The bad news: too many digital photographers don't bother to organise or retouch their pictures.But take it from your audience; most photos could stand some touch-up, whether it's as little as removing the red-eye or as serious as removing the telephone pole growing out of someone's head. Nor do we want to see shot after shot of the same scene, simply because you didn't take the time to pick the best one.
The good news: you don't have to be an imaging whiz with a Photoshop-size software budget in order to quickly fix and organise your photos.
These software packages were designed with you in mind -- they'll take you by the hand and lead you or let you blast your way through a whole batch -- and all cost a miserly AU$300 or less.
Most of these products try to be end-to-end digital photography solutions, from input to output. That's a lot of territory to cover, so we derive each features rating from what we consider to be the four key constituent parts: organising, retouching (fixing image flaws), creating projects (using the photos as content for something else) and sharing.
Those are the ratings we report in the table below.
| Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 | Corel Paint Shop Pro 9.0 | Microsoft Digital Image Suite 2006 | Roxio Photosuite 7.0 | Ulead PhotoImpact 10.0 | |
Features (overall) |
7.9 | 6.5 | 8.1 | 5.6 | 7.6 |
Organizing |
8 | N/A | 9 | 5 | 8 |
Retouching |
8 | 7 | 9 | 5 | 8 |
Creating projects |
8 | 6 | 9 | 7 | 7 |
Sharing |
7 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 7 |
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allen
13/02/2007 01:59 PM
Most the above are completely untrue, what is required for a photogrpaher that has to edit 1800 photos at one time, is speed and simplicity. Just so basic for something so simple. Firstly the browser and "Edited" photo should be on the same page with a program that comes up with one click. Then "save or save as" {So dam basic!). Then the edited photo should be easily found. Most importantly what is mainly missing is a worthwhile cropping tool, the most important tool to a photographer. Picasa2 does everything but crop at 6x8, the most used size. Very frustrated photographer.
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