Originally posted by Angie Wall
Ok, I bought the K-5 and now I want to do some tweeking to my pictures. Now keep in mind, that I am NOT a professional, I am not able to run a complicated program, or spend hours fixing a single picture, I just want to tweek the coloring, brightness, crop a bit maybe turn my picture a little...you get the idea... what do you recommend for a program? I think my priority is ease of use and quality of finished product rather than price.
Here is my 2 p. :
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/digital-processing-software-printing/1702...ing-tools.html
Buy the way quality and easy of use is not neccessarily more expensive, the free Paint.net and Sagelight (costing mere 40 USD) are much easy to use (to do crop, play with levels and say do sharpening, and support real 48 bit editing).
Adobe is a brand and it is de facto standard and highly valued amongst professional photo processing community.
BTW k-5 is really good camera and it has a lot of processing settings and power available to you in the camera...based on that I do not see any reason not to shoot directly in jpeg and just avoid the hassle with raw thing, unless you like the post processing for the sake of it.
I really doubt a beginner shooting in raw mode and then applying post processing say for noise reduction can beat the integrated
k-5 noise reduction hardware
IMHO with your advanced camera and integrated k-5 image processor you can achieve much better results by carefully studying and apllying the jpeg settings, rather than shooting in raw and then trying to fix it afterwards with some software, you save yourself a lot of converting hassle, not to mention if you shoot in raw you double your space needed - the space is important when you do your backups, because inevitable all hardware fails.
As you have said simple post processing is the key here, cropping and some colour/exposure fixes.