UKH

Looking to get more out of my photos and am debating whether to upgrade to something better than iPhoto.

Googling just lands me with more questions than answers. Is there a generally ‘preferred’ option for outdoor types?

One that is free usually works for outdoor types.

I use Adobe all apps but that is quite expensive. Their photography plan is about £10 a month and should give you what you need. 

If you are using a phone to take photos then Apple photos or Google photos is probably good enough. If you have a camera then then Adobe Lightroom opens up a whole new world.

Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Plan - the £10/month one

https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/photography.html

You will get as many answers as photograpers!

Lightroom & photoshop are/were the industry standards. I still use them, very powerful and easy to find out how to use them through YouTube tutorials. 

However, lightroom is often slow, and other options are very good and cheaper, or even free. 

I use Capture One Express with my Sony camera and get some nice results. It is free.

I have had a play with Skylum Luminar, which also gave nice results but kept crashing.

A friend uses On1 and rates it highly.

I use Adobe Elements, it's a one off payment for the software rather than having to sign up to a monthly plan. I think you should be able to buy it for around £60.00.

It's essentially a slimmed down version of Photoshop, but I don't feel as if I'm missing anything and only use a fraction of what Elements can actually do. Currently on Elements 15, so probably about time I upgraded to Elements 2020 as I feel I've got my moneys worth out of it.  

I use Capture One Pro for Fuji. I also have Luminar 3 for when using my other cameras.

I use lightroom. It's great but still constantly learning more and more about it!

Not too cheap but I personally think it's worth it. Pretty happy with the difference I can get between RAW and final edit now.

I use the non-subscription Adobe Elements too.

Thanks all. I have a Sony A5100. Not a great camera but gives decent enough results given my meagre skills.

Was looking at the Capture One software from Jessops, but at more than £200 seems a bit expensive for me.

I’ll check out some of the free options you’ve all suggested.

Ta 😀

Depends...

On what you want. As in do you want digital asset management (i.e. let to app worry about where the pic you're after is, you find it with tags etc.) or do you want to edit them pics, remove some unwanted topropes from the pics and so on?

For the former, I still think Lightroom is the industry default... but others are catching up (just not there yet). Newest version only via subscription, but older LR5 or LR6 can still be bought as licences (2nd hand) and are perpentual. Won't support newest camera formats and have all the fancy editing tools... but get the job done (I have LR5, which means that I need to convert them pics from my newest camera to DNG-format before I import them to LR). Looking at migrating to either Skylum Luminar (but I'll wait until 4 is out and what their DAM module looks like and works) or more likely to DarkTable (opensource alt.).

If the latter, then it's still Adobe Photoshop... But a lot more options are available (some free like GIMP).

That being said, Photos (not iPhotos anymore ) is a reasonably good asset manager, and stuff like Luminar integrates to it for editing... so that is a valid option (if you don't know any better, reg. asset management).

I just use Windows Photo Gallery which came with my laptop. It's been repalced with something inferior in Windows 10, but can still be downloaded for free. It seems to do ok with my Fuji jpegs, but I know that I ought eventually to take the plunge with RAW (I bought Lightroom but just find it too intimidating at the moment!)   

That’s interesting, I’d always assumed you’d edited your photos. They’re usually really good. You’re obviously just talented and lucky (right place, right got time) with a decent camera.

Gives me hope

Thanks. Happy with Photos (d’oh!) for organising. More looking for something to see if I can get more out of my photos through editing. 

I use Lightroom plus the adobe cloud storage. It’s the 21st century, the cloud is the way forward as far as I’m concerned. 
 

I have the adobe photography package but I basically just use Lightroom CC. If any of my photos need more editing than that can provide, it’s probably not a very good photo to begin with. 
 

I also have one of the camera specific Capture One releases, but it’s too fiddly for asset management for me (/I don’t know what I’m doing) so I’ve stuck with adobe for easy workflow.

I edit them with Windows Photo Gallery!

Photoshop Elements(its version 11, I think) that I bought cheap when a newer version came out.

I also use Affinity as a RAW converter

I use GIMP too. For a free programme it is very good

If I'm working with jpegs only sometimes I'll use Photoscape. It is limited compared to the other but it is also free and just about the easiest editor anywhere.

Dave

Ah. I’d assumed that was more of an organiser than editor. That makes more sense.

Still great photos though 👍🏻

It's actually rubbish for organising since they changed it to make it impossible to drag and drop thumbnails into the order you want and then renumber them. My ad hoc solution was to use Picasa to do that.

Adobe £10/month CC plan with Lightroom and Photoshop for me. 

Lightroom got 90% off what I do and Photoshop for the rest.

Been using Lightroom since 2006, have gone over to subscription model (reluctantly).

It is a great piece of software.

But would I go straight to it now if I had to start over.  Probably not.

Do I know what I would go for - no.

So not much help, sorry.

Could you explain why Capture one for Fuji?

(Getting into my second hand X-T1 and not sure what to use for editing)

Capture One (v10 I think) -- probably not as flexible as lightroom/photoshop, but does what I need nicely and quickly, handles the boundaries of the sensor well (very low noise), and is non-subscription.

I think Capture One Pro does a better job of showing colour than Lightroom does, certainly for Fuji. I don't know if thats the same for other makes. And as Fuji does colour so well I want something that will do it justice. 

Thanks. I’m thinking maybe I’ll try the free version first and if it merits the expense I could go Pro, Sony version

Use something free to see if you can be bothered to actually edit your pics, then ask the question again.  There are multiple amounts of editing people tend to do:-

1)nothing, shoot jpeg

2) shoot jpeg and use whatever comes with their PC to do basic changes to the whole picture e.g. contrast / brightness / saturation changes

3)shoot RAW and use whatever comes with their PC to do basic changes to the whole picture e.g. contrast / brightness / saturation changes

4) shoot RAW and use a proper editor like photoshop to apply selective edits to parts of images or erase unwanted items / change backgrounds / swap people's heads over etc.

