On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Nuno Miguel dos Santos Baeta<[email protected]> wrote: > I own a Mac and prefer to spent some money on a lens, or other > equipment, instead of software - well, I guess that in digital > photography software should be considered (unseen) equipment :-)
Image rendering/processing software, in my opinion, is *at least* as important as your most expensive piece of camera equipment. I have never understood why people paying thousands of dollars for the "best" equipment (like Leica M cameras and lenses) would then piss and moan over the prices at the cheapest place they can find for film and processing (Walmart, Sams Club et al), and similarly the cost of even the most expensive software to do your image management and processing in the digital realm is a bargain compared to the cost of any decent lens. > As far as I know, Photoshop is _the_ image manipulation program. It > seems to be "easy" (compared to GIMP) to use and is on the expensive > side. On the other hand, GIMP is GPLed software but its interface is, > to be nice, awkward. > > None of the differences above are technical - I mean differences that > can change the outcome of an image after manipulation. Are there any > technical differences between Photoshop and GIMP? There are many many many technical differences between GIMP and Photoshop. Not the least of which is that GIMP's color management facilities remain awkward and/or nonexistent, depending on which version you plan to use and how much effort you are going to put into learning how to make it do the right things. And its 8bit/channel makes editing with GIMP fragile. But most photography doesn't need Photoshop really. Photoshop (particularly the Creative Suite product, not Elements) is the master Swiss Army Knife of graphics manipulation software. Less than 10% of the Photoshop use in the marketplace has anything to do with photography, and probably a smaller fraction of Photoshop's functional facilities are actually directly germain to photography too. What photographers need is image management (get the image files from camera to computer, organize them, make them findable, make what they contain understandable, show them to people, print them, prepare and put them on the web for others to see) as well as simple image processing (render and adjust colors, cropping, spot-fix, etc). Make it easy to do so, make it so that there is a regular process and consistency in doing so. Minimize how much disk space the photographs are consuming, make it easy to back up and archive photos. Etc. This is precisely what Lightroom and Aperture are designed to do. I have tested both and prefer how Lightroom does it, but either is a good choice for a Mac OS X user. Either of these two applications are substantially less costly than Photoshop CSx, and Lightroom's facilities for photography are much broader than Photoshop Elements (particularly the Mac OS X version). I use Lightroom myself: all of the photos I've posted this year, with maybe two exceptions, have been processed exclusively in Lightroom. For both my professional and personal work. I strongly recommend it. --- BTW: for anyone interested who is local to my part of California ... I'm teaching workshops at the Mid-Peninsula Media Center in Palo Alto, one in August and one in September. The August workshop (Aug 11-13, 7-10pm) is called "Photoshop: Intermediate For Photographers" and is intended to bring photographers who have some comfort level in Photoshop basics to the next level for photography: curves, layers, color management setup and printing, and workflow will be treated. The September workshop (Sep 15-16-17, 7-10pm) is called "Lightroom: Starting in the Middle" and is intended to help the photographers who have a large body of existing work and skill in using Photoshop understand and take advantage of Lightroom: a discussion of the differences between a Photoshop workflow and using Lightroom as the primary image management and editing tool, along with computer setup and usage concepts, are all included. The workshop size is small and there will be plenty of time for hands-on and personal discussion. More information and registration is available on the Media Center website at http://www.midpenmedia.org/, feel free to send me email to ask more questions too. :-) -- Godfrey www.gdgphoto.com www.flickr.com/photos/gdgphoto www.twitter.com/godfreydigiorgi -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
