Photo processing software

[ts705]

After taking many pictures with my S500 camera, I'm finding that cleaning these up individually is VERY time consuming. It seems that every photo editor has some good features but is missing features or is weak in other areas.

I'm looking for the ultimate photo software - one that allows:

1) multi-photo cleanup/enhancement (contrast, brightness, sharpness, red-eye reduction, etc.)
2) croping and resizing
3) altering resolution/file size
4) format conversion
5) fun stuff (morphing, etc.)
6) ability to remove things I don't want (people, trees, etc in the background)
7) good picture organization on the hard drive.

Are there any programs that do most/all of these (as well as others)?

[CyberDyneSystems]

Have you looked at ACDsee... it does what you describe in batches (except crop of course.. which requires individual attention)

[Hellashot]

I highly, highly recommend Roxio Photosuite. I have v5 but they sell v7 now. I also have Adobe photoshop elements.

With photoshop I found very few "auto" fixes and it left me with a lot of manual adjustments to make the images how they should be. It may be a powerful and popular program, but it's not for the quick and easy.

With the autofix doctor in Roxio, usually all I'll have to do afterwards is take the "midtone" exposure down a click or two. Occassionally it'll flip out a setting or 2 that you'll have to adjust yourself but overall it's so much easier than photo shop.

Cropping and resizing is also easier. You can easily choose a 5:7, 4:6 ratio crop and other sizes, and when you do a custom crop it tells you realtime on the screen what the dimensions of your crop is.

Plus it's fairly easy to set a standard DPI for every image you open. Photoshop defaults to 180 DPI which is useless for printing.

Hellashot

[jukas]

After taking many pictures with my S500 camera, I'm finding that cleaning these up individually is VERY time consuming. It seems that every photo editor has some good features but is missing features or is weak in other areas.

I'm looking for the ultimate photo software - one that allows:

1) multi-photo cleanup/enhancement (contrast, brightness, sharpness, red-eye reduction, etc.)
2) croping and resizing
3) altering resolution/file size
4) format conversion
5) fun stuff (morphing, etc.)
6) ability to remove things I don't want (people, trees, etc in the background)
7) good picture organization on the hard drive.

Are there any programs that do most/all of these (as well as others)?

Take a look at Capture One from www.rawworkflow.com it can do #'s 1-4 and 7. It's a little pricey ($100 for the LE version batches are limited to 20 images) But it's really streamlined my workflow. What I usually do when I have multiple images of the same subject, is do any WB and exposure corrections, and some minor curves or levels work to one image, with 1 click I can then apply all the changes I just did to any image I want, then que them up for batch processing and go get a cup of coffee while it outputs them all into 16bit Tiffs.

An added bonus is C1 never actually touches your raw file, it writes all the modifications you make to a 1kb .work file, so 2 days or 3 years down the line you can undo the changes adn go back to your straight raw file.

[Jesper]

After taking many pictures with my S500 camera...

Take a look at Capture One from www.rawworkflow.com ...

jukas, Capture One is a program from converting RAW images from DSLRs to TIFF or JPEG. It is not very useful, and IMO a waste of money if you have a PowerShot S500. That camera doesn't have RAW at all.

[jukas]

jukas, Capture One is a program from converting RAW images from DSLRs to TIFF or JPEG. It is not very useful, and IMO a waste of money if you have a PowerShot S500. That camera doesn't have RAW at all.

Whoops, learn something new every day. :oops:

[ejwebb]

Check out Photoshop Elements 3 - not sure about batch processing, though. Here's a previous link:

http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=44565

[PhotosGuy]

I'm not sure if it will batch process, but go to GIMP.org & check out the GIMP. It's free & has most PS features.

[gardenstate]

I have not found one software package that does everything well-- but have several that fit my needs and may be worth your consideration...

Batch processing -- many correction options
DCE Autoenhance from http://www.mediachance.com

JASC Paint Shop Pro 9 - excellent all-around imaging software
http://www.jasc.com

For beautiful skin tone correction - Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro plugin
Skintune from http://www.phototune.com

[Goofup]

Elements 3.0 will do all those things... except morphing (but it will warp text).

Heck, for all I know there's a plugin to do that too...