[35wailin]

Hi all, I am kinda new to post processing. That being said, I use Picasa right now to organize my shots and have played a bit with the settings in the past. I also have a paid copy of Photoshop Elements 11 that I bought for my daughter's high school computer class. Also have Silkypix that came with my K-50.

Pro/con for each? Is one better than the others?

[rod_grant]

Of what you have, I'd use Elements.
I have used a couple of versions of Elements and found it quite OK.
I have since switched to Lightroom and find it quicker and easier to use, but then I'm no PP expert either!

[SpecialK]

Hi all, I am kinda new to post processing. That being said, I use Picasa right now to organize my shots and have played a bit with the settings in the past. I also have a paid copy of Photoshop Elements 11 that I bought for my daughter's high school computer class. Also have Silkypix that came with my K-50.

Pro/con for each? Is one better than the others?

You should read other threads in this sub-forum. Every opinion has been expressed :-)

[Bruce Clark]

I agree with rod_grant. Elements is quite good. From what you have I would stick with Photoshop Elements. I have had no joy at all with the Pentax bundled software and have removed it from my computer entirely.

Lightroom can be used independently or complementary to Photoshop Elements. Each has its own strongpoints. There was a similar question the other day, here is my summary to that question.

LR has lens profiles. PSE does not
LR noise reduction is better than PSE
Spot healing in PSE is far superior to LR
PSE has layers LR does not
PSE has pano stitching and HDR
Both offer cataloging.
Both offer compatibility with third party plugins eg Topaz
A lot of experts on both systems are here on this forum.

PSE has a fairly steep learning curve. Happily there is a support group Photoshop Elements Techniques, Tutorials, Downloads, Video Tips, Newsletter and more - Photoshop Elements User which I found very helpful with a vast number of tutorials in video and PDF as well as a regular magazine.

[DSims]

You should read other threads in this sub-forum. Every opinion has been expressed :-)

Yes, indeed. There are actually a number of good options. My favorite is not the same as what the majority choose. Many people have not actually investigated it very much, as far as I can tell. Adobe's kind of a default, and many just go with it. You can get good results with it. But it has its quirks as well - some bothered me enough that I don't use it. Capture One and DxO are the other top candidates. And you have a few good options beyond those, though these three are generally the most capable and refined.

[JimC1101]

I used PSE for years and it worked great. especially if you just want to shoot JPG;s. I always shoot RAW now for the last 5 years and LR is my preference. It really depends on if you want to improve your RAW pics, then you should use LR. If you don't want to get too involved in your processing and you just want to shoot JPG's, PSE is fine.

[alexcox]

Try Photomatix. It's HDR software but does an amazing job of pulling info out of the shadows and highlights of single shots, and works with all file formats, not just DNG.

[6BQ5]

There's a lot of options beyond Adobe's offering and the Silky Pix software that came with our cameras. Be sure to check out the open source and completely free packages like GIMP and RawTherapee. You can also download free trials of DxO Optics Pro and Capture One. The trials are 30 days long and offer full functionality. You may even be won over to buy one of these packages.

[reeftool]

I used Picasa and Elements for the first couple of years after switching to digital from film. As time went on and I began to shoot more RAW photos, I purchased Lightroom and never looked back. There is a lot of editing software out there, from the price point of free to the ridiculously expensive. I latched on to Lightroom because the price was reasonable and the learning curve was very easy pick up. Most software has a 30 day trial. One drawback to Lightroom is that it tends to tax your computers resources to the limit if you don't have a fairly new machine with a lot of memory. Of course, that may also be the case with much of the other programs too.

I use the $9.99 monthly subscription for Lightroom/Photoshop. While some may not like the idea of not "owning" their software, I now have editing software the can do just about everything that could be done to a photograph for a price I can easily afford (I'm retired). All of the software mentioned so far is very good and very capable with the biggest differences being the user interface and the learning curve. Lightroom is like driving a car with an automatic. Photoshop is like a large truck with a dual range manual transmission that needs to be double clutched.

[emalvick]

Since you have PSE, I'd stick with it and get some practice with it. With practice, you might find you're missing something and specifically know what you are missing. You can then find a software at that point that works for what you need. It could be LR, it could be something else.

And, since you have PSE, I wouldn't bother messing with Gimp. But, I do think RawTherapee can be a good one to try if you are using RAW at all and you want to see what that is about beyond what PSE gives you. It's free, and you'll get a taste of what that's all about.

[shooz]

ACDSee Ultimate Pro 8.

It's finally come of age and now features basic layers.

It's cataloging feature set has always beat the rest, hands down and it's development and editing modules are now as good as any.

Try the trial and see how you like it.

[arkav]

Hi all, I am kinda new to post processing. That being said, I use Picasa right now to organize my shots and have played a bit with the settings in the past. I also have a paid copy of Photoshop Elements 11 that I bought for my daughter's high school computer class. Also have Silkypix that came with my K-50.

Pro/con for each? Is one better than the others?

