I just bought a new laptop (Compaq Presario B1275TU w/ Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T8100). I've owned a Nikon D80 for around a year and now I'd like to find out what types of software I should be purchasing to do some photo editing, such as taking away backscatter, adding/subtracting light, etc. I'm a novice when it comes to software for photo-editing. I've heard of Photoshop Elements 6 and ACDSee Photo Manager 10 but I don't know which one works best for beginners. I don't want to spend too much money. Thanks for your help! 
Shooting Technique, Workflow and Editing / Archived topic
Software for editing photos
Started by wudai ·
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Read-only discussion
Software for editing photos
8 posts
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For quick color, sharpness and exposure correction of RAW images.....you will be amazed at what Lightroom can do.
I personally use Photoshop CS3 to deal with backscatter etc.....
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Photoshop has been the tool of choice for years.
However it is expensive and is a very wide and deep program. There are reported to be over 1400 commands in it and it you don't use it frequently, you forget - at least I do.
I believe you can do 85% of all in light room and if you want a few extra 'tools' add Photoshop elements.
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Do what I did and go to the Adobe website and download a free 30 day trial for each of the programs.
I used CS3, Lightroom and Elements.
In the end I preferred Elements.
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Photoshop CS is amazing but its not exactly intuitive - and as Okuma says, if you don't use it, you forget it.
Photoshop Elements 6.0 is the Lite version of Photoshop and has most of the useful commands. Its still not very intuitive but is easier than the full blown version - just about. It also contains the latest version of Photoshop Album which I have always found an excellent, simple cataloguing system.
PIG004s idea of using the free trial downloads is a good one - and worth doing. You might also try Capture NX which is Nikon's editing program. Its reasonably intuitive and very good for manipulating areas of a picture - other than by using a Select command.
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Don't forget the GIMP. It's far more feature rich than Photoshop elements and there are many plugins available for it including panotools (correcting lens distortion etc) and UFRAW (importing Raw). Best of all, it's open source and absolutely free!
It's not a replacement for Aperture-Lightroom or Photoshop, but if you interest is casual use rather than a power user, it's worth a look. Actually, the only reason I use Photoshop rather than the GIMP is because the GIMP doesn't support 16bit imagery. This isn't an issue if you're shooting JPEG's.
Cheers,
Mike
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Starting out with a brand new high performing computer, I see little reason to mess with anything besides Lightroom initially. (I'd do Aperture if it were a Mac)
More than just editing, it allows you to start from scratch with good organization of your photographs, and a good solution for handling import, categorizing and organizing, editing, and output to printer, web etc. When you consider everything these programs (Lightroom and Aperture) do, I think they're a bargain.
Another thing to consider is that because of Lightroom's popularity there are a huge number of tutorials and other resources to help get you up to speed quickly.
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A good free too for processing RAW images is RAW therapy
And as someone else said, GIMP is great (and free too).. photoshop users will find it very familiar
And there's also GIMPshop which is made to look just like photoshop
And if you want to stitch an underwater panorama try Hugin
