Thread: First steps in image processing

I also love some of the Topaz Labs plugins.

I use Lightroom for everything. I find that with the latest version I no longer need anything else.

If you do go for LR it's worth tracking down good instructional videos and books since just playing around with it will never reveal all it is capable of.

Adobe have a lot of free resources including a series of videos on LR4. The best book (for me) is Jeff Schewe, The Digital Negative (though the first chapter can seem a little overwhelming). Another one I found useful is Vision & Voice, Refining Your Vision In Adobe Photoshop Lightroom by David Duchemin. As well as discussing the capabilities of LR he selects twenty of his own images and shows how he has used LR to process them. Duchemin also runs and ebook publisher called Craft & Vision and there are three eBooks on LR by Piet Van den Eynde. One is a general work, the two others are on dodging and burning and B&W conversion.

Of course if you decide to go with something other than LR you can ignore all of the above

I use Lightroom 4. Just learning it, and have barely scratched the surface of what it's capable of. I have found the answers to many of my LR and PS questions at Julieanne Kost's blog. Very informative. She works for adobe.

Julieanne Kost. Principal Digital Imaging Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials.

I use Raw Therapee for raw development (I think that it ok and free) and Gimp for image manipulation. Gimp is unfortunately quite hard to learn and there is too many plug-ins. If you want to use gimp this book is quite good:

Amazon.com: GIMP 2.6 for Photographers: Image Editing with Open Source Software (9781933952499): Klaus Goelker: Books

there is new version of that book available.

Gimp is all about layers, masks, selections etc. and they are really hard to gasp.

Yep, Lightroom would also be a perfect alternative. Unfortunately it's not running on Windows XP.

I also have Gimp installed, but the learning curve IS really hard...

Hi all,
very shortly what is the difference between photoshop cs and lightroom? If I understand it right is software coming from the same company

Alex

Originally Posted by Grisu_HDH

Yep, Lightroom would also be a perfect alternative. Unfortunately it's not running on Windows XP.

I also have Gimp installed, but the learning curve IS really hard...

Yes. Gimp is quite powerful but very difficult to use. Besides there are some serious drawbacks with it (notably that it is mostly 3*8 bit program). Can't really recommend it. Works for me (mainly removing backgrounds etc., wavelet noise reduction and wavelet skin smoothing). There is no good choices for me. My tabletop machine is 5 years old and has got Windows XP 32 so even raw therapee doesn't work and Gimp is very slow to use. So I run mainly Ubuntu 64 now.

Maybe in the autumn Windows 8 will be usable and there is suitable time for computer upgrade.

Originally Posted by alaios

Hi all,
very shortly what is the difference between photoshop cs and lightroom? If I understand it right is software coming from the same company

Alex

I've never used Lightroom, but here's my basic take on it. Lightroom is primarily a image cataloging program that has image editing abilities. Photoshop is image editing/illustration software that has rudimentary image cataloging functionality.

Of course it isn't that simple, but that's the basic idea.

Lightroom has leapfrogged Photoshop in some areas in recent years, but lags behind in others. Which one to use depends on how you work and what you want to do to your photos.

Does Lightroom not work with Windows 8? I got a new laptop this weekend, running 8.....and I find it quite er, weird.

Lr room is a pretty powerful photo processor with lots of print setup options. It doesn't allow you to manipulate photos like you can in photoshop however but the processing is pretty great and not too hard to learn, at least the basics. There's a lot under the hood that you can learn if you take the time to learn it.

It also is supposed to work with W8.