Looking for a good organiser

Diamond7

Hi. Can anyone recomend a good quality photo organiser and basic editor?

Looking for something a bit more upmarket then Picassa and I have a small budget to play with. I need something to displey images, tag, rate, slide shows, make CD-Roms and automatic editing with good manual input. I dont require a full spec editor like Gimp or even elements, alas I don't have the time to learn about layers etc, but would love a good platform for my ever growing Jpeg collection. Spent hours trudging through internet reviews and sites but find the waters murky. Some first hand impartial advice would be invaluable.

coolmoose

my vote is with Photoshop Lightroom 3. Download a 30 day trial from adobe.com. Don't let the Photoshop in the title put you off, it's just part of the Photoshop suite.

Heebie

I'd also say Lightroom. The "Library" section is just for what you want to do.

Diamond7

It looks good guys but lightroom 3 wont work on my laptop cos its too old. I only have 1Gb of RAM and it needs two. Trying to find a trial version of lightroom 2 but no luck yet... its all about 3. I see it costs $300 from adobe, this seems very steep for what it is and its way above my modest budget although i saw another site selling it for $60 could this be right? or just some rip off? Anyway unless i find lightroom 2 trial i'll have to look elsewhere. I wanted to spend like 50 euro max, there is plenty of stuff out there but every review of the software is different thats why if anyone can recomend something really good from experence i'd have the confedence to splash out my hard got pennies.

EmilyCoco

I was also thinking about light room but the price is high, as I have elements, would getting light room really make any difference?
Thanks

Heebie

Lightroom is a completely different tool than Elements.

Lightroom's job is to streamline the process of gather your photos from a "shoot", organise them, choose which ones are good, which are crap, and which are in -between, then go through the very basic steps of getting them ready.

Cropping, basic color control, spotting, lens vignetting and such.

I've not used anything I'd consider remotely as good for the organising part... and I went from 10-15 minutes per photo to 1-2, as far as doing basic stuff before it's ready to print..
It integrates into PS easy enough.. control-click on an image and select "open in photoshop" if a particular image needs heavy duty tools.

AnCatDubh

EmilyCoco wrote: »

I was also thinking about light room but the price is high, as I have elements, would getting light room really make any difference?
Thanks

Try downloading the lightroom trial from the adobe site - you get to try it out for 30 days.

I tried it out in the beta for a few months and I I found it really good. Not terribly intuitive, but persevere at it as it has lots of options before you'd have to head into something like photoshop.

The presets in lightroom I found very handy - though everything starts to look the same I found when using them. There is a large community using it - it is *THE* processing package for photographers. I watched david duchemin at the weekend on creative live and he said he only uses lightroom - very rarely does he use photoshop.

Now, I didn't buy it as yet, as I have a different raw processing package at the moment (and I tend to use Ufraw and the Gimp - both free, but definitely not particularly intuitive although you get to love their quirks).

Heebie

Here's a way for me to sum up how much I like Photoshop & Lightroom:

I bought a Mac, specifically to be able to run Lightroom, and Photoshop CS4 with accelerated graphics. (Photoshop CS4 and CS5 will actually utilise the nVidia graphics hardware GPU's in a Mac for image processing.. doesn't do that on Windows.) The new lightroom (version 3) seems to share this ability.

I pretty much only use my Macbook for photography.. right now I'm sitting at my Linux-based desktop. (I don't use Linux/Gimp for photography because there isn't really a good color-profiling setup in X.)

Diamond7

Can anyone suggest an alternative to Lightroom that does not need as much system requirements. I found a trial version of LR2 but it wont work on my laptop. Now looking for something a little less comprehensive.

Heebie

Some lightroom alternatives:

http://www.lightcrafts.com/lightzone/
http://www.irfanview.com/
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
http://www.bibblelabs.com/
http://www.rawtherapee.com/

Photoshop Elements comes with something called "organizer" that does some of the library functions.

There are probably yet more than that.. but those would seem to be the "most similar" to lightroom. Some cost, and some don't.

Diamond7

Heebie wrote: »

Some lightroom alternatives:

http://www.lightcrafts.com/lightzone/
http://www.irfanview.com/
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
http://www.bibblelabs.com/
http://www.rawtherapee.com/

Photoshop Elements comes with something called "organizer" that does some of the library functions.

There are probably yet more than that.. but those would seem to be the "most similar" to lightroom. Some cost, and some don't.

Some of these look great.
Thanks for the links Heebie...
Again my laptop is letting me down. Both Lightcraft and Bibble recomend dualcore processors and 2gbs of Ram. I will just have to start saving for a new one rather then my messing around with different software and slowing my machine down. It was fine until I looked into this image editing craic. Good things come to those who wait.
By the way Bluemarine looks like it will be a great bit of opensource gear once they get it going with some editing tools...