktop running Picasa, Gimp, UFRaw, and FSpot for my imaging needs. These are good tools when you get used to them
Tip - Edit Ruthlessly
Learn to weed out duff shots in camera so you don't end up with lots of junk on your PC
This will also prevent you from filling your memory card up too quickly when shooting
With experience you will become more disciplined and efficient at this
Tip - Take charge of your image library
Plan and well learn your base folder structure and let this be the foundation on which your image manager sits. Image managers such as Picasa store extra info like edits, tags and collections in their own internal files. In each folder there is a file called 'picasa.ini' that keeps track of what you have done to your images and collections. Photoshop Lightroom has it's own internal database where it stores all your edits
Linux Photography Software Links
Open Source Photography Tutorials, Techniques and How-tos - Open Source Photography
Linux Photography Software and Tutorials - Linux Photography Blog