Software (Photography)

From EdVoncken.NET

Contents 1 Photography Software for Mac OS X 2 Photography Software for Windows 2.1 Adobe Photoshop 2.2 PaintShop Pro 2.3 RawShooter 3 Data formats in photography 3.1 Digital Negative Format 3.2 EXIF 4 Techniques

[edit] Photography Software for Mac OS X

• iPhoto - part of iLife, included with Mac OS X
• iPhotoToGallery - upload iPhoto pictures to your Gallery
• iPhoto Batch Enhancer

Advanced photo editing

• Aperture
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
• Adobe Photoshop

Panorama tools

• DoubleTake
• Hugin

[edit] Photography Software for Windows

[edit] Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the Nr.1 image editing software on Windows and Macintosh. For Linux users, there is the Gimp (Open Source).

• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Labs - new and interesting developments
• Photoshop Tutorials & Plugins
• Photoshop User
• Photoshop TV
• Planet Photoshop
• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

(successor to the excellent Pixmantec RAWshooter)

[edit] PaintShop Pro

Corel (formerly JASC) PaintShop Pro is an easy-to-use image editing program. It does not have all of Photoshop's advanced features, but most people will not miss them.

[edit] RawShooter

For best image quality and post-processing (white balance!), you will want to shoot in RAW (NEF) format. RAW gives you much more control over the final image, at the expense of having to post-process every image you create. I tried Nikon Capture, and didn't like it much. The interface is clumsy and slow. So I went back to JPEG for a while, until I discovered RawShooter.

Working with RawShooter was a breeze: I had a bunch of photos where the white balance was slightly off. In RawShooter, I used the eyedropper tool to pick a known white or light-gray point on the image and hey presto! White balance restored! It just doesn't get any easier than that.

In 2006, Adobe acquired Pixmantec, for their Adobe Photoshop Lightroom product. I got a complementary license for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, but I still use RawShooter quite a bit.

[edit] Data formats in photography

[edit] Digital Negative Format

Contrary to popular belief, digital photos are less long-lived than you think:

• the image format (NEF?) may go out of fashion,
• your harddisk may crash (you do create backups, don't you?), or
• your backup media (CD, DVD) may go out of fashion or become unreadable due to aging.

The first problem may be solved by using an open image format, such as Adobe's Digital Negative.

And for the latter ones... Welcome to the painful world of backups and archiving...

[edit] EXIF

There is a lot of information inside your images; the so-called EXIF header. Several programs exist to display and/or edit the EXIF information, a short list:

• Opanda IExif
• jhead
• Other EXIF software
• Exiv2 - Exif and ITPC metadata library and tools

[edit] Techniques

• HDR
• Digital Blending