Wondering what programmes we use to edit and manipulate our Photos, I have Elements 6 at the moment, but been offered Adobe CS4, know I shouldnt but

I use Photoshop CS5 Extended Edition, Lightroom 2.6, Photomatix Pro (HDR images) and Tintii (selective colour images).

Cheers

Dave.

I mainly use Paint Shop Photo Pro X3 as well as Photomatix Pro for the HDR stuff Chris.

If you can manage to get CS4 at the right price then be prepared to work at getting the most from it as that (and CS5) is the way to go.

Try CS5 from here to see what you think of it.

I use CS4 and Photomatix Pro too.

As another member above said, Corel PSP is one i use along with Elements 6

I have used Photo Elements 6 (Apple) but still tend to use Photoshop 7 (Windows XP) mostly.

Areas of use vast, and admit not really used either with their full potential, but great fun messing about with.

I have used Lightroom since before it was even owned by Adobe or called Lightroom. I have CS2 but I rarely use it mainly for the odd occasion where I want to manipulate several images into one, that sort of stuff that can't be done in Lightroom. Adobe have released v3 of Lightroom yesterday with a host of updates and new features so now Photoshop will probably be used even less.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) is one of the best programs MS make and it's fantastic for panoramas and stitching photos together. What's even better is that it's free.

Irfanview is another free program that anybody who takes photos should have. If you want to do quick resizing, cropping, image manipulation, slide show creation, watermarking an a host of other things either individually or in batches Irfanview is your go to tool.

Whilst I'm on the subject of free software Photoscape is quite a neat program that offers an easy way to do enhancements like filters and frames plus straight forward image editing. It also creates animated GIF's which is handy at times.

I'm not a GIMP user but many people swear that it has equal abilities to Photoshop for way, way less money (free in fact). A lot of the things that have appeared in CS5 like content aware fill have been available as plug ins for GIMP for some time. Make you wonder where Adobe get their inspiration. :-)

If digital noise is a problem have a look at the free Community Edition of Noiseware by Imagenomic. I now use the standalone version (US$30) for it's added customisation and ability to run batches but I did use the free version for several years. Noiseware does a great job.

Edited 9 June, 201016 yr by K1W1