Best editing software?

[Invisodude]

One thing also to throw in here, I noticed in your signature you shoot a Nikon, another great option is CNX (Capture Nx) to process the raw files, then, if more edits are needed, export to TIFF and edit further in elements or paintshot, etc. But you can do a lot of edits in CNX. Most people hate Capture nx at first, but once you get to know the program, it's quite amazing, the control points are with trying it for sure. I've downloaded element trials a couple times, maybe it's just me but I spend so much time trying to set the brushes how I want them. Then I pull up CNX, even for a jpeg and zip out the edit. You can quickly assign any function to a brush, it's perty cool

 

[ghache]

i use photoshop and lightroom.

i like lightroom because of the file manament functions that are alot better in lightroom than the viewer in cs4.

i use lightroom for the whitebalance and all the fun stuff, i apply more advance technique in cs4.

use them both alot.

 

[Garbz]

image editing at the 16-bit color depth level.

Can someone explain what this means. I use Elements and didnt realise I might not be getting the most from my photos because of it.

The bit depth is the number of possible values used to display colour. At standard 8bit colour level 0 represents black, and 255 represents white. At 16bit, 0 still represents black, but white is now 65535. As you can see the number of possible shades has increased by a massive factor of 256.

Now these shades will not be visible to you in general, however they become critical in computing final values when you do things like adjusting exposure. Say you increase the brightness of an 8bit image the software has little data to work with and will calculated a best guess of the final values.

However your cameras capture 10 12 or 14bit data in raw files. When you edit in 16bits this extra data comes through so now your brightness increase becomes less of a guess at final values. This can reduce posterisation an extreme example of which looks like this:

16bit editing becomes important for heavily edited images especially with lots of gradients.

 

[Fusion]

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Elements and Lightroom are an excellent combination, use them all the time. Only when I need more do I go to CS4. I can do most thing I need to do with those 2 progs. :cheers:

 

[Hamtastic]

Lightroom is Adobe Camera Raw with a cataloging system (and a much cheaper price tag than Photoshop). There isn't an ACR version of LR3 yet, but I assume there will be. I only shoot raw, and find ACR covers 95+% of my photo processing needs. I need CS for stitching, HDR, and other special effects, but I don't use those very often. For typical photo processing I think Lightroom is a good choice.

Lightroom automatically handles color profile and bit depth conversions. The processing is done in 16 bit and a color profile similar to ProPhotoRGB, and then converted to sRGB and 8 bit when exported as jpegs. It's all supposed to be "invisible" so the photog doesn't have to worry about it.

I process in 16 bit because I understand the reasoning behind it, and my computer has no problems. In personal testing and real world experiences the only time I've ever actually been able to see a difference was when trying to lighten dark shadows quite a bit and still recover usable detail. In other words a severely underexposed shot that I ought to be deleting anyway.