One of my goals as a photographer is to share with others what I know and what I learn along the way. I want to make the people around me better photographers, I know that may sound crazy to some folks out there but honestly at the end of the day we should all know how to take a great photo. That being said I am going to start picking topics to do a little knowledge share sessions here on my blog. I hope you all enjoy what I have to share and I truly hope you all learn something that takes your photography to the next level. If you have any questions on a topic please leave me a question in the comments section and I will be sure to get back to you.
This week’s topic is photo-editing software
I get a lot of questions about what equipment I photograph with but I think the number one question I get more often than any other is “what editing software do you use Mandy?” Here is the low down on what I use… now this is not what I recommend you do be sure to read to the end I will give you my opinion then.
Currently I use a combination of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop to do my post processing. My workflow consists of loading images into Lightroom; I filter out the junk and do mild processing in lightroom like adjusting exposure (total amount of light allowed to fall on the subject during a photograph) or saturation (adjusting the colorfulness of an image) on images that need it.
You can learn more about these products and pricing here:
Many times that is all that is needed in the way of post processing, however this day in age people want some flare in their photos and that is where Photoshop comes in for me. I export my images from Lightroom and then selecting key images I open them up one by one in Photoshop and I play! I either tweak settings on my own to get the look I want or I run actions (actions are a series of recorded editing steps to recreate a certain look – so instead of doing it manually every time you can record a process once and at the click of a button use that process again and again –process efficiency at its finest!) on the images to get a certain effect. Going through these steps takes time, sometimes it takes a lot of time! Lightroom is pretty user friendly and I would wager to say the average Joe could pick it up pretty easily however Photoshop is not the case. Photoshop is a very robust tool that takes time to learn, I use it every day and I wouldn’t begin to say I was an expert.
So when folks ask me what I use that is my answer, but when they ask me what I would recommend well that depends on your budget.
Actually what I typically tell people to do is check out Google Picasa
http://picasa.google.com/ this is a
free tool that you download and can begin to use immediately.
Picasa allows you to adjust saturation, exposure, contrast, etc…
plus you can crop, change to black and white and so much more.
One of the coolest things about Picasa is you can create albums and share links to your albums with ease and it is all FREE!
Trust me and give it a try before you run out and spend hundreds of dollars on other editing software!
A few photographers I know took me under their wing to share with me some of their techniques that has inspired me to share with others. This photo of me was taken by CJ Kale of Kona HI CJ is business partners with my childhood friend Nick Selway. You can find more information about them and the amazing work they do here at
http://www.lavaphotoart.com/index.htm
