Topic: Photo Editing Program

[bluewingolive]

Wondering if someone can offer some ideas for photo editing on a PC.  I'm looking to do some basic stuff w/ filters and granular/smoothing.  Free is good, but not necessary.  I don't want something too deep or has a steep learning curve.

[beatkilla]

Lightroom


Not free but does everything.

[if_then_else]

Affinity Photo 2.
Inexpensive, powerful and a perpetual license (no subscription model like Adobe's)
There's a Summer Sales action going on until Aug 1 (25% off).

[tgos3]

depends on how much flexibility and power you want. Are you just working with jpgs, or with raw files as well?

If you just deal with jpgs, I think Irfanview would be great to start out with.  It can do raw files as well, but other apps are more flexible, speedy, and powerful for that.
Irfanview is free, and can read pretty much any graphics file (and play some audio files)
I have used it for many years when i just want to resize something (or batches of things), rename files, make downressed email jpgs, look at thumbnails, etc.
I find the sharpening and color management parts less flexible than the Adobe apps I usually use.
https://www.irfanview.com/

I think denoising and sharpening take a bit of judgement and learning, in any app.

FastStone Image Viewer is free, for non commercial use, less powerful than the Adobe apps, but probably a bit more powerful than Irfanview
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
 It's pretty easy to use, and you can be familiar with it pretty quickly.  It is indeed fast (although a bit slower with raw files than jpgs, at least on my W7 era computer)

I have Lightroom and Photoshop (the last standalone versions of each) and have used versions of both for many years.
they are standards of the industry, but have learning curves.  After years using Photoshop, I tried demos of successive Lightroom versions 3 times before i finally sat down and 'did the knowledge'
Once you get comfortable with your most common uses, both are easy.   Figuring out how the tools work in any app takes a while, and then becomes a set of habits.

You might consider Photoshop Elements, which is a light version of Photoshop for users who are willing to have the app make a lot of decisions for them.
It's not too expensive (about $100 from Adobe, and often on sale at the usual big photo mailorder/online places (bhphoto, et al)
I have never used it, but i bet it is designed to be easy to use, and does the heavy lifting for folks who don't want to go down the rabbit hole, using a subset of current Photoshop algorithms.
https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements.html

A bunch of the newer apps (Affinity et al) use extensive algorithmic file analysis to offer what they think are the most likely useful preset modifications for color, sharpness, etc.

there are lots of online comparisons by various photofora that point out the good and bad points of all of these apps.

tg

[tim in jersey]

I'm not a photo guy, so I can't say if this will do what you need, but the price is right.

Worth trying before laying out cash for a paid app I would think.

[tgos3]

I'm not a photo guy, so I can't say if this will do what you need, but the price is right.

Worth trying before laying out cash for a paid app I would think.

--------------

I am a photo guy. 
I have tried GIMP several times and gave up. finding it frustrating to use, with poor ergonomics (i.e. it doesn't fit the way my brain wants to work ;-) , with the second steepest learning curve of anything I have tried.  Since I already had PS and LR, it wasn't worth the effort for me.   There is a reason that PS and LR are pretty much the standards of the photo editing industry (with a few other contenders, some on Mac only) aside from mere historical inertia.

If you are willing to put up with GIMP, consider trying RawTherapee, which has the deepest, most flexible and technically sophisticated (in terms of what is exposed to the user) controls I have encountered, but also a steep learning curve.  There is a large user community, lots of tutorials and a very big User Manual.  All free for home or small business (i.e. <$25 K income from photo work per year)  I use it occasionally when i want to get down to the nitty gritty of stuff that Photoshop and Lightroom have made more 'user friendly' but also more opaque, but I have not mastered it yet.   I did not mention it before because it certainly has a steep learning curve, steeper than Lightroom or Photoshop, at least in my experience.

If you aren't willing to study the manual, don't even think about using it routinely, IMO.  Check it out online and see if it is not too overwhelming for your purposes.
http://rawtherapee.com/ 

The ergonomics are pretty reasonable, but the number of choices in how to process stuff is daunting...'with great power comes great responsibility' to figure out which of the many features work best for you, on any particular image.  It helps if you actually have a reasonable technical understanding of the characteristics of digital images, but the User Manual teaches you about that pretty well.

If/when i get my next camera that can not be used with my versions of PS and LR, I will probably try to master RawTherapee, rather than be Assimilated by Adobe subscription apps.

I don't think either of these is what you are looking for, but since GIMP was mentioned, I thought you might as well be made aware of what may be the most flexible and sophisticated free editor for civilians (i.e. not medical, aerospace, NASA, JPL, NSA, etc).  Not for the casual user, though, at least in my experience.

tg

[beatkilla]

I didn't realize Lightroom was a yearly subscription deal now.....i have the standalone versions from years ago.

I still run a Canon 1d mkiv and 1dX so i am old school.

[tgos3]

I didn't realize Lightroom was a yearly subscription deal now.....i have the standalone versions from years ago.

I still run a Canon 1d mkiv and 1dX so i am old school.

I still shoot 6x7cm and 35mm B&W film, develop it, and scan it, so I am very old school,
but I edit the scans in PS and LR, and I also do lots of digital photography, so I am not a Luddite ;-)

[DrumistSiveston]

Hi,
When I worked with buy phenq Windows, I used a free version of Photo Filtre.
I was satisfied with the basic performance, as I'm in no way a photo guy.

This is good. Do share some of your edited photos with us. 

[bluewingolive]

Wow! Thanks for all of your feedback and experience sharing.  Alot to ponder.

[allan]

I just finished off 3 rolls of 120 that ive had in backs for around 4 years.

[Scooter123]

Affinity.  Modest price, you own it forever, and they upgrade it about once a year.  Its not as good as Photoshop, but pretty good.  I use it to take out unwanted artifacts (using clone tool), remove backgrounds, and edit in RAW format. 

[DSatz]

I've used Photoshop Elements for about eight years; there are things that I like about it and things that I despise. I use only maybe 1/10 or 1/20 of its available menu commands. I certainly don't buy the new versions every year.

In general, do be prepared to have to learn some stuff. There are definitely things I wish I'd known sooner; I could have fixed more problems early on, and created fewer of them myself.

Much of the time when you rely on a program's built-in "intelligence" to fix a problem for you, it will "fix" what you didn't think was broken, and break what you thought was OK. Photoshop's "healing brush" tool, for example, can sometimes do remarkably useful things automatically and save oodles of time--but it can also act very stupidly and create harm, and often it's hard to see what's making it do one thing instead of the other. I use the "Undo" command in Photoshop Elements (Ctrl+Z) more often than any other command.

That said, I use it on picture files of scanned documents much more than conventional photos, like of people or pets or microphones, and they probably can't optimize everything for both uses equally well.

But still there is just too much corporate narcissism (or plain stupidity) built in. The default for resizing images is to specify the number of pixels for width and height; fine, but 99% of the time I want a particular percentage reduction, yet each time I open the "resize image" dialog, it flips back to pixels; it doesn't remember the last choice the user made. Each time I go to save a picture as a PNG file, it asks whether I want compressed or uncompressed; I would guess that at most only 1% of users EVER want uncompressed PNG, but there's no way to prevent that question from interrupting the process. And if one does upgrade to a new version, it overwrites all your saved preferences from the previously installed version, and you have to start all over again to override Adobe's defaults if you don't agree with them.

Plus if you load a group of files in a certain order, it then puts the focus on the last file you loaded rather the first--and after you save and close any file, it then advances to the last remaining file that you loaded, rather than to the next one in the sequence after the one you just worked on. I can't imagine who would possibly benefit from that.

--best regards