Looking for a software recommendation

I've been quite happy with my combination of iPhoto (for organizing and first-round raw editing) and GIMP (for further touch-ups). Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac at home, and I'm tired of doing my photo work during my lunch break.


The long version:
Canon's ZoomBrowser doesn't seem to work right in Win7 64, unfortunately, and I was never much of a fan of it anyway.

While I'm willing to pay some for a really nice piece of software, I'm NOT willing to just keep buying things in hopes I'll eventually find something that works, and I'm not willing to pay what Adobe charges for basically anything. If I was a professional, sure... it would be part of the cost of doing business. But I'm not... I'm a hobbyist, and I'd rather spend my money on my camera. I might be willing to buy Lightroom, if it will handle downloading from the camera or CF card and organizing -- I haven't been able to confirm that it will work with my old 20d.

I don't do a lot of editing. My usual workflow is as follows:
1) Use iPhoto to extract my pictures from a CF card -- I don't normally plug the camera straight into the computer on the Mac. I'd like to avoid it in Windows, as well.
2) Sort the photos into events.
3) For each photo I want to process:
3a) Adjust color if necessary.
3b) Crop if necessary
3c) Export as jpg, large size and maximum quality.
4) Open it in GIMP
4a) If necessary, straighten it.
4b) Do whatever sharpening I want done. Usually that means running the USM filter at fairly limited settings.
4c) Save it.

Basically the only editing I'm doing is to tweak the color, crop, and sharpen. I clearly don't need PhotoShop for that. I don't like the "sharpen" function in iPhoto... if I did, I probably wouldn't bother with GIMP for 99% of my photos.

The short version:

So: Is there a decent program, similar in function to iPhoto, that can be had for a reasonable price? Lightroom runs around $80 for me (I'm a student, and I work for a state university full time... I pretty much get all the possible discounts), and I might be willing to go that high if enough people are enthusiastic.

Ideally I'd like something I can synchronize between Windows and Mac, and maybe linux, but that's pretty low on my list of wants, and nowhere on my list of needs.

Thanks in advance!

Lightroom is your best bet. It has everything you just listed and more. It should work with your 20D as it's updated with almost all digital cameras. It can be set to import automatically when you plug in your CF card and you can meta tag and sort before importing your photos. It's also faster than most editing programs because it applies the edits once you export the photos. Editing is very easy as well but it isn't as robust as photoshop which is great.

Play with the LightRoom 3 trial and see if you like it.
LR4beta is supposed to be released on Jan 10th, so I wouldn't buy LR3 unless you see a free upgrade to LR4.
If it doesn't recognize your Raw files, you can always convert to DNG and import them.

Thanks, guys. I did just now notice that they've actually made a free trial available... I'll install it and give it a shot. Of course, color correcting my cheap laptop may be an issue, but I'll see how it works out. Getting good software is the first step. I can add a better monitor later if need be.

Also, thanks for the info on LR4 -- my usual pattern is to buy something the day before it goes completely obsolete and unsupported, so I should probably buy LR3 this weekend.

Well, just because a beta is coming doesn't mean the release is imminent.
It still might be a few months before the final release.

Another +1 for Lightroom. It will most likely eliminate GIMP from your workflow entirely, since you can also straighten, sharpen, etc., in LR. It also has local brushes you can use for sharpening, dodging/burning, skin smoothing, etc. It can't do pixel-level editing like Photoshop, but that doesn't seem to be a need for you - and you always have GIMP to fall back on for that.

Merlin, where is your info that LR4 Beta is coming on the 10th of January coming from?

Alex, if there is such a beta you'll be able to use that beta until either a new beta comes out or LR4 is released. For $80, LR is worth every penny and more. Consider how much you've spent on camera gear and it's a fraction. What I found with my 20D and especially my G10 is that having LR is like getting a whole new camera. High ISO shots that were pointless before could REALLY be improved by the LR3 noise reduction. The $100 I paid for Lightroom would have been money well spent if that's all it did. Fortunately, it does so much more.

Download the trial, see if LR4 really materializes before the 30 days are up and go from there.

vondo wrote in post #13640379
Merlin, where is your info that LR4 Beta is coming on the 10th of January coming from?....

I'm guessing Merlin heard something similar to what's being discussed in this thread.

Veemac wrote in post #13640433
I'm guessing Merlin heard something similar to what's being discussed in this thread.

Thanks!

It was on a different site where the announcement had a LR4b on it.
Funny enough, it now says "Surprise" instead.
Someone got wise to it and changed it.

amckenzie4 wrote in post #13640239
Thanks, guys. I did just now notice that they've actually made a free trial available... I'll install it and give it a shot. Of course, color correcting my cheap laptop may be an issue, but I'll see how it works out. Getting good software is the first step. I can add a better monitor later if need be.

Also, thanks for the info on LR4 -- my usual pattern is to buy something the day before it goes completely obsolete and unsupported, so I should probably buy LR3 this weekend.

