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Good photo editing software recommendations?

texasmccoy

texasmccoy

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 24, 2010
36
5
Montgomery County, Texas
Hi there, I'm new here. I apologize in advance if this has been asked here before, but this is a HUGE forum and I didn't know where to look. :confused:

I am a newer Mac user, got my MacBook last year and so far I LOOOOOVE it... :D SO much less stress than "Windoze"... Almost everything Mac I've learned so far is terriffic, except for one thing:

I absolutely HATE HATE HATE iphoto! :mad: I find it extremely frustrating to work with. The goofy process involved to resize a photo- exporting and then importing again, is ridiculous, and the odd filing system it creates drives me bonkers. I need WAAAY more tools to edit my pictures than iphoto provides :( In the past, I grew accustomed to using "Microsoft Picture It! Publisher" on my windows XP systems, a neat little program that was remarkably complex, as far as the amount of things it allowed you to do to your photos.

Can anyone with experience recommend a good photo editing/manipulation software that would work better? Something that is more user-friendly and has more advanced tools than iphoto? It doesn't have to be free, I am willing to pay for a program as long as it's "the cats meow", so to speak :eek:

Thanks for all helpful input you can give me :)
 
I'd like to be able to easily resize my pics. Programs I've used in the past often had an ability to just let you grab the corner of the pic and resize that way. It'd also like to be able to do artistic things to my pics. I got pretty good at colorizing black & white pictures in windows. "Microsoft picture it" had the ability to snip out pieces of pictures and put them together into a new one, just as if you were taking a pair of scissors to a magazine and making a new creation out of the clippings. That was fun to do. Things of that sort. I guess what I'd like essentially is a program with better basic tools than iphoto and the ability to get artsy with pics as well.
 
iPhoto is a photodatabase and nothing more. So you hate iPhoto for the wrong reasons.

You can however buy a photoeditor like Adobe Photoshop Elements 9, Pixelmator (my favorite) or get a free editor (Seashore, Gimp) and set iPhoto up so that on double click the picture gets opened in the editor and when you close the editor the changed pic is in iPhoto. Boom.

However the file system of iPhoto is then still not an open filesystem since all pics are in a database like structure. I'm not sure if you can let iPhoto organize the pictures in their original location.
 
The cat's meow is Aperture or LightRoom.

The two have their difference but play the same game. Much like Nikon vs. Canon.

I use Aperture. It's iPhoto on steriods.

I edit in photoshop to do all the specialized stuff, but for corrections and retouch nothing beats Aperture in terms of efficiency, especially when dealing with 800-1000 wedding photo's at a time.
 
maflynn said:
You do realize that iPhoto can edit images, so its not a "photodatabase and nothing more."
Click to expand...

Yes, of course iPhoto has very limited editing capabilities. The database aspect outweighs these editing capabilities by far.

Given that people expect editing capabilities of of a pixelmator like level you can say that iPhoto is just a database. For that specific reason the ability to link to a "real" editor was built in.
 
For what you are doing, I echo the suggestions above

Preview can do some things, but I usually forget about it

GraphicConverter is my "go to" app for a lot of things, although I don't do a lot
It is a great value and has a lot of features and capabilities

Pixelmator has gained a lot of popularity and is a better option than the Gimp in my opinion

Photoshop Elements is a good value as well, and probably does most things you want to do without all of the full blown capability of Photoshop

If I want to work on something in iPhoto, I usually just drag the file out to the desktop and open it in GraphicConverter or something else

But again, I don't do that much photo work
 
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