[Nomadic Zen]

I live on a tight budget and tight space constraints. I spend most of my time on the road living out of a backpack and use photography as a means of documenting my travels. As such, I only care a small netbook with me. Over the past few months my photography has gotten better and better and I'm starting to learn the limitations of what I can do on camera and what I need to do post picture taking. However I'm limited by system resources so I can't be running stuff like photoshop. I'm currenty using picasa as a means to adjust my color and shadows and whatnot. I'm wondering what other people suggest I use to help adjust my photos. I'm really looking for a good noise reduction process that would work with my constraints. Also hoping to start experimenting with HDR soon.

Any help would be appreciated.

[noahpurdy]

You're going to be hard-pressed to do HDR imaging on that little netbook. As far as a light-weight Photoshop alternative, check out Paint.net. Hope this helps!

My netbook's got a duel core in it and I only do very limited processing on it. You are going to struggle a lot with the limited hardware.


If I was going to give any advice, it would be get rid of Microsoft to get the most out of the hardware you have got.

[mole]

Perhaps you already know about Irfanview:

IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide

Good for cropping & minor adjustments, reads both JPG & DNG files (and lots of others too if you install the optional plugins), And it's free!

It can also work with many Photoshop plugins. For example, you can do curve adjustments with Irfanview if you install SmartCurve (also free):

SmartCurve

And it seems to work fine with the Noiseware plugin (not free) as well:

Imagenomic - Best Plugins for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and Apple Aperture

I do most of my PP on a Mac, but have a very old (windows 2000!) laptop with Irfanview installed, and it works quite well with not much memory.

You might also want to look into Gimp (also free software). The Mac version includes greycstoration noise removal, not sure about the windows version...

[Wombat]

You might also want to look into Virtual Studio, made by the same bloke who does the mighty Virtual Photographer plugin. It's free, light on resources and can also use PS plugins. The one thing it doesn't have is a clone tool, but most of everything else you need is covered.
Gimp is good but very slow. Might be your only alternative if, as suggested by Dom, you ditch Windows and go for Linux.
Another alternative is to track down an earlier version of PS - say, version 5 or 7. Still does everything you're likely to need on the road but doesn't need a 50,000GHz processor and a squillion terrabytes of RAM to run it.
Arcsoft Studio is also quite adequate, has levels and is light on resources. Also try Magix Xtreme Photo (formerly Xara). Similar level to Arcsoft but free.
Safe journeying. Come and visit Australia sometime.

[pb_red]

here's my 2 cents regardless of what software you use:

1) your OS will significantly affect performance
ex: windows XP might be easy on resources but it won't be as efficient at utilizing the available hardware as Win7. fyi, i have Win7 RC on my netbook and it works great (although i don't do PP on it)

2) your power plan will significantly affect performance
bottom line is that if at all possible, plug your netbook in. if you're in a car get a car power adapter. etc.

3) your choice of hard drive will very significantly affect performance
if your budget allows, get an SDD, which does a lot for reads but not as much for writes...

4) the amount of RAM will significantly affect performance
as always, more is better...

5) the number of CPU cores may not affect perf as much as marketing would like you to believe.
most software is single threaded and is not helped by multiple cores. however it does help to have an extra core to offload system tasks, etc

6) finally, make sure that your netbook monitor is calibrated
while you are doing all that PP your colors might be way off on a different screen. also, brightness will be affected by your power settings...

as for the software, i recommend picking whatever works well for you and sticking with it. there might be cheaper and more lightweight alternatives out there but if they are a pain in the ass then you will spend more time fiddling with the software and less time working on your photos.

[Adam]

Get a Ubuntu netbook for $350 from system76.com and install GIMP.

Best performance you'll ever get- Windows can't compare on that hardware

Adam
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[johnmflores]

Hey Nomadic Zen, some good advice here, as usual. I've got $.02 to add, as usual.

Shoot JPG. I've got a HP netbook (2140, with an Atom 1.6Ghz CPU and 2Gb RAM) and processing RAW DNGs is like watching paint dry. DNGs are really large files as well, so you'll start filling up your HD and as a result slow down your PC sooner than with JPGs.

Think about all of those pixels - do you really need 14 megapixels or 12 or 10? Larger files slow down your computer and fill up your hard drive. You can push a 6 megapixel image up to 8 x 10 in a pinch. And if most of your viewing is on screen, then 6 megapixel is plenty. Save the higher resolutions and DNGs for the truly epic shots.

Get it right in the camera. Get the exposure right when you take the shot and you'll have less to do on the underpowered netbook. Take a test shot, chimp, learn, and then shoot the real one.

Choosing your settings wisely can mean the difference between 20 minutes in post-processing and 2 hours.

[grainbelt]

The last post has the best advice, IMO. I travel on my motorcycle with a 6mp Olympus point and shoot and an HP netbook with Picasa on it. I upload straight to smugmug from Picasa. Pretty slick really.

I'm not going to win any awards with this setup, but it is great for documenting my travels and capturing those critical moments. My use is almost all web, the odd print.

[Aperturae]

IMO, if a netbook is desired, in order to get the most performance out of the machine you're going to want to install a reasonably solid distro of linux. On my netbook (Samsung 1.6ghz 2gb Ram) I installed an older distro of ubuntu and did my PP in Gimp, and I must say I was impressed at how well the netbook handled it. I just couldn't deal with the 10' monitor, and it ended up on ebay :P

I doubt I am much help....

[Steve.Ledger]

If you have access to the web when you need to edit, try: ► Pixlr
It's pretty fast.

Another vote for Linux.
As I said in my first post lose Microsoft and install Linux, try Ubuntu, it's the easiest to use if you've not used Linux before.

[attack11]

atoms just don't have much power, so you can do things but it's like doing it on a p2-p4 prescott type computer.

win7 is a bit better than xp on this hardware; some os progress after 9 years isn't too bad for microsoft. if you got an ion/atom, then you could offload some of the gui/photoshop to the onboard nvidia gpu.

[patrickt]

I have a netbook. I wouldn't dream of doing my editing on it. I travel with my netbook to have access to the internet, write, and store photo files from my SD cards. I might occasionally adjust a horizon or correct the white balance with the netbook so I can send a photo to a friend before I get home but other than that all my files wait for processing until I get home to my desktop.

The netbook is painfully slow and the screen is small. Both are killers, imho, for editing.

[BobRad]

My experience is totaly different. When I travel I take my Samsung NC-10 with 2GB RAM and Windows XP. I've loaded Lightroom 2 on it and have no problem converting my RAW files and editing my photos just like at home with my desktop system - not as fast, but not annoyingly slow either. When I have Internet access, I export to Flickr, also with no problems. This is based on two one-month-long trips in 2009.

Bob