Image editing software review for digital photographers
This image editing software review looks at the most popular software for digital photography. The reviews are completely independent and are a result of genuine hands on use of the software.
Image editing software usually comes in two parts – the album part, and the editing part.
If you have a digital camera, image editing software is absolutely essential!
It is possible to do without it; but then it’s also possible to do without a washing machine – but life is a whole lot easier with one!
As I said at the top of this page, there are usually two parts to image editing software – the album part, and the editing part. It helps to know what each part is for.
Firstly, the “album”. This organises your digital photos for you. Consider this as a filing system for your digital photographs.
The software will find photos on your computer, create thumbnails of them, and then sort them for you.
This makes it far, far easier to find your photos. Instead of looking at a lot of meaningless file names you can see a thumbnail of the photo itself.
Digital photo album software shows you all your photos in one place, no matter where on your hard drive it is stored. No more hunting through endless folders to find that photo you were looking for!
The better albums also allow you to tag photos with something meaningful. For example, you could tag all photos from a skiing trip with a “ski” tag.
Later, when you want to find photos of your skiing trip, just click the “ski” tag and the software will show you only photos from that trip.
Better still – good albums allow multiple tags. So you could add another tag to those skiing photos, “friends” perhaps. Then, when you click “ski” and “friends” the software will show you only photos of your friends skiing.
The best albums go much further. Some will fix red-eye automatically, and can even recognise faces in photos – so you can sort photos of people easily.
Image editing software review - "editing"
The editing part of the software allows you to make changes to your digital photography.
The type of changes you make are likely to fall into two categories – image enhancement, and image manipulation.
Image enhancement: This involves making basic changes to your digital photography.
The changes are brightness, contrast, colour saturation and image sharpness. Almost every photo will be improved with a few tweaks to these.
Image manipulation: This is a little more detailed. It covers everything from making a photo black and white or sepia, to airbrushing devil horns onto the mother-in-law!
The best image editing software will save your edited photos separately from your originals - just in case you change your mind about those horns later on!
The reviews here cover software from those that make basic changes, to software that will really let your creativity flow.
Sidebar . . . One of the best things about digital photography is sharing the photos you take. However, because we end up taking so many of them, it’s easy to lose track of them all.
I recommend you give Google’s Picasa a try. It will not only organise your photos, but will perform minor edits too.
It’s all some photographers need, and best of all, it’s absolutely free!
Picasa comes as part of the Google Pack. If you don’t want the rest of the pack just de-select them when you get to the download screen.
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