I’m still in the process of selecting, editing, and uploading photos from my trip to Europe last month. Happily, I have made it to the half-way point! So far, my editing has mainly consisted of some basic level adjustment in iPhoto. Nothing terribly fancy. However, tonight I took some time to play around with a photo in GIMP*, and as long as you don’t look at the larger sized versions, it turned out okay.
I chose this one because I really liked the composition, but the impending rain storm stole my light and gave me a grey, cloudy background instead. Perhaps if I had known more about how to adjust for that, the original photo would have looked better, but instead I got a dark building and a washed-out sky. After using some GIMP tools to select the sky bits separately from the building bits, I was able to adjust the levels to make it look more like it did with my eyes, and then I flipped the selection and did the same with the building.
Of course, if I wasn’t busy procrastinating from other items on my to-do list tonight, I might not have ever gotten around to doing anything like that with this photo.
*I’m too cheap to shill out $600 or so for Photoshop at this point in time. However, if I do much more processing, I may need a tool that speeds up the process.
I doubt many people will ever actually NEED the full version of Photoshop at $600, instead many will find MORE than they will ever need in Photoshop Elements for $100, retail cost at the Big Box stores. Shopping online, however, can save close to 20-50% on the same software, bringing the cost within range of many reasonably-sized budgets.
Granted, it is difficult to compete on a cost-basis with the likes of GIMP, but I’ve always preferred the interface of Photoshop; that’s obviously just a personal preference, but I feel that the efficiency with which I can work in Photoshop more than justifies the additional expense in acquiring that software. To each, there own.