What program do the photographers on here use to edit their photos? Photoshop or Aperture 2? Can someone describe the advantage / disadvantage or either program.
They're really complimentary products, it's not a one-or-the-other choice. Aperture is great at organizing and filing images, along with workaday editing. If you need to do sophisticated image correction, editing or manipulation Photoshop is the tool, unparalleled resources and add-ons available.
depends what im doing, CS3 and lightroom, for cropping to certain aspect ratio's i use the supplied canon DPP. CS3 is a do-it-all, but takes time, and is my choice for a low amount of images Lightroom is better for batches, sorting, RAW workflow is 1000X quicker than opening each file CS3
Lightroom and PS Elements unless you are a high rollin pro like Kovz then you can spend the big bucks on CS3.
I use CS3, Light room, Nikon Capture and Digital photo professional. Digital Pro is the fastest for large Canon RAW file manipulation such as exposure,contrast,shapining,color,chroma, pre set color balances and more. Its is also fast at viewing images in full size and is very fast at batching RAW's into other formats. But it only does Canon formats. Light room will do all of them but not as fast and you have to be careful about eating up your drives when making albums. Photo shop is still king for any manipulation
I can do 90% of whatever I need to do to my pics in Nikon Capture 2. The last 10% in CS3. Get the shot right to begin with and you won't need to do a ton of post processing.
I have CS3 but I only use it to add text to the photos when someone wants. Basically I do no editing.
i just tried a trial version of aperture and find it alot more intuitive for the non-pro, and there are lots of tutorials on apple site. it doesnt stitch panoramas, but for a layperson like me playing with my amateur photos-it is alot easier to handle then ps3
i crop my images some and thats about it. i never have like the photos that someone has taken and "enhanced" the colors to make it look better. its just not what photography is to me, but it might be to others.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is a fabulous program for organizing, batch processing and editing. You can also create nice web galleries with it. Here's an example: http://www.bwhip.com/mom_08_top5/ Photoshop CS4 is incredible for advanced editing, but for most people Photoshop Elements also does a fantastic job for a lot less money.
Knarf nailed it. Everyone else's advice seems spot on too. I work as a graphic designer and IMO most people who buy Photoshop, after some initial experimentation, end up using about ~5% of its capabilities. It's like buying an F16 to taxi to the cornerstore to pick up milk. Save your time and money. Download the trial version of Elements. It is Photoshop-lite and you may find it is far more than you need. If not, most of the concepts and commands are directly transferrable to Photoshop.
