quote:

Originally posted by Keystoner:
If the kid is interested in graphic design, then Photoshop. If she's interested in photography, then Lightroom.

I disagree. Photoshop is still the premier photo editor. It is Photoshop, not GraphicDesignShop. Your assessment also ignores Illustrator as a tool for designers.

Lightroom, at it's core, is a photo management platform. It's essential for professionals who, as part of their work flow, handle large amounts of photos and require an efficient work flow that produces consistent results. It's also useful for hobbyist who want to lightly edit their photos. It's powerful, but doesn't hold a candle up Photoshop.

Photoshop is a full fledge photo editor. If the goal is to learn photography as a hobby, then you want the full toolset. Having access to all the tools gives you the ability to work outside the box, like using frequency separation to smooth skin or tone sampling to fix colors.

Like I said before, Lightroom and Photoshop are different enough that you can't recommend one over the other. They're designed up work together in an ecosystem.

Absent the budget to get into Lightroom and Photoshop, a full fledge editor look Affinity makes more sense. You can use Adobe Bridge for content management if necessary.

I have heard great things about Affinity. Haven’t used it myself, but for those that don’t want to pay Adobe forever, it seems like a good option.

You guys always impress me. I have a lot to read up on. Thank you all for your input on this

Another professional level image editing app is Capture One put out by one of the best high end camera companies out there - Phase One.

If you purchase at least a certain level of Sony cameras, you get a free version of it called Capture One for Sony. For just a $100 more, you can upgrade to Capture One Pro for Sony, which I use.

I absolutely love Capture One, and one reason is because it isn’t cloud based. You download it, and you will get periodic updates with special offers. The other reason is it isn’t NEARLY as slow as Adobe cloud products are which have to send info back and forth during use.

Adobe POed a lot of people recently and I’m one. I have Adobe Creative Suite 2, which was expensive at the time, and it became totally worthless to me.

Just a note that's neither here nor there: the Adobe subscriptions for Lightroom and Photoshop include the full desktop software, not just the Cloud versions.

OP: Need to find out what daughter means by "editing software."

Does she want software to "process" the image (equivalent to turning undeveloped film into a photo print), or does she want to manipulate the finished image by adding stuff to it, being artistic, etc.?

I say this because, in simple terms, digital cameras can output what was captured in RAW format or jpeg format.

jpeg is basically a finished image, ready for printing or whatever. You can crop it and do some lightening/darkening, etc., or add to it like via Photoshop, but that's about it.

RAW is equivalent to undeveloped film that must be processed to produce the image.

There are free and pay RAW processors. FastStone is one of several free ones. LightRoom is a pay one.

There are also free and pay editors, which I am not familar with.

I only image in raw so I need my image editor to be able to edit raw and convert. As I said earlier, I had Adobe CS2, but Adobe pretty much made it useless to me over time. Jump forward, and I used their suite for the free trial period earlier this year where I used Lightroom and Photoshop to process and edit my daughter’s college graduation images.

I like LR and PS, but I don’t like how slow they are since they have to communicate back and forth into the cloud. I’m still mad at Adobe for what they did to my CS2 and to other customers so I looked elsewhere. Other than using the free version of Phaseone’s Capture One for Sony, I upped the features to the pro version for $100. Since I began to like it so well after the learning curve.

Also, some don’t know, but you can edit raw files in your Mac’s Photos app. It does a good job and is free.

quote:

Originally posted by ftttu:
I like LR and PS, but I don’t like how slow they are since they have to communicate back and forth into the cloud.

Like Aeteocles said... you don't have to use cloud versions of the software, the subscription includes the ability to install traditional desktop application versions of the apps.

A few open source tools which are good for photography are:

Gimp (already mentioned)
Darktable
DigiKam
RawTherapee

Not all are photo editors, but are useful in other manors (organization, etc).

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:

quote:

Originally posted by ftttu:
I like LR and PS, but I don’t like how slow they are since they have to communicate back and forth into the cloud.

Like Aeteocles said... you don't have to use cloud versions of the software, the subscription includes the ability to install traditional desktop application versions of the apps.

Personally, I won't purchase another Adobe product, but I won't tell others not to. My post was to warn about the slowness of the web-based suite that I had experienced. It did, however, work well after the 'boot' process.

You can't go wrong with Adobe, especially since it is the industry standard. I highly recommend youtube videos to those who are intimidated by these image processing applications.