5) shoot RAW and use specialist software / photoshop plugins to do certain jobs like noise reduction or black&white processing in addition to other things.

I think you should be able to find photoshop CS2 for free. It might be old but it will still let you do (4) enough to know if you want to invest some money.  Some software works better for certain camera types, so find out what works well for Sony-generated images.

Cheers. I shall investigate.

I’m usually a 1 or 2. But I’ve only just heard that jpegs deteriorate as you edit them. As I get used to my camera I’d like to think I can pull some half decent photos out of it, with some post edit improvements.

They don't deteriorate, exactly. It's just repeated saving and reopening the file in between edits that might result in degradation, since the JPEG is generally a lossy compression. And of course there is less info than RAW files in the first place. If you do any editing with JPEGs, just don't save and reopen the file after every step, but do your edits all at once and "save as" to a different final file (with max quality) and keep the original. Still not as good as RAW workflow of course, but quite ok for many users.

I may well be missing something, but isn't any file just a string of ones and zeros, so why would a jpeg file get degraded by closing and opening more than any other file?

Degradation can occur only if opened, edited and re-saved. Not just opening and viewing.

See https://www.lifewire.com/jpeg-myths-and-facts-1701548 for better info.

Ok thanks. So it is the recompression after editing that causes degradation? I tend to fiddle around editing a photo, but, for the best ones, once I have it how I want, start again and do it in fewer steps in one go.

No need to start again unless the app you used to edit the pic saved it After each step (or you did). AFAIK Most don’t do that, so the amount of editing steps has no affect.

odd ball here

I use Corel photo X5

never tried any of the Adobe products as theyre too expensive for me. Tried Gimp but not as easy to use as corel so ive stuck with that

Thanks again.

Learning loads here, glad I asked.

Another few possibles:

If you end up with a camera, learn how to manage the settings so that jpgs straight from the camera look the way you want (most of the time anyway)

If you decide you need to do more processing, try the camera manufacturer's own processing software especially for raw conversion.

For a free Lightroom-ish package take a look at Darktable

Finally throw your arms up in despair at what you're doing and buy into the Adobe Photoshop / Lightroom package and join the rest of us who have sold our souls .... but it may take you a while to get there!

LOL

I’m finding the ‘fine’ jpegs straight out the camera to be pretty good, compared to my previous camera. Particularly when playing about with the cameras settings.

Just wondering if the move to RAW will be the next step up.

Thanks

DxO Optics. Amazing correction modules for all my lenses and bodies.

Fuji jpegs are rightly considered superb and I've even read articles by a couple of professional photographers who say they use them in many situations. However, I find them very "flat" straight out of the camera whatever the settings, but they do seem very malleable in processing. In fact I have found I get the best out of them by going for the most neutral camera settings and then processing as required myself.

Indications you *might* be ready for raw file processing would include for example:

You find yourself with high contrast scenes (bright cloud, dark land) and when you try to adjust the image you end up with noise in the shadows and bands across the sky.

You feel the need to sharpen images a bit more than your camera permits, or need to make local adjustments to the sharpening

You're getting fed up tweaking the camera settings for each scene you encounter

These are only indicators, not definitive needs. Maybe the thing to do would be to set your camera to save both raw and jpg files each time you press the shutter release and have a play with the raw files (which will look very bland compared to the jpg version) and see if you are motivated or put off by the processing.

You certainly don't NEED to save and work on raw files but they are definitely more flexible than jpgs. Correspondingly more work too.

Thanks. Maybe I’m expecting more from processing and actually the way to improve my photos would be to learn to get more from my camera first.  

Yes, you can't beat getting the exposure right in the first place!

I have looked into this and think it may be (at least a bit) overstated. I am sure when JPEGS were developed the main aim was to reduce file sizes - but not at the expense of gradually destroying the image - they were photographers after all.

Compare these - one is the original RAW file and one is a high res JPEG opened, tweaked a bit, saved and closed, repeated ten times - both viewed at 100%. Can you tell which is which?

https://pbase.com/chris_craggs/image/170169582

Chris

You’re pretty correct. The degradation will require numerous Re-saves to come apparent. The best place to see this would be light gradients in the sky or something. 
 

you can test this be using a higher compression setting and then comparing said gradients. 

Which i guess is where much of the original compression took place anyway,

Chris

it's .png screenshot file, so its hard to tell

Paint.net served me well for lots of years, especially since Adobe introduced subscription payment and Paint.net... well, is still free.

Ta 

Another vote for Lightroom/Adobe on the monthly plan. I really ought to make a bit more use of some of the features and its organisational stuff, but it works for me. I edit all my photos, though not heavily. If you did invest in this, I'd do what I still haven't done, and actually try to learn how to make the most out of it to make the tenner-a-month worth it for more than just organisation. (kicking myself up the arse to take my own advice...)

I previously used GIMP, which was absolutely fine, just less intuitive. For quite a while I just used Windows editor, it really depends what you want to do (that was mostly just cropping with tiny tweaks).

I've all but given up on Lightroom, I have the last version you could buy rather than rent.

I've never really got into the whole library / catalogue site of it.

I now use Affinity Photo on my iPad, it is inexpensive and very powerful, especially for RAW processing and iPad interface is particularly good and easy to use

https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/affinity-photo-for-ipad-review

Thanks. I’m wholly committed to all things Mac do will def have a look at that. Was.also considering RawPower which I’m told syncs well with Photos.

Luminar also has an extension to photos. So might be an option