Picture Window Pro.....I'd say that any program made by Digital Light and Color is worth taking a close look at. They make some of the most effective PS Plugins that I have found, especially Color Mechanic Pro, an indespensable tool for architectural photographers who need to work in mixed lighting situations.
Thanks,
Kirk
at age 73:
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep"
Chris, with the gimp on linux... hope do you profile the monitor or use ICC profiles..?? I've been holding off migrating to linux cos i couldn't find an answer...
PWP was written by a photographer and using photography (darkroom) metaphors. You do not have layers, you have masks. You can apply color filters that match photographic filters. It has had full 16 bit processing since day 1, until photoshop which only got it recently. It is small and loads fast. Until CS and CS2 it had a lot more photo tools than photoshop - lens correction, perspective correction, etc. Now that photoshop has copied those the advantages are not as great. If you have darkroom experience, it is much faster to learn and use. I have used it for years and despite using Photoshop CS2, I still go back to PWP very often - it is terrific for color correction. It really depends on how much time you want to spend on the computer. If you want to emulate the darkroom experience, PWP cannot be beat. If you want to indivudally tweak each tree in the landscape and add a little artificial texture to the bark, photoshop is a better bet. You can do good work in PWP within hours of starting with it, it takes weeks to months to get any decent results out of photoshop. You do not get all the plugins and toys, some of which are very good, you do with photoshop, but hey, you could buy lenses instead with the money you save!
Check out Norm's tutorials, they really show what you can do. The better the negative, the less you need photoshop, and the bigger the format, the less you need a zillion tools to sharpen and tweak your image to make your pictures look like they are sharp and have a good tonal range. I think Ctein is right - even a photoshop user should have a copy of PWP for some things, and it costs less than some plugins. OTOH, the new healing tools in CS2 are hard to beat when there is crap on the negative or powerlines across your vista.:-) I thought I would switch to CS2 but as I use it more, I think PWP is better for most of what I do, but somethings like healing are much better in CS2.
Ed Richards
http://www.epr-art.com
Don's orig post was regarding a Mac program. GIMP and PWP are PC only are they not?
GIMP was originally Linux only. It is now available on many platforms. PWP is Windows only.
Photoretouch Pro is a Mac program. Here are the Tutorial movies for the program.
www.binuscan.com/us/prp/tutorial/chapters.html
"You do not have layers, you have masks"
Which aren't interchangeable. Photoshop has masks too (either quickmasks or channel masks). Layers provide whole other ranges of possibilities. And not just for artificial effects, which don't interest me at all ... i'm talking about basic image work, like tonal and color adjustments and sharpening, which intelligent use of layers can give incredible control over without any destructive editing.
Photoshop is to photo software what a view camera is to photo hardware.
There's really nothing out there that comes even close to Photoshop. I've been using it steadily since 2.0 and I've tried many of the other products that have come out before and since. The learning curve isn't steep if you stick to the areas you need and ignore the areas you don't. Don't blame the tool for being too powerful. How steep is the price, really In other words how much is it worth to get the image exactly how you want it? If you could buy a new piece of camera gear, let's say a specialty lens, that would give you exactly what you needed for the shot but took some time to learn, how much trouble would you have justifying the purchase? I'm not saying that to be snide, please don't take it as such, just purely from an economics standpoint. Would a new $600 specialty lens that gave you exactly what you, your client or your patron needed be worth it vs. something that was cheaper but didn't have the full potential to get it exactly right? Figure out the equation and you've got the answer. That's always been how I approach these things. No one else can figure it out for you.
If you want a point-and-shoot in either department, they are out there and the results are what you would expect. If you want to get the most out of your photos, you need to be willing to make an investment in time. Corel makes a number of products, Paint Shop Pro is out there, GiMP is another. I've used them and always gone back. Then again, your software needs may be very modest and in that case you need but throw a rock.
PWP uses a different paradigm - you get a series of new images, rather than saving everything in one image. My problem with layers is that on a huge LF file, the layers soon make the file too large to use in the Windows memory space.
Ed Richards
http://www.epr-art.com
Ed,
You might want to look into the Layer Transfer technique I described in this thread:
largeformatphotography.info/lfforum/topic/501003.html
The process makes it possible to work with more layers with limited memory.
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