which photo editing program do you prefer? pros/cons. which one should i get?

Erm, well this is a no brainer. Photoshop is the only photo editing that you will need for most of the editing.

Aperture/Lightroom is a photo management software which allows some adjustment to your pictures but any serious photo editing will end up to Photoshop or Corel something.

Get PS elements. Given your out of focus inquiry, I'd assume that CS4 might be diving in at the deep end. That, and Elements does 99.9% of what CS4 can for photographers, and costs only a fraction of CS4.

Well, Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture are two solutions, Adobe Lightroom is very powerful and has almost everything you can think of to work your photos, you can change to Photoshop directly from there with changes intact, interaction between the two programs are perfect. Aperture has some powerful features, but Lightroom doesn't go back on them, Lightroom support almost every raw camera format available, APERTURE DOES NOT, actually this is probably the biggest critic on Aperture, anyway, you can convert raw to dng (digital negative format) for compatibility and size efficiency, Aperture says that can read DNG but I could never open my dngs, but several people says that they can. You can try both programs for some days, fully functional. Aperture and Lightroom are programs for photographs, the need to use photoshop is to serious manipulate photos, I mean, in that way, photography finishes and starts to be computer artwork....

http://www.apple.com/aperture/trial/

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=photoshop_lightroom&promoid=,DTEML

You should definitely have a look at Aperture and Lightroom: although they are photo management apps, they allow you to do most of the rough edits (crops, changes of exposure, simple retouching). As I'm not a professional and I don't need to tinker with my photos a lot, I find that Pixelmator suffices my needs for the editing part.

Note that these days, most people use a combination of Aperture/Lightroom + dedicated photo editing app.

I use Photoshop cs3 as my main photograph editing tool, using pixelmator for simple tasks i.e. cropping, then I use photomatix pro for tone mapping, but if your just starting out and want a simple to use, good to look at application then either Lightroom, aperture or PS elements are all good tools, you just need to decide what your aiming to do, as previously mentioned by OreoCookie Both lightroom & aperture are workflow management tools and pretty good at it too, but have a look at pixelmator for basic editing

A combination of Aperture or Lightroom with PS Elements is probably what you need. The former are photo editing, organisation and management software which are great for basic corrections and enhancements. PS Elements is a feature reduced version of Photoshop but will handle 99% of what you need to do now. It is a great value with substantial features of the original but at a fraction of the price...

I have Aperture & PhotoShop CS3. Between the 2 of them it does everything I need and more.

88888888 said:

just got a new nikon d60. >-) wondering which one is a good program.

Click to expand...

Use iPhoto. It will do 80% of what most people need. That is organization and minor adjustments like crops and color balance. Then for the images that need more work, say for example removing a utility wire from a landscape or correcting skin problems in a portrait you can get Adobe Photoshop Elements. This editor will do most everything and has layers, masks, Adjustment layers, and brush type tools and filters and so on. iPhoto is free with every new Mac and Elements costs about $80.

Later if you want to upgrade to the full up Photoshop CS4 Adobe has an upgrade program where you get credit for the $80 spend already. And the user interface is about the same so you don't loose the effort spent on learning.

Also if you want to upgrade from iPhoto to Aperture, Apple makes this painless with a one click method to import an iPhoto library into an Aperture Library.

So get/use the combination of iPhoto and Elments. The two can work together seamlessly. You can tell iPhoto to use Elements as the default editor and then the two will pass image files back and forth without you needing to handle that. Use these until you know why you need to upgrade

i do most of my editing in Aperture - white balance, highlight recovery, contrast, etc. then i export it to Photoshop to do more advanced stuff if i need to, resize, and sharpen.

i suggest using iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom, at least as an organizational tool, and get Photoshop (Elements) or GIMP for everything else.

I use CS4 and LR2.3. Photoshop is not a good place to start though. It's crazy expensive and only easy if you've been doing it a while. When I started doing photo work on computers it was the only option really (early 90s) so I've grown with it. But now elements or iPhoto would be better to start with. Also lightroom and or aperture (as mentioned) will do most everything you need these days.

But yeah, DL the 30 day trials for any of the adobe products and see what you like. Then if you're eligible, take advantage of the edu discounts.