Software

[smoke665]

Here's one I picked as an example. When shooting Landscapes DOF is an important consideration. Do you want a deep DOF with everything sharp, do you want the foreground blurred fading into a sharp background, or sharp foreground with the background blurred. On this particular shot f/4 was not a great choice. the image is lacking in sharpness throughout. Also 1/80 shutter is close to the bottom of what most new people can hand hold. Raising the ISO up would have allowed you to increase both the shutter and the aperture. Here's a quick Lr edit trying to overcome the soft focus and exposure issues. I suspect your meter was reading the bright background, as this edit has a gradient that pulled the exposure down by close to 2 stops.

And your original for comparison

 

[Raw photographer]

Adobe Photoshop Elements 18...

Yes i use that myself, i like it, but i do prefer Gimp, I do things with it that Photoshop elements does not have.

 

[Raw photographer]

Here is one i touched up a little. Just cleaned it up a bit, Im not sure if there is to much green in the leaves, i was really trying to bring out the reflection in the water. Anyway let me know what you think.

Great shot.

 

[Raw photographer]

Here is one more, hopefully this will help a little, i am not a pro at editing or anything but i have some basic knowledge, I know someone else here could do a better job at editing these than me. Anyway, enjoy.

Edited one below.

 

[Designer]

What software should I consider and what will I use it for?

Most photographs need a minimum of adjustments to look their best. Straighten, crop, brightness/exposure, etc. You don't need to jump right into pixel-level editing just yet, and besides; that takes quite a bit of learning in order to do it effectively, so no need to grab anything like that unless you are intrigued and want to learn it. Your Canon free download should do everything that actually needs to be done.

 

[JonFZ300]

I agree with Designer. If you're just starting and shooting JPEGs, download Canon's DPP and mess around with straighten/crop, brightness/contrast, shadows/highlights, saturation (global or by color channel), sharpening, and resizing. The only other thing would be color temperature and/or curves, but I'd wait until you have mastered the basics and start shooting raw to delve into that.

 

[JonFZ300]

Exposure, shadows/highlights, straighten and crop. This is a tough image because you'll never get detail out of the reflection, but you can get some out of the foreground and trees. I think my version could use a touch of contrast now that I look at it because it looks a little flat but this is a basic edit that took about 2-3 minutes.

 

[Raw photographer]

Yip i second this opinion, i grew out of other editing software but at the time it's all i needed.

 

[Original katomi]

when you do start to edit in a serious way consider,
A saving in TIFF format, it’s lossless and pretty much universal
B a graphics tablet and pen are much easier to use than a mouse or touch pad
C external storage, you will be amazed how much hdd space you will use

 

[smoke665]

when you do start to edit in a serious way consider,
A saving in TIFF format, it’s lossless and pretty much universal
B a graphics tablet and pen are much easier to use than a mouse or touch pad
C external storage, you will be amazed how much hdd space you will use

Agree with all but "A" which I'll add the following exception. I've recently switched from TIFF to PSD in Photoshop, because they are significantly smaller file sizes when saving layers, and don't balloon with edits. Plus they are more compatible across other other Adobe applications.

On "C" an external drive can actually be used for your master storage. Lightroom stores the edits in the catalog which needs to be on your fastest internal drive, but it doesn't care where you put the master image file as long as it knows where to find it. Ps can also pull the file from an external. My current rig which does a super job, has a 500gb SSD, a 2tb HD, 32gb ram, Genforce graphics with 8gb on card, a 256gb external SSD connected via Thunderbolt port (dedicated scratch disk for Ps), and a WD 4tb cloud server (which I'm rapidly outgrowing). Because I travel a lot I use a WD 4tb Passport for backup.

 

[Ash Telecaster]

Thank you everybody. I am going to spend some time today playing with this.

Thanks Raw, Smoke, Jon for the examples. A picture is worth a thousand words and I'm grateful for your time and generosity!

 

[Raw photographer]

Thank you everybody. I am going to spend some time today playing with this.

Thanks Raw, Smoke, Raw for the examples. A picture is worth a thousand words and I'm grateful for your time and generosity!

No worries anytime.