What Photo Editing Software Should I Use?

I recently received a question regarding photo editing software from a member of our Facebook page.

Can you recommend a good photo editing software? I’ve read reviews on Photoshop and Paint Shop…and then there are free web-based programs. So many to choose from! Thanks!

If you’re asking what would be the best professional editing software out in the market today, my answer would be Adobe Photoshop CS5hands down. It is the standard these days for photo editing. While it is the first choice for most people, its’ cost, however, makes it hard to attain. At a street price of $600, it’s not cheap. There is a free open source program called Gimp. The interesting thing about Gimp is the fact that it comes close to the editing power of Photoshop but it’s free. Gimp is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. The catch? It has an incredibly steep learning curve.

So what then? If one is free and the other one costs $600, what are my choices?

Instead of purchasing Adobe’s robust $600 program, for the average user, I would recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements 9which is basically a more basic form of Photoshop. As you progress, however, Elements can also teach you to use many of the advanced editing tools also found in Adobe’s pro-level software, Photoshop CS5. I think the biggest misconception everyone has is that photo editing is best done in Photoshop. What most don’t realize is that the average user only uses about 10% of the program’s power for everyday use.

So what is an average user? Maybe you can ask yourself a few questions and see if you fit within this category:

• I am interested in basic retouching (red eye, removing a blemish, etc.)
• I just need to crop and resize an image because I try to email a photo and my email tells me it’s too large
• I want to try cool effects such as watercolor, pastel, crayons, etc.
• I need to create adjustment layers and  masks to adjust exposure settings
• I need to dodge and burn areas in my photos
• I’m looking to create some actions to make my workflow smoother

If you answered yes to the first three and no to the last three questions then maybe you can classify yourself as a basic user. If you had to google the last few items just to find out what they mean then your needs are simple. At $99 for Photoshop Elements, it’s a great bargain.

For $99, you can also pick up Paintshop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate. Paintshop is known in the market as Photoshop’s most notable competitor. PaintShop Photo Pro has developed a reputation as the poor man’s Photoshop because of its extensive tools. I’m not too familiar with this program though although I remember playing around with it a few years ago when it was still owned by Jasc Software. Corel bought them out a few years later.

If you’re using a Mac, let’s not forget iPhoto which is part of the iLife ’11package. There are lots of things that work for iLife most notably it’s geo-tagging capabilities and it’s ability to be able to sort photos via face recognition. I use a Mac and I’ve tried the software as it came pre-installed on my iMac. It’s fun to use. Easy but it doesn’t necessarily meets my needs as a photographer.

For my work, I use both of Adobe’s pro-editing software – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3and Adobe Photoshop CS5. Both aren’t cheap but my needs are probably quite different from yours.

Free Photo-Editing Software

Gimp

Google’s Picassa

Piknik

Screen shot of GIMP for the Mac OS X (above) and Google’s Picassa (below)

Novice Software

Adobe Photoshop Elements 9

Corel Paintshop Pro X3 Ultimate

Screen shot of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 (above) and Paint Shop Pro X2 (below)

Professional Software

Adobe Photoshop CS5

Adobe Lightroom 3

Apple Aperture 3

Apple Aperture 3 (above)

Screen shot of Adobe Photoshop CS5 for the Mac OS X (above) and Lightroom 3 (below)

My recommendation: