LCD

I've used ACDSee for some time now for viewing and organizing my photographs. If you purchase their editor you will find a decent basket of photo-editing features. They have been around for a long time and their present products incorporates many incremental improvements from some decades of new releases. ACDSee competes with Lightroom and Photoshop and, in my opinion, are comparable in most ways.

dcampbell52 Loc: Clearwater Fl

I really like Adobe Lightroom Classic CC on the cloud. It plus Photoshop and the newer Lightroom CC (which, to me, is ok for cell phones and smaller tablets but lacks the in depth control of the Lightroom Classic CC) provides all of the control and other options that you need for storing, cataloging, processing, printing (and with the mapping feature which takes advantage of a gps enabled camera images or the photos can be manually placed at desired locations on the map) gives excellent results. Personally I like the mapping feature even though none of my non-cellphone cameras have gps.. the cellphone camera does but I rarely upload those into Lightroom. I have 168,000 photos which uses 3.6 TB of hard drive. (I have 2 8tb drives, 2 4tb drives in the computer along with my 2tb C drive. (and no, I haven't moved to a solid state C drive yet but it is on the todo list). I shoot everything in RAW/NEF and all are processed after each shoot. All of my photos are cataloged, mapped and can be exported in .jpg, .tiff or any of the necessary formats. For me, the $9.99 per month cloud is a really good option. Yes, I heard the objections and they are silly. I own my photos.. they ALL live on my hard drives in RAW/Neff format and have the trailer files for the conversion. Now, I had a project a few months ago where I needed more of the software on the cloud than I was subscribed to (I needed Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and a couple of other programs). Adobe was nice enough to let me upgrade to the full cloud for 3 months at the $56 (or whatever the rate was at that time) then once my project was finished, they stepped me back down to the $9.99 per month basic Photographers plan. And yes, I billed my client for the additional $138 (difference between the $10 per month and the $56 per month for 3 months). So, according to the support specialist at Adobe, this is a temporary option available as long as it isn't "over used". Now, I'm not sure about the term "over used" but I would think that you could upgrade/downgrade once every couple of years without having to stick to the more expensive package.
My point here is that the "cloud" gives me the flexibility to deal with whatever issues come up. Oh, and I got the 10gb cloud storage.. The ONLY thing that I use the Cloud storage for is to put examples of my work up so that I can show them to a prospective client while on the road. I also have a large Western Digital Cloud drive system which allows me to upload (unprocessed or RAW/NEF) copies of my images from the hotels rooms/restaurants or other places with "free" Wi-Fi. This gets a copy of my photos back to the house/office for safety. By the way, I have a laptop with an external USB 4tb drive that I use while traveling. I don't like to use the laptop for serious processing of all of my photos, but it gives me the ability to upload and look at the shoots and evaluate those that need to be reshot and gives me something immediate that I can show a client. If the "local" hard drive crashes, I already have copies of everything sent to my WD Cloud back home. It isn't perfect but it works for me. Oh, I also carry 8 SD 64gb cards for the cameras, so I try to not have to reuse a card while on a trip. But, I have copies on the laptop/usb drive and copies on the WD Cloud back home if that plan falls through. My point is that the Adobe Cloud (which is a misnomer in that all of the software and images are on your computer drives.. just the stuff you choose to send up to the cloud exist there... after initially downloading the software from the cloud to your computer. Oh, and Adobe sends out regular updates to all of your installed software so it is ALWAYS up to date.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Royce, you're getting a lot of advice, some of it good. What I tell my students is that PS and LR are industry standards, and are well-supported. Boasting a user community of over 9,000,000 people - there are numerous user groups, forums and learning tools available.

The sentiment of many is that they don't want to pay for software, and will struggle with the free stuff just because . . .

There is nothing out there like Lightroom's catalog image management. Though many have little to base their opinion on. I've used over a dozen image editing programs - Paint Shop Pro, Photoline, GIMP, Picture Window Pro, Photoshop Elements, ACDSee, FastStone Image Viewer, Irfanview - and my favorites are Photoshop/Lightroom, Capture One, DXO Photolab, and to a large degree, On1 Raw.

On1 Raw is an interesting product. It was originally just an excellent suite of plugins - for detail, special effects, resizing, masking and a pretty awful portrait editor, with no raw editing capability. It has matured in the time since I started using it (V7, about 5 yrs ago), and it now includes a very good raw editor. It is not a full-function bitmap editor like Photoshop, but it does let you do masking, local edits, and "layers" in the raw portion, which only two other software packages that I know of can do - DXO and Capture One.

Since $10/mo doesn't seem to be an issue for you, I would get started as soon as you can with Lightroom. Photoshop will take some learning, but as your skills get better with LR, you'll start to see opportunities for editing an image that are not possible with LR, and you will start to venture into ways to do this stuff with Photoshop.

