As a new owner of a Digital SLR I have been very excited about learning new digital photography skills. I have talked to a number of friends and commit to posting about all the cool free software I have found useful in my new endeavour. Here is my caveat: these are all free, and in a sense you get what you pay for. All of the software I am suggesting is good, and in my mind, fairly polished. However, all of these programs have less documentation and require a little more effort to learn to use then comparable marketed products. That statement is in no way an indication that they are inherently less functional but they may not be quite as easy to use or learn. In any case, they can't be too difficult as I have more or less figured them out.
First and foremost is the GIMP. For those that don't want to spend $600 on Photoshop get the GIMP. Gimp is an open source photoshop alternative. There is little I have found that cannot be accomplished with the GIMP. From the GIMP webpage:
"GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages."
GIMP is probably the most powerful free computer art program available. There are a few big differences when compared to Photoshop with respect to commercial printing, RAW image management, and vector drawing. But for my, and I believe almost every casual users, purpose it is far more then I could ever use. However, the enormous amount of power under the hood of the GIMP comes at a cost; it is not simple to use. However there is a rapidly improving manual as well as a wonderful set of videos that teach the GIMP available on the web. The videos from www.meetthegimp.org will teach you much of what you need to know for fairly complicated image editing as well computer art creation. The Gimp is definitely worth checking out.
Many people have no use for using the RAW picture format. However, if you are new to Digital SLRs or really want to get as much as possible out of your images you should consider it. In brief a RAW format image is the information directly out of your cameras image sensor. It contains quite a lot more data than even high quality JPEGs. This additional informationo often contains details that have been lost in shadows or appear white in brightness. By using the RAW format you can often recover some of this detail that would otherwise get lost in the JPEG. The catch with RAW formatted images is that the files are proprietary and generally not accessible to programs like GIMP. This is where Raw Therapee comes in. Raw Therapee is a program used to import and enhance RAW photos prior to converting them to a standard format. RAW Therapee will import the generic data from your camera and then allow you to enhance it by modifying the exposure, brightness, contrast, color saturation and many other. As you may have guessed when you take a picture that is underexposed and increase the exposure it will cause any properly exposed regions of the image to become over exposed. To solve this problem RAW Therapee has a number of shadow and highlight filters that will only affect dark or light regions respectively, thereby allowing you to fix only what is broken. Lastly, if you have tried doing exposure adjustment on any of your pictures in other programs you may have found that your images become noisy and blotchy. Raw Therapee has a suite of tools used to sharpen soft edges as well as blur or smooth noisy regions. All of these features take a while to master but you can quickly become capable of producing outstanding images as well as fixing your poorly exposed shots. This is a very slick tool and certainly worth checking out. You can download the RAW Therapee Website There is a great manual that explains how each each of the settings works and makes recommendations for initial values. I will post more on this topic and will include the default settings I use for my Nikon D40.
Any of you who have owned a Canon Point and Shoot camera may have used the Canon Photostitch tool to make panorama images. Autostitch is a free, and it my mind much better, image stitching tool. In Photostitch the user had to position the images and indicate overlapping regions so the software could build the panorama. Autostitch does all of the work for you. You need to take a series of images that overlap enough to leave no voids. Autostitch will then take the images align them, distort them as necessary to create smooth transitions, adjust exposure and stitch the images into a single file. No muss, no fuss, just a series in and single large image out. It is perhaps the single most amazing single purpose program I have ever used. I highly recommend it and make a posting showing a few of the images I have created. The download is a demo version but is not limited in any way.
I am sure many of you have had the experience of taking a picture of a beautiful high contrast scene like a sunset only to find that any one exposure does not capture what your eyes saw. This is a fundemental problem with current digital camera sensors. However, digital software has created a means to solve this problem. High Dynamic Range or HDR images utilize different exposures of the same scene in an effort take the best of each and create a single image that more accurately represents the original scene. FDR Tools is a program that does the combination process to create HDR images. There is a learning curve as it is very easy to create exagerated images that look ridiculous. With a little practice you can create some really great effects. Go here to read about and download the latest free basic version.
I hope you enjoy these programs. I know that I have enjoyed learning them as well as the results they have created for me. I will post a few images that demonstrate the features of each program.
