Lead Adventure Forum
Other Stuff => Model and Miniature Photography => Topic started by: Hammers on March 25, 2020, 02:32:16 PM
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While I since many years have purchased and installed Adobe Photoshop on my home computer, I have recently come to rely almost exclusively on the following free and online photo editing tool:
(https://pixlr.com/images/pixlr-header-logo.png) (https://pixlr.com/x/)
While Photoshop indeed is very powerful and ha a lot of nifty features, I feel it is somewhat complicated to navigate. Its a bit like handling a CAD\CAM laser cutting machine when all you need is a pair of scissors. Pixlr has few an really easy to understand controls for sizing, cropping, light and colour adjustment and even a few useful filters. In my experience, that takes you a long way to make your miniatures shots more pleasing to look at and is almost always all you need.
Pixlr has the added advantage of being available online which means I can steal a little time at work to fix some shots I took last night and post them on LAF.
I will do a short, sweet and to the point step-by-step on how I work with Pixlr later.
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I use Photoscape. Basic stuff (no outline cropping, layers, text etc) but perfectly serviceable for figure photos :)
http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php (http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php)
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GIMP https://www.gimp.org/ (https://www.gimp.org/) is another free download - can be quite complex, similar to Photoshop. Works well, if you have time to play around with it a bit.
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Affinity do a photoshop equivalent https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/
It's not subscription and is at 50% off just now because of the coronavirus
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I use Adobe Lightroom for all of my photo processing (exposure, contrast, saturation, etc). If I need to edit something into or out of a picture I'll use Photoshop.
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I use whatever is in my laptop... dirt basic Microsoft Photo editor that comes with windows. All I usually use is the exposure adjuster and the clarity adjuster, and neither one too much (otherwise the photo starts to look obviously edited).
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My primary image editing software is Photoshop, primarily because that's what I know the best. I also have Lightroom, as part of the same subscription package, but I seldom use it because I find its file handling model to be quite clunky and obstructive.
GIMP has progressed to the point where it is finally becoming a worthwhile alternative, for those who don't care to pay Adobe every month for the privilege of using their software. Like Photoshop, it has quite a learning curve, but there are plentiful tutorial resources available on the web, especially on Youtube.
Affinity Photo, from Serif, is another excellent Photoshop alternative. It's not free, but it is relatively cheap, and they seem to have fairly regular sales as well. It does have a decent range of image creation (i.e. painting) tools, but its main usefulness to me is in image adjustment — tone, colour, effects, size etc.
Krita is a superb free paint program which I highly recommend if you want something to draw and paint with. It also includes some image adjustment tools, but its primary focus is image creation, so it's not so useful for photographic post-processing. Its nearest non-free equivalent would be Painter.
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Very helpful summary Fitz.
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I'm also using gimp. Since version 2.8 it really became a good alternative to photoshop. You can customize it to your needs, and you'll find plenty of documentation and video tutorials online.
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I'm a big fan of GIMP - I've been using it for the last ten years or so for various things.
I found the learning curve between it and Photoshop were similar, but once you know how to use it, GIMP is just as good (if not better thanks to all of the plugins that people create!) for both small-scale graphic design (I use mostly for making posters/fake propaganda) and photo editing purposes.
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I like Irfanview as it's pre-sets (Sharpen, Resize etc) are usually all I need. I also like Paint.Net for accurate cropping and editing using the layer feature. Both are relatively simple to use but have depth if you need it.
https://www.irfanview.com/
https://www.getpaint.net/index.html