Below is an example of a photo restoration that I used Photoshop for, because there was nothing that could be done in Lightroom and most other image processors - raw or bitmap. You can see that the original was extensively damaged, but the restoration is nearly perfect. The tools I used to get this done include cloning, making a selection and copying it, reversed (for the girl's hair on the sitting on the couch at the left, as well as the sweater), I used frequency separation to smooth out the tone and color in the wall behind the sofa, reconstructed the hand of the girl in the middle, etc. This took me about an hour, and it was pro-bono, along with many others that I did after hurricane Sandy.

I will spend as much as two hours doing a fashion retouch for a friend who does fashion photography, but the result will be perfect, and not overly done.

A very good site to see a lot of what can be done is https://www.retouchpro.com/

Good luck with your search!

(Download)


(Download)

gloryg Loc: New York

Hello,

You can check Faststone. It is free and has several nice features.

Thank you

Jaackil Loc: Massachusetts

You can not go wrong with Lightroom CC. You will also get PHotoshop with the subscription. both are the gold standard for photo software. There is a reason everyone compares other software to them. For $10 a month it is a great value. I, like you am not a pro, shoot with a D7100 for my own enjoyment. I started with Picassa also but when I switched over to LR and PS I never looked back. If you want something simple LR allows you to automate a lot of your editing in addition to cataloging. If you want to get being more creative editing images you can do that with LR and PS too. They will allow you to do as little or as much as your mind can imagine.
Good Luck

gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast

Elements uses a data base structure for organizing photos similar to LR's. Stripped down a bit but I find it perfectly adequate for my needs. I don't know if they're both similar to Adobe Bridge but I suspect they are since they're all Adobe products.

Jakebrake Loc: Broomfield, Colorado

Ah Royce, again we see the Pro's or wannabe's chiming in for Adobe's PS/LR monthly rental plan that is far from "somewhat simple". I am like you, a guy who shoots Canon's with some pretty nice glass, and consider myself an advanced amateur who tried the PS/LR monthly rental plan during a free trial period quickly coming to the conclusion it was far, far more than I needed, wanted and didn't want to spend countless hours sitting in front of my computer studying programs with very steep learning curves.

Therefore I researched many post processing programs and tried several during their free trial periods and found 4 that I use. Faststone Image Viewer (FREE) http://faststone.org/, Topaz Studio (FREE) https://topazlabs.com/downloads, Photoshop Elements 2018 ($69 bucks when on sale) which is a scaled down PS with a very nice organizer and adjustment features. I'm not adverse to Adobe products, just their $10 buck a month lease plan. PSE is a full featured program geared more for consumer hobbyist's, which is why the Pro's seem to prefer PS/LR. Also in my PP arsenal is Photomatix Pro ($100) for the times I want to play around with HDR. Thus, my advice is to try the programs previously suggested during their free trial periods and see what works best for you.

Cheers;
Michael
A beer drinking DeSoto driving old fogey! (Thanks Andy!)👍

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

It's one way to go... I use Lightroom CLASSIC CC 2018, which is the desktop version. Lightroom CC is the mobile version that runs on everything — smartphones, tablets, Macs, Windows PCs...

If you subscribe, you get access to BOTH versions of Lightroom, plus Photoshop, Bridge, and a few other goodies.

There are many other alternatives. Affinity Photo would be my second alternative. It runs on Macs and Windows, costs $50 or less, has a free trial for 30 days, and gets rave reviews from users. Check it out at https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/desktop/?trial&mc=AFFPPC01&gclid=CjwKCAjw_IPcBRAjEiwAl44QkXklqDJMAATMTgpnqI1ThWUOI3bt7sGUfYj4uoj3aeJd-RLE7QCqdxoCPpcQAvD_BwE

TucsonDave Loc: Tucson, Arizona

Royce,

After using a few free programs like Gimp, I reviewed Affinity Photo. One time cost of $50. I have had two free updates in the past year, and with all the available self-help videos, I was able to learn some basics quickly. By using it, I also switched to shooting RAW most of the time. I have the Windows version. Originally developed for the MAC the interfaces look identical. It has a ton of capability, uses layers like Lightroom. It does NOT help with managing photo storage. But, I didn't purchase it for that function.
Have fun with whatever your use.

kpmac Loc: Ragley, La

Lots of advice, huh? I use On1 Photo Raw. Does it all for a one-time price. As you can see there are many options.

AndyH Loc: Massachusetts and New Hampshire

Could I interest you in one of my fountain pens? 😎

Sersly, choosing the right software is very individual. I find LR intuitive and easy to use, but after a few months I still haven’t touched all of its capabilities. Gene is right on PS as being the most capable pixel editor IMHO, but your choices are also capable.

I actually like the subscription plan - you don’t have to wait for the developer to bundle new releases - the improvements come along as they’re developed.

Andy

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

I agree' it is the way to go

Jakebrake Loc: Broomfield, Colorado

I have several fountain pen's Andy and as a matter of fact I'm going to buy ink today while the oil is being changed in my DeSoto!

Cheers;
Michael

Jakebrake Loc: Broomfield, Colorado

Got's to go for now. Received my new Canon 100-400 II, and headed to The Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge for a test drive. Later.

AndyH Loc: Massachusetts and New Hampshire

Wow- great lens. Enjoy!
Andy