Photo Editing Programs

kathy65

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What is a good program to buy and use for photo editing? Something that is easy to use for a beginner, but yet has awesome tools to use.
 
Adobe Photoshop CC2015. Might as well learn the best and not have to relearn as you improve.
 
Is it easy to teach yourself?
 
Photoshop is excellent, but it is not beginners software. You can teach yourself but there is a huge learning curve. I don't use it anymore. Lightroom is much more user friendly.
 
Is it easy to teach yourself?
Near impossible but you can take classes at the local college. It is the defacto program for retouching so there are lots of places to learn it.
 
kathy65 said:
What is a good program to buy and use for photo editing? Something that is easy to use for a beginner, but yet has awesome tools to use.

I am going to say Lightroom is what you want to buy. It's good. Lightroom is very,very good. And it is easy for a beginner to use, and at the same time, it has awesome tools for cropping, leveling, doing BASIC cloning/spotting, image adjustment and editing, and it has very easy "Lightroom Actions" that can be easily found on-line, or created on your own and saved. Th actions are a series of adjustments that can be saved in a set, and titled, and then applied to future photos, and of course, edited/adjusted. Lightroom also can help you publish photos to the web in basically a click or two. it is what I would suggest for a beginner wanting to learn the basics of shooting, organizing, then editing photos.

Lightroom allows a person to import a folder's worth of photos, and to then sit down and zip through adjusting them in a very fast,efficient way. It's not designed for pixel-level, micro-editing of minutiae, but is geared more toward fast, simple, logical editing of images.
 
Is it easy to teach yourself?
Near impossible but you can take classes at the local college. It is the defacto program for retouching so there are lots of places to learn it.

not really. I taught myself, though I was very young when I did. Taking a class, online or in person, would be a good idea.

But, as far as software goes, PS isn't that difficult to learn once you have some basic concepts down: channels, additive color theory, curves, masks
 
In my estimation Photoshop has levels of features. Sure there are complicated and difficult to use tools and processes but there are also a full set of easy to use intuitive tools that you can learn and use quickly and easily. There are hundreds(+) of videos on youtube and Adobe and other places that show you how to use tools and techniques.
Lightroom is a different basic concept with it's strengths being in file handling with many of the features available from Photoshop.
It can be just a simple tool to use on your photos or it can be another hobby unto itself. For you to decide????
 
Is it easy to teach yourself?
Near impossible but you can take classes at the local college. It is the defacto program for retouching so there are lots of places to learn it.

not really. I taught myself, though I was very young when I did. Taking a class, online or in person, would be a good idea.

But, as far as software goes, PS isn't that difficult to learn once you have some basic concepts down: channels, additive color theory, curves, masks
a lot of the self taught folks neglect things like proper organisation and naming of layers, blend modes and expert feedback.
 
Is it easy to teach yourself?
Near impossible but you can take classes at the local college. It is the defacto program for retouching so there are lots of places to learn it.

not really. I taught myself, though I was very young when I did. Taking a class, online or in person, would be a good idea.

But, as far as software goes, PS isn't that difficult to learn once you have some basic concepts down: channels, additive color theory, curves, masks
a lot of the self taught folks neglect things like proper organisation and naming of layers, blend modes and expert feedback.

I can *definitely* agree with proper naming, it's a bad habit I have to force myself to overcome when doing work both at school and for work. All my professors will dock for this - and they should. I'd imagine proper layer grouping is another thing self-taught people would probably neglect.

I do use blending modes, and actually I use them in ways that I think a traditionally taught person might not think of. I do think self-teaching you'll get a better understanding of the mechanics and theory behind image processing, but I agree, it probably comes at the expense of not having expert feedback and real-world practices.
 
What is a good program to buy and use for photo editing? Something that is easy to use for a beginner, but yet has awesome tools to use.
Photoshop is the gold standard. But it's expensive (you pay a monthly fee) and it's very complex to learn how to use it--it's definitely not something that is easy to learn or something I'd recommend for a beginner.

Pixelmator is sophisticated and relatively easy to learn. Lightroom is a versatile program that is a coupe of steps below Photoshop in terms of capability and difficulty to learn.

Now, if you feel that Pixelmator or Lightroom are still too sophisticated, a good option is Picasa. It's not that difficult to use and it ties in to a bunch of other options that make photo sharing and storage easy. If you have a Mac, it will come with a program called Photos which is easy to use and very capable.
 
FWIW - Photoshop CC 2015 has the same software used in Lightroom CC's Develop module. It's called Adobe Camera Raw or ACR.
In fact, ACR has been part of Photoshop quite a bit longer than Lightroom has existed.
The version of ACR used in Photoshop is the ACR 9th version of ACR. Lightroom 6 uses essentially the same ACR 9.

Adobes $9.99 a month subscription includes both Photoshop CC 2015 and LR CC because the 2 are designed to compliment each other. Adobe has designed to 2 applications so photographers can start their editing in LR, then move to Photoshop to finish editing their images using for more precise tools, additional features, and additional capabilities.
 
And now an independent person's opinion on the Lightroom/Photoshop connection:

Lightroom. BUY it. Own it. Learn it. That will get you off of the $10 a month leasing program Adobe came up with when their customers agreed they would NEVER pay $50 a month for Photoshop. Adobe did not design Lightroom and Photoshop to work as a tandem...they are bundled now at $10 a month because of a massive failed attempt to take millions of licensed OWNERS and convert them to poor sharecroppers who could be forced to pay $50 a month in perpetuity...

Lightroom was "designed" and refined and iterated as a critical step to counter Apple's growing presence in the photo editing and organizing market as digital imaging went from serious hobby people only to "everybody with a P&S and everybody with a smartphone camera". Lightroom is designed to be something that can actually help people organize, catalog, and web-publish or print-prepare many,many,many images--something that Photoshop is not capable of doing.

Lightroom was designed because Adobe's lame "Photoshop Elements" application was...totally lame and showing its age and limitations in a very bad way...and other software/computer/hardware industry players, like...Apple Computer...began to present a real, growing, and genuine threat to Adobe's product matrix.

I used Photoshop for 18 years...since I got Lightroom, I BARELY ever open Photoshop...
 
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Lightroom and YouTube, another pair that complements each other
 

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