All of them are going to have advantages and disadvantages, and everyone has their own personal preferences in terms of how they like to work on their images.

I've got the K-30, which is pretty much identical to the K-50 in most respects. Right off the bat, I'll say the following:

In my experience, when I nail my exposures, I have a hard time "bettering" the JPGs that come out of the camera with any of the RAW converters I've tried. If you can get your images "right"
in camera, then you may only need a simple program to do cropping/resizing and other basic adjustments ( something like FastStone, which is free and lightweight ).

But the camera can't read your mind, so if there's some special creative processing you want, you have to do that in post processing, and if you're going to do something radical, you'll probably
want to start with the RAW file and use a RAW converter.

I've tried the following:

ACR ( via Elements 9 )
Rawtherapee
Silkypix 3.0 ( bundled with the K30 )
DxO pro 8 ( recently installed via free license offer )

When I'm not dealing with tricky lighting, or trying to recover blown out highlights, I've found minor adjustments to the camera's JPGs give me better results than anything I've
been able to wring out of these RAW converters - and I've spent time working on the same photo with each converter in turn, with different settings, trying to see if I could get
something that was more 'pleasing'. The camera's JPG engine does a very good job of balancing noise reduction vs detail retention.

This will generate howls of protest, but from a pure usability perspective, Silkypix is actually the best of all those programs for my workflow, once you get familiar with it. The interface is a bit different from what
most people are used to, so I think many never take the time to familiarize themselves with it. A nice advantage is that it allows you to create your own presets ( what they call 'tastes" ) for
every subsection of the adjustments, as well as global presets. I find it is far easier on my computer's CPU than the other programs. Most of the functions you'll need are there.
Hands down, it is the fastest at updating the previewed image - in fact, you can scroll through a drop down menu and it will revise the preview as you hover over the various options,
allowing you to pick your preference without the need to apply/undo each one in turn. As far as the output goes, I've found that on average, I'd rank it second to DxO.
I haven't been able to get it to bring down the noise without messing up fine detail as well as DxO.

Rawtherapee is very complex - there are a LOT of options included, and it may simply be that I don't understand it enough to get the best results out of it. It does have some nice features,
but it suffers a bit in terms of usability. It's also the buggiest of the programs I tried. Certain basic functions related to configuring/saving/applying presents simply do not work correctly, which
makes me wonder if there are also less obvious bugs lurking down in the bowels of it that may account for deficiencies in image quality. I've never been happy with the noise reduction - it tends to obliterate fine detail. But like I said, there's
such a bewildering number of options and adjustments, it may simply be that I couldn't get it set up correctly. Oh, and it's a bit of a resource hog.

Elements includes a dumbed down version of ACR. I've never been super happy with the RAW conversion side of it - it gives you only a small number of options for adjustments in RAW
conversion ( yes, I know, I'm also complaining that Rawtherapee has too many ). Once the conversion is complete, Elements gives you the largest number of options for editing/adjusting your photo, including layers, etc. Elements is on the slow side if
you've got a lot of RAW images to go through.

I'm new to using DxO ( just got a free license for version 8 off their website ) and still figuring it out, but I like what I'm seeing so far. The fact that it will automajically correct vignetting, distortion, and chromatic aberration
for any camera/lens combo that they've profiled is great. It doesn't seem to support any of the 'normal' keyboard shortcuts I would expect it to ( eg. <cntrl>-s does not trigger save/export ). Strangely, it doesn't seem to
have a "highlight recovery/reconstruction" tool like all the other converters. It's extremely slow at updating the preview while you're making adjustments, which can make the adjustment process a bit tedious. If you can
get a basic set of adjustments saved as a profile, and apply that to multiple images, that speeds things up. DxO seems to do the best job of balancing all the various trade-offs in terms of image quality. I just wish the
usability was a bit better, but that may improve as I become more familiar with it. Perhaps some of these deficiencies have been addressed in the more recent versions of the program.

For browsing/comparing/culling images and performing simple adjustments to JPGs, nothing I've tried beats FastStone.

Though it suffers a bit on the usability side, I'm leaning towards DxO as my RAW converter of choice right now. If I could get as good results from it, I'd take Silkypix over DxO for its
usability.

If I need to stitch a panorama, or do something with layers, or other heavy duty editing, then I'd use Elements.

So as far as I'm concerned, you've already got two decent programs to work with ( Silkypix and Elements ). FastStone is a free/donation program that makes a great image browser, and you can configure it to
launch both Silkypix and Elements ( via 'Edit with' ). These programs all play well together on my machine. The 'Edit with' doesn't work quite as nicely with Rawtherapee and DxO.

[6BQ5]

@arkav - If you like what you see in your trial of DxO v8 then you may really like what Capture One offers. DxO is a very good RAW converter and processor but it is far from being a compete package in my opinion. It's missing a lot of basic photographic processing functions like tilt and dodge/burn. Some may think those functions belong in Photoshop but I think they fall in the realm of RAW processing.