Find out which digital photo software
fits YOUR specific needs
If you have a digital camera or just digital photos, you will need a digital photo software. The choice is huge. This website aims to bring you the information you need to make a choice in the jungle of available products.
Learn how to edit photos and images, how to enhance them.
Learn how to convert, to compress images, how to obtain many special effects.
And learn which software fits your specific needs.
Like for most fields in the software world, you have the "monsters" and many pretty little programs. I believe that one is often better served with a few small programs of 2, 3 or 5MB that fit your needs than with these sluggish monsters of more than 100MB which fill up your computer memory, are hard to learn and bring you a lot of unnecessary features you will never need.
These pages will tell you what features are essential and which software is specially confortable in solving a given task. Like in life, there is no ideal candidate. But knowing what YOU want to do, this guide will help you to find YOUR best candidate.
The different sorts of digital photo software:
With photo editors, you will be able to modify, enhance, resize, cut out your photos and apply an uncountable amount of special effects to them. Most photo editors are also the place where you go when you want to scan an image with your scanner.
 |
Any pixel graphic editor or painting software may be suitable too. In deed your digital photos are nothing else than pixel graphics.
At the page about photo editors you will read what features are really essential and should not be missing in any digital photo software.
|
|
Many (not all) digital photo editors have also good photo viewer capabilities. Thus group 1 and group 2 often meet seamlessly. More about
photo editors.
Primarily they are thought to give you an overview of your photos. They show you every photo in a given folder as small thumbnails. Now, most of them have a few image editor functions too. And some have even better and more convenient image editor functions than dedicated image editors. Some photo viewers will let you set up a quick slide show.
Fundamental batch processors let you define a list of tasks that will be applied tremendously fast to a huge number of pictures. And they do just only that. E.g. You want to resize a collection of pictures to 400 x 300 pixels, add a watermark, sharpen them a little bit. Many editors and viewers have reduced batch processing capabilities too.
These are databases that let you add a short description to your photos, let you keep a catalog of all your photos from your hard disk and from removable drives (cdrom). The best ones let you search for words and browse through thumbnails even if the given cdrom is not in the drive.
A class of programs that aim to correct automatically or semi-automatically your photos. Essentially the exposure, contrast and color. They may have a few parameters that give you a reduced opportunity to influence the result. Depending on which kind of photos you feed them the results may be excellent or somehow disappointing.
6. The highly specialized photo programs
Here we speak about digital photo software that fulfil one specific task. These programs are useful complements to the general editors and viewers. Their benefit is to go thoroughly into the details of the task they are designed to accomplish. General digital photo software,
-even if a similar function is available-, will never offer such a choice of keen adjustments.
