4 Free Digital Photography and Image Editing Resources
May 16th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 8 Comments
Many web workers are involved with digital photography, graphics and image editing. I know I am. There are a number of excellent, free resources available online for staying abreast of the latest news on these topics, and improving your skills. In this post, I’ll round up some of the best resources I’ve found.
While I don’t always reach for Photoshop when I want to do image editing, when I want to do a really nice job on an image I do. Photoshopnews.com is a fantastic blog on Photoshop that will keep you in the know about useful plug-ins, techniques, tutorials and more.
I mentioned that I don’t always reach for Photoshop when doing image editing. More often than not, when I want speed and a good set of tools–but not the long load time and bloat of Photoshop–I like to use Irfanview. This is a free application, and when I wrote about it before many readers chimed in with positive reviews. Check it out.
If you happen to use Nikon cameras, definitely keep up with Nikon Glass. This is a blog dedicated to Nikon equipment, photography techniques and software. You’ll get much better pictures with Nikon equipment if you read it.
Gimp is one of the very best open source graphics and image editing programs available. Originally developed at U.C. Berkeley, it has a rabidly dedicated community of developers improving it. Over on the OStatic blog, dedicated to open source, I’ve posted several free tutorial sites for Gimp. Even if you use commercial graphics software, try Gimp.
Do you have any favorite, free photography and graphics resources?
8 Comments Post your own comment
michael says: May 16th, 2008 4:52pm
Can’t say this enough: Irfanview’s batch commands are far superior (in terms of usability) to Photoshop’s.
Ronald says: May 16th, 2008 5:15pm
Good reading! Well i worked for some years in professional photography and work with photos has changed completely. Photoshopnews.com is imho a must-have-bookmark, though i have to admit that now - for editorial photo work - i am often lazy to even start PS. Instead of PS i am using more frequent Irfanview or XnView for batch stuff. Since i have a lot of stock photos to archive, i am also using as a cheap solution ThumbsPlus. You can use ThumbsPlus together with MySQL and that speeds things up. ACDSee Pro 2 is nice too, but it has no MySQL interface and the built-in proprietary DB is aweful slow.
Tryxie says: May 16th, 2008 5:38pm
Hmm… I must say I don’t agree.
I thought Irfanview was obscure when I tried it the first time. I must say that was between 5 and 8 years ago… It must have improved since.
But because I was so disappointed I dug elsewhere and discovered Photofiltre.
And I think it makes the works a hundred time simpler and “more in a Photoshop Way” which make it easier if you are used to THE one image editing tool.
XNet says: May 17th, 2008 12:32am
I love IrfanView for easy tasks. If there’s some more difficult image editing to be done I prefer Paint.NET over the Gimp.
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Sabrina says: May 19th, 2008 6:49pm
A good start. I keep a blog about Free Photo Stuff on blogger, Stop in for some free goodies and please help me spread the word about the blog.
http://freephotostuff.blogspot.com/
Jeremy says: May 20th, 2008 1:08pm
Appcelerator just posted a new demo app that lets you add some cool effects to your photos for free. It’s really to show off they type of app you can build with their software, but it’s pretty fun to play with.
I particularly like how my 2-year-old looks in “Posterize”. :-)