Photo image editor

[Dave00]

I'm looking for a good pro-level photo editor. This is mainly for digital camera photos, but also for some scans. Graphic Converter is great for brightness/contrast/saturation, as well as cropping, rotation, and scaling. However, there's no ability to really retouch photos. I do most of the retouching - red eye, lighten/darken a specific area, smudge, etc - on the Canon software that came with my camera. Unfortunately, this software is very quirky and buggy and limits the viewing area. I'd also like to be able to take a photo that looks grainy/speckled (as often happens in low light) and fix this. The main target output is for prints, although I put some things on the web as well.

I've used Photoshop in the past (as in almost 10 years since I used it seriously) and found it to be rather slow and clunky, better for artsy type stuff like motion blurs and distortions. Perhaps it works better on photos now.

Any suggestions?

--D

 

[logicat2001]

Hi Dave,

Photoshop is what you make it. It is most definitely the most feature rich, all inclusive, power user set of image manipulation tools that I've ever used; I believe I've been using it for close to 10 years.

However, it's also expensive and complex. In many cases it's complete overkill. You might check out Photoshop Elements though, which has much of the same functionality but with a very different workflow. Bunches of the application are structured by workflow rather than simply providing the tools.

best,
Logicat