St. Paul, MN Photos

This is about software that I like and actually use. There are many products out there for manipulating photos every which way. My choices are in most cases inexpensive and easy to use. I want to spend more time shooting photos and less time tweaking them. Most of my photos require resizing, cropping, sharpening and sometimes some color adjustments, noise reduction and touch up. I shoot most of them in the RAW format because that way I kind of get a do over if I didn’t get it right.

Digital Photo Professional – it comes with Canon DSLR camera’s. It is a quick and easy way to tweak RAW photos and convert them to JPEG’s.  I use it to view the photos and to decide which ones are good enough to process.  I should spend some time learning how to use it. Like most people with most software I am not getting the most out of it because I don’t understand all the features.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 – I bought mine at the local Best Buy store for less than $100. This software has a ton

Elements 7

of features and it will be a very long time before I learn them all. I have been using elements every since version 2.1 came out.  it is not intuitive for new users but I have to say I really love the latest version.  I was using 5.0. I can now do all kinds of things I could not do before with the greatest of ease.  I can change backgrounds, fix yucky looking skies, crop, edit and choose from a ton of photo effects.  I also like the way it handles RAW photos, a weakness in the 5.0 version.  I consider this software a must have.

Visual Watermark I bought this nifty little program over the internet for $20.00.  Photo shop elements can be used for adding watermarks but I love this nifty little program because it is so easy to use.  Select one or a batch of photos and a watermark and click. I have mine set up to save a new file so that I have two versions of each photo, one with a watermark and one without. I also like how easy it is to create the watermark. Yes the software is redundant but I love it.

Photomatix -This is what I use to create HDR images.  It costs about $100. It took me forever to learn how to use it but once I did I got some impressive images. Formulas can be saved in the software so once I fiugred out how to use it I started saving the formulas.  Sometimes I can get a nice photo with one click if I use the right formula. I have never used any other program to create  HDR images so I am not going to say this is the best.  it is inexpensive and I have gotten great results with it.

Picnik – I use this a lot.  it resides on the internet, there is a free version and a pro version.  I use the pro, which costs less than $25.  I discovered it when my daughter was in Europe and looking for a way to edit photos without having to add more software to her computer.  Photos are uploaded onto the site and they can be edited, cropped, tweaked, framed . . and much more.  I have used it to create collages, to write on photos and to edit photos that are already in Flickr. I highly recommend this product.  It is very easy to use. Last summer my primary computer died and I used it to edit all my photos.

Also see Web sites for photographers.  The page has information about browsers, and online photo editing software and more.