High Sierra Topix

What image processing application do you use to process image files out of your camera before posting here on this board...if any? Obviously some members just load whatever their camera captured.

How would you tersely describe your skill level using that program?
Do you ever color print those images? Do you have a color printer at home or do you do so at an outside service. If so do you use the same application above to process your images before printing?

Most serious photographers, especially those that make prints eventually end up using Photoshop that is both very expensive and complex. However most people can get along with far less for example Photoshop Elements and many others and do well. This person currently has CS6 installed and will avoid upgrading to CC the subscription service aka Creative Cloud as long as I can. In the mid 90s at the dawn of digital photography I began using Photoshop 3.0.1 and over the years have dabbled with various other imaging programs. Note in that era although there were not yet consumer "digital cameras", there were scanned files from film like Kodak Photo CDs.

Interesting. Our Boise site had a kiosk where you could print full color prints for free. Even saw large printers sitting it the hallways waiting to be "recycled." A friend grabbed a 12mb pic of Virginia Lk from a trip CD, printed and framed it for me.

At home.. I don't like to drop the dime on ink like that. I get in my wife's face for too much printing. For personal use or posting to this site, you don't need more than paint on win10. Can't speak to Apple or phone users.

I use Rawtherapee for raw processing and GIMP on occasion for further refinement. 95% of my PP is with Rawtherapee. I won't pay for a subscription service, so I won't be using any Adobe products except for the lens correction profiles that RT reads just fine.
I don't normally print, but the couple of shots I do have on print were comp'd by my roommate/Landlord who is CEO of a high end photo printing shop.


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camera raw, Photoshop CC, some NIK plugins. I have CS6 on the disk but since I get the whole Adobe CC suite for $20 a year via site license, I'd be stupid to use the old version, although it does get the job done, should I ever have to fall back on a version of Photoshop I own a perpetual license of. /I doubt I could be happy with Elements or LIghtroom. Those are slow and crippled and don't do half the stuff I do on a regular basis.

Skill level? I've used it since version 1.5 in the early 90s, but there's always more to learn. I used to teach Photoshop for a while, mostly for scanning slides during the era before digital cameras become commonplace.

I don't print at home. If I print, I use BayPhoto or make books at MyPublisher.com where I've had pretty good results. Costco prints are used for stuff where quality doesn't matter. They are actually pretty darn good for the money, especially once you have printed a few and get a feel for their color profile. I usually do my business cards and other non-critical stuff there.

Since I make my living typesetting books, I’ve had Adobe Creative Suite since the beginning and thus used Photoshop. I currently use the standalone version of CS6. Like many long-time independent Creative Suite users, I refuse to pay the exorbitant price for the cloud version. Yes, I know that will make me professionally obsolete at some point, but I’m retiring next year. My Photoshop skills have been dictated by my job: I’m quite good at photo restoration and the basics and only mediocre to inept at the more advanced capabilities, such as masking.

Last December, I received a free version of the standalone Lightroom with my digital camera. If the initial image is decent, I only need to use the Basic and Tone Curve adjustments along with the Lens Corrections. I don’t see any reason to use the more advanced features to try to make a bad photo look better. I find I get better dynamic range more easily in Lightroom than Photoshop. So I do the initial processing in Lightroom and the final minor tweaking in Photoshop.

For all my prints, I only use West Coast Imaging in Oakhurst. Their print quality is unsurpassed as far as I’m concerned. At every show I’ve been in, people ask where I get my prints done because the quality is so good. Their drum scans of slides are fantastic, capturing all the detail. Until they changed their policy a couple of years ago regarding the minimum order, I used their printmakers to create the final print; they were much better at it than I am and I could consult with them on the phone. The conversations were usually a version of “make it look like the original slide” since I only had what I considered my best images drum scanned. Now, I either take the drum scan and process it in Lightroom/Photoshop or process the digital in Lightroom/Photoshop and upload the photo to them for printing. I only have a very small number of photos printed each year.

I've always used Lightroom. It's much less complex than photoshop yet is quite powerful. Luckily I've become much better at capturing images where I don't often have to do any editing.

I do all my basic photo editing of digital photos (adjusting exposure & contrast) in iPhoto on the Mac. For enlargements, I do additional processing in Photoshop CS6 - it has better controls for levels, shadow/highlights, and sharpening. I like to do "local contrast enhancement" using the sharpening controls. For scans of old negatives and slides, I exclusively use Photoshop. They always need color balance adjustments in addition to exposure/contrast, and often benefit from saturation adjustments. I've also learned how to mask skies in my scans so I can apply "smoothing" to reduce the grain in the sky. For these old scans, I've even used masks to lighten up faces in shadow without lightening the whole photo. I mostly print enlargements at Costco, who publish ICC color profiles for their printers that you can use in Photoshop. I get pretty good results at Costco right up to the 20x30 inch posters.
-Phil

I had been using Photoshop Elements 10. A few months ago, the Windows 10 update made Elements 10 imposible to use (menus are now blank). So now I am looking for new software. I read the stuff on Elements 15. The reviewers preferred Elements 15 over Lightroom. There seems to be a lot of gee-wiz stuff for people pictures and artsy stuff in Elements 15 that I would never use. Is there a particular software that is more specifically suitable for landscape photography? I would say that only about one out of a hundred photos I take have people in them. Apparently you can buy a version without video capability. I never take videos, so that would be OK with me.

My camera has the capability to shoot RAW, but lately I have just been using the automatic setting. The camera menus are on the screen, and I really have trouble seeing the screen, so I give up and just shoot "auto". Nevertheless, I may start using RAW settings again, so would like to be able to do those too. Software that came with the camera (Cannon) has a basic probgram that works with RAW.

On thing I have not been able to figure out in Elements 10 is how to rectify the lense distortion when I stitch photos together. Supposedly, Elements 15 does this easier and better.

Before I buy Elements 15, I would like to ask if any of you know of something within the same price range that would be better for my purposes.

http://www.techradar.com/news/photograp ... re-1284627

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369237,00.asp

http://www.toptenreviews.com/software/m ... -software/

I mainly use LR and PS, but occasionally use some others.

Thanks for those links. I skimmed the information. It will take me a while to really digest all that information.