If you are looking to take your photography to the next level it helps to use a post-processing software to tweak and perfect your images. There are different software programs available to help photographers make their photos look the best they could possibly be, and regardless of how experienced photographers are, they tend to use editing software to fix bad lighting or do a little retouching. Depending on whether you’re looking for cheap software programs or you’re planning to make an investment, here are a few top-notch editing tools that photographers at all skill levels use.
GIMP
GIMP is a free software tools that has been around since 1996 and has been consistently updated since. It can be a little confusing to navigate at first, but it has so many useful capacities that it’s worth it to take the time and learn to use it. With GIMP, you can correct colors, enhance contrast, brightness, sharpen or blur an image, fix perspective problems, and remove red-eye.
Photoshop Elements
Photoshop Elements is a simple tool that helps to prepare you for learning photoshop, which can be a complicated program to use. Photoshop Elements costs $99, which is a lot cheaper than the more advanced software. Elements has every basic photo editing tool available. It has an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to learn and fun to use. It also helps you organize your photos and view them easily. This is a great option for someone who eventually wants to learn Photoshop, because the terms and tools are similar to that of the full version.
Lightroom
Lightroom is another great all-in-one program for photographers. It’s designed for for beginning-to-end photo-editing. It allows you to adjust color, tones, contrast, and basically everything you would need to make your photos look superb. Many professional photographers solely use Lightroom to edit their photos. It has the ability to let you save your frequently used actions as presets which can be used in one click, saving you time. You can also batch edit you photos, which means that if you’re making one change to a group of photos, you can do it in one click rather than performing the same task over and over again.
Photoshop
If you’re a rookie photographer, Photoshop can be overwhelming. However, it’s one of the best ways to do editing because it gives you control. It’s absolutely worth your time and effort if you plan to make photography a profession. Photoshop can be a bit expensive, especially if you buy a license for the entire Adobe Creative Suite. However, licenses cost hundreds of dollars. Luckily, Adobe now offers the Photographer’s package which only costs $9.99/month with a yearly contract. Now that it's affordable, more people are taking the plunge and learning it. Additionally, the Photographer’s package also comes with Lightroom, so you can learn and use both programs. If you would like to edit with Photoshop but don't know where to start, look online for simple editing tutorials to figure out basic techniques. Concentrate on learning one editing technique at a time, and practice until you are comfortable using it.