I am looking for some better post-processing software. I am currently using MGI PhotoSuite 4 Platinum. It is older software and is limited in what it can do. I would like some recommendations on software that will let me process my photos to a better finished product. As an example, here is a photo of a natural spring that I shot out in the Mexican desert. The photo on the left did not capture the image as I remember it. The photo on the right does, with some enhancement.


Thanks in advance!

How much are you looking to spend? I use Lightroom and Photoshop CS3, but that's a decent bit of money. I believe Photoshop Elements has become pretty powerful, at a low price point, and Paint Shop Pro is still around. And I'm sure someone will holler "GIMP" for the Linux/command line/do it yourself crowd.

CS4 [or soon 5] or DXPro plus Nikon Capture NX2 if you by any chance use Nikon.

Save for very basic "image enhancement", everything else is a waste of time and money IMHO.

Those seem to be reasonably priced. What is the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop CS3?

No I don't own a Nikon. Why do you opine "everything else is a waste of time and money"? 'Splain please.

Thanks

I am also incline to suggest LR and CS3 (or 4) used in combo. For post process, CS3 (or 4) is very powerful. You don't appreciate LR until you have 50,000+ photos. LR is great for some quick edit and cataloging.
Check them out by using the 30-day free trial.
If budget is a concern, Element 7 is quite useful now.

Lightroom is more of a program that helps you organize your photos, and also providing basic but powerful tweaking tools that let you change coloring, exposure, contrast, etc. If you've ever used Apple Aperture it's basically like that. Photoshop CS4 of course can do all those things and much more, so that is why I continue to use PS over anything else. Head on over to adobe.com and download some trials and see what you like best.

Okay, good idea. I use their Adobe Standard for documents in my small business and have been satisfied with that product. Hopefully PhotoShop will prove to be the same.

Thanks.

PS CS4 is on my wish-list. Academic versions of CS4 and Elements are available. If you know a grad student......

I agree, but also if you shoot RAW format, Lightroom 2 is great when processing them in batch. I used to use CaptureOne prior to Lightroom2 release and I have to say Adobe did a great job on LR2.

I do the vast majority of my tweaking/edits in Picasa. It covers 90% of my needs, including adjusting color tone to a limited extent.

Without trying too hard I came up with this using your original photo in Picasa:

Not too shabby and pretty close to your "fixed" image, I think.

It will even do a bit of tweaking on RAW images, though not nearly as much as a true RAW processing tool.

Photoshop is a great product, but it is very expensive unless you actually need the features it offers.

Or have a child as young as K.

How much time do you want to spend in Post Process and how much time do you want to spend learning how to use the Post Processing software and what to do with it?

For most non-professionals/very enthusiastic amateurs too much time is required to learn how to use Photoshop. Yes it's powerful. Yes there are some things that it can do that others can't. But it's like the BMW many SLR owners drive around - it spends 99% of its life doing the exact same thing as a Honda, just as well, but at 2x the price.

Lightroom is a program that simplifies the back end work of managing your photos, basic editing, and in general makes taking photos more fun, imho. It's also cheaper.

There are other programs out there, but Adobe is the standard. Nikon Capture is a waste of money.

I completely agree with the previous poster. I'm a professional photographer, who's owned Photoshop since version 1.0. I still don't know or need a lot of it's features. I'd say keep things easier than Photoshop. Lightroom is a little simpler to learn (though they don't exactly do the same thing) and great, especially if you're shooting raw files.

While the Lightroom + Photoshop CS4 combination suggested by a few posters is very powerful, indeed, it is likely to be overkill both price and featurewise for you unless you are a pro or an advanced amateur.

Photoshop Elements is seemingly rather simple but it has a surprising amount of power and it can usually fulfill most of the needs of non-pros with a much gentler learning curve and a fraction of the price of full PS.

I would characterize myself as an advanced hobbyist (DSLR with a lot of lenses, several thousand shots a month, almost exclusively RAW) and my own set-up is the following:

DxO Optics Pro 5.3 (for RAW processing) -- DxO gives much more fine-grained control over RAW processing than the RAW portion of Photoshop Elements. To me, it is the software I use by far the most (I typically correct exposure and color, and crop the image but do not do much more editing). The cost of DxO is around 100 euros. If you don't shoot a lot in RAW format, this is not a necessary (nor even a wise) investment.

Photoshop Elements 7.0 (about 100 euros again). Plenty of power and features for most non-pros. Very easy-to-use basic fixes, quite a bit of power for even quite advanced stuff. PSE has two components, Organizer and Editor. Organizer is keeping your shots in order and catalogued. In my experience Organizer is fine up to about 20.000 of so photos, above that it starts to creak a little. I go around this limitation by maintaining several separate catalogues instead of one huge catalogue.

Photomatix Pro 3 (another 100 euros) for HDR (high dynamic range) processing. This was probably not a good investment as I have found that I don't do a lot of HDR and there are some free packages for trying out HDR.

As some other posters have suggested, do go to Adobe site and download a trial to see which program meets your needs. There is a free trial available for DxO Optics, as well.

I have tried GIMP and gave up quickly as it seems to be rather powerful but the learning curve is quite steep. It is free, though.

Whatever software you decide to go with, I would suggest that you also get a good supporting book. I have Mark Galer's Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 Maximum Performance which I have found quite good (I only just got the book, though).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
T.

While Capture NX is slow and in no way ideal for batching hundreds of images it does remove all manner of CA from NEF images better than any other product on the market - period.

Open an image in NX and CA is automatically removed - then hit a single button to open the image in CS4. Well worth the ~$100 to anyone wanting the best possible final image quality from a NEF file.

Just as anyone who is really serious about photography will likely have several lenses to address different shooting situations so too the digital photographer needs multiple software packages in order to produce the best possible final image.

Currently I use Capture NX, CS4, PT Lens, Neat Image, and NikSharpener Pro/Qimage in that order, and once you get your own workflow set it is very easy and speedy to get an image ready for printing.