You know, LR gets recommended, and in fact I myself am a died-in-the-wool LR user, and have no problem recommending it to a lot of people, but for people just getting underway in post-processing, it may not be the best choice.

So looking at your post, yes, Lightroom could meet your "basic" processing needs, but it could be overkill if you aren't shooting a "volume" of photos that you then want to process and "organize" and such. However, since you can get it for $80, well, that's hard to beat...

Anyway, are you shooting Raw or Jpegs? That can matter. You mention "Exporting to jpegs", which is language that implies that you're shooting Raw, is that so? If so I presume you are using a Gimp plug-in for Raw processing?

Just so you know, you can install and use Gimp on your Windows laptop.

And then, you say "Canon's ZoomBrowser doesn't seem to work right in Win7 64" and I wonder about that -- it seems to work fine in my Win7 64 laptop...what seems to not work right about it?

But, unless and until you decide to go with Lightroom, I'd really encourage you to get the Canon software up and running. ZoomBrowser is a "little" part of things. For instance, the EOS Utility can handle downloading images from your camera, although for the 20D I'd seriously advise that you get a card reader -- you will be amazed at how quickly a card reader can download those pics compared to the old 20D USB connection! And, both ZoomBrowser and Lightroom are set up with utilities to download from a card reader.

And then, ZoomBrowser isn't the best app for your editing needs. It has a few things but is really inadequate even for the things you have in mind. Canon provides Digital Photo Professional (DPP) for your editing needs and in fact it will do all that you mention. I'd encourage you to install it and check it out. With DPP, you don't need to mess with ZoomBrowser unles you want to use its downloading functions. DPP has a browser so you can just open it to view and edit your photos.

There are a ton of basic editing apps out there if you shoot jpegs, and even ones that you can use to view Raw files, but as far as "developing" Raw files you need an app that can do that. Besides DPP, yes, Lightroom is great at that. You might also take a serious look at Photoshop Elements. It has a built-in Raw processor and then it has an editor that has a lot of powerful functions that Lightroom (and DPP) don't have, and price-wise it's a good value.

That's true. I used a combination of DPP for "developing" and digikam (on linux) for organization. At the time I quit using DPP (3.6 or so, I think) it was not even able to straighten a photo, but I understand it's been improved substantially in the mean time.

Ah... details I forgot to include.

Yes, I shoot RAW only.

I don't exactly recall what the problem I had with ZoomBrowser was: I know I wasn't able to get images off the camera, and when I tried it last week it didn't seem to start at all. About a year ago when I got the new laptop, I spent about a month trying to get things set up so I could adjust the camera settings (adding my name to the EXIF in particular), and neither I nor the techs at Canon could solve the problem. I finally borrowed someone's XP laptop, installed the Canon utilities, changed the setting on my camera, and uninstalled all the utilities. The guy at Canon told me that many of the utilities just plain don't work in Win7 64. That could have changed over the last year. As a side note, I'm an IT guy by profession, so while I may have been screwing it up, it's not quite as likely as it could be.

I have GIMP installed, and I'm using a sort of awkward combination on the laptop of hand-copying (using the CF reader) into a temp folder, using DPP to figure out what image is what, hand-moving the images into separate folders, then doing basic color/exposure/croppin​g in DPP, and sharpening in GIMP. The problem has really been that DPP doesn't seem to do sorting in any way I like, and even when I had zoombrowser working it just opened up other programs to do the editing I wanted to do. I want it to be at least as "all-in-one" as it is on my Mac at work.

Well, ZoomBrowser won't do the editing part, in fact it won't do any editing on a Raw file. DPP will do the tasks you mentioned quite well, but by itself won't handle downloading/naming/sor​ting the files. I don't know why you are having problems with ZoomBrowser and the Utilities -- you might try downloading and installing the upgrades for the three apps from the Canon site -- go to any current camera, to the Software section, choose your OS (Win7 64 is listed) and download and install the three to get the most up-to-date functionality!

Ok, I downloaded the trial version of LR3.

The first thing I see is that they've taken the histogram, and used a UI for it that's so different that I can't figure out how to do anything with it. I've got a photo with big blank spots at both ends of teh histogram. In DPP, iPhoto, and UFRaw (the GIMP plugin I used to use) I'd drag the edges of the histogram in toward the peaks, to remove the empty areas. That would increase the range of colors visible, more or less. In LR, dragging anything in it seems to... alter the exposure?

After an hour or so I've managed to learn to just pretend the histogram isn't clickable and play with the sliders, and I'm starting to figure out how to get to the same results I got with iPhoto and DPP. It seems odd that a tool by the biggest name in editing software does things differently from, in my experience, everyone else. I'm sure there's a reason -- maybe even a good one! -- but it seems odd.

I suspect a lot of my frustration at the moment is that the other three programs I've used shared a lot of interface conventions, and LightRoom doesn't really seem to share much with them. I'm not sure why, but it does seem to be true. I'll keep poking at it for a day or so, but I'm not as enthusiastic as I was an hour ago.