John Hicks Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England

Should have read I have used versions of it for over 15 years

John Hicks Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England

Should have read I have used versions of it for over 15 years

John Hicks Loc: Sible Hedinham North Essex England

Should have read I have used versions of it for over 15 years

bleirer

That is a great price. Also it's easy to import an elements catalog into lightroom if you want to upgrade, and part of the learning curve for Photoshop is there, since there is so much in common.

Elements is 8 bit once you get into the main program but i believe the Adobe camera raw that launches when you open a raw file is still 16 bit for the initial editing, though the ACR has a few tools missing compared to Lightroom's and photoshops version.

F8 Forever Loc: Lng Island, NY

Adobe is the goto shop for most people, including pros. Expertise is all over the place and many people learned it OJT and stayed with it.

But, many of us started somewhere else. I used a great free program that Corel ended up buying and burying so it could sell more Paint Shop Pro's. Paint Shop Pro is actually a very good program and integrates well with all its other stuff. I haven't used anything for a while, but will use it again when I get set up again. (Major computer crashes and data losses) Corel also has online training sessions. Only a hundred bucks for the Ultimate version, which is money well spent. Regular, and cheap, upgrades which you can usually skip.

I've used GIMP, and it is as good as anything else I've used, but the learning curve has always been enormous. It's open source and free, so contributors are always more interested in coding than explaining how to use it. Like so many other things, you can waste hours digging through menus, and then next time forget where you found your answer. Plenty of forums and help sites, though.

I think someone mentioned Irfanview-- it's incredibly mature now and does maybe 90% of the run-of-the-mill stuff, like color balance, contrast, cropping, sharpness and stuff. And it's free, although sending Irfan a few bucks for his work is always appreciated.

There's Xnview, which seems to be a knockoff of Irfanview, but is every bit as good.

And good old Faststone Image Viewer which is still relatively uncomplicated but still does resizing, red-eye,
and other basic stuff with little fuss.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

Admittedly I haven't used Photoshop since around the turn of the century, but this is pretty close to how it used to look (minus the dark theme and updated icons). But yes, I can see how this can be intimidating in today's slider-based age.

Cheers

(Download)

sodapop Loc: Bel Air, MD

Photoshop is directly connected with Camera Raw which has all of the same sliders that are in Lightroom. also you get to choose the background from black to white and anywhere in between.. Now that the OP has had virtually every editing program recommended,all of which are good ones, it would be interesting to see what is ultimately choosen!

Dennis833 Loc: Australia

There are lots of good photo editors! I would personally recommend Luminar if you want to get the best from your images in the least amount of time.

OzWizard

Take a look at Affinty Photo, the interface is similar to Photoshop. Does some things a lot easier than Photoshop does. $50.00 as a download and you own it, no subscriptions. Can be found on sale for less on occupations.

joelbolden

I have the Adobe package and use the LR,LRCC and PS. I also purchased Affinity Photo and that has become my goto editing program for 90% of my editing because it's so handy. I have Windows 10.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

FWIW - I kept hearing how great Affinity was, so I downloaded the trial to give it a look see..had a hard time dealing with slowness editing my raw files, so that ended Affinity as an editor for me.

Maybe it is fast for JPG files, but it was noticeably slow on processing raw files compared to Lightroom for me, and since I prefer to shoot raw and process as needed it quickly became a hassle.

joelbolden

Affinity processes Raw faster on my system, plus when I engage Affinity it handles both from the same page, unlike LR, where I use it for basic and then have to call up PS...which is REALLY slow on my computer.

Blu1Dog Loc: Florida

Gimp is amazing! The prices on the other programs in Adobe led me to options I could afford. Gimp works for me Scribus takes care of publishing... I couldn't afford $700 a year to rent something that wouldn't let me use what I had created unless I kept paying... Just saying, if money is an issue, Gimp is well worth looking at.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

It's great even when money isn't an issue. No offense, but statements like that give people the impression it's not as good as other editors, when in fact it's very powerful and does the same level of work.

Complaints of the GUI not being intuitive, or it's difficult to learn are just personal opinions that reflect how a person feels about a program, not it's reliability. I can make the same remarks about any program I am personally not familiar with, but it does not detract from how well the program performs it's intended function.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I used GIMP exclusively about a decade ago before I got Photoshop. I used GIMP because of the price. It was a good introduction to pixel editors and I did a lot with it. But eventually I found things that I couldn't do with GIMP so I spent the big bucks for Photoshop. There was a learning curve with GIMP and another with Photoshop since the GUIs were different, but once I got used to Photoshop, GIMP was relegated to "occasional use". It is still at that point today.

If you're new to pixel editors, GIMP will work for you and you can learn the basics of using layers and masks. I expect that in the decade since I was using it exclusively it has improved so that there are fewer things that you will need PS for (although in the "occasional use" category I can't state that it "does the same level of work").