Photo Editing Software

First of all yes you need one. But you don’t necessarily need (well you might want) Lightroom or Photoshop or any of the other top-of-the-line editors. Here’s why:

If you’re shooting images of the kids or the dog or the cat you’re going to want to crop out unnecessary stuff out of the background. You may want to lighten or darken your image a little. Even if you’re shooting snapshots in JPG format the results will look better with a little editing.

If you’re shooting in RAW format then yes you definitely need a RAW photo editor but again it doesn’t have to be Lightroom and/or Photoshop.

So what do photo editors do to RAW files? Essentially they turn them into JPGs suitable for printing or viewing online or sharing on your phone. (And while the software can do other amazing things like change the RAW file into other RAW formats like TIFFs or DNG files that’s a subject for another day.)

Wait a minute you might say: Isn’t that exactly what my digital camera does automatically if I set it to JPG mode? And the answer is yes…sort of. Today’s modern cameras are marvels of technology but too often the complex technology can end up in less than perfect results. That’s where your photo editor can save the day.

And when it comes to RAW files, there’s so much more a RAW editor can do like change the white balance (a subject coming up soon) or the saturation or the level of noise reduction (another good subject to come) that if you’re shooting in RAW it pays to get a good RAW editor.

So let’s start with Lightroom (LR). Enormously popular and extremely versatile and useful Lightroom isn’t all that hard to understand. Most amateurs can get it working after viewing a few You Tube videos. LR is what’s called a non-destructive editor which means your original images are never actually touched and remain unchanged but a duplicate is edited and saved. Another key feature of Lightroom is it’s actually a very powerful database as well as photo editor. This is both a good thing and a challenge. It’s good because LR will automatically file away your edited images and setup your files for you. The challenge is once you’ve started using LR’s data you must remain within LR to load or save images. Any attempt to pull an image out of the data base will break the data base connection and LR gets really really upset making future saving and filing images a nightmare.

Photoshop (PS) on the other hand is by far the most complicated and powerful photo editor that most pros use in conjunction with LR. In fact LR can be setup to reference Photoshop as an external editor. What this means is as you’re using LR you can drop into PS and do some higher level editing (like replacing an unwanted sky with a more desirable one from another image. it can also remove your x partner from old photos and the list goes on LOL.) External editors accessible from the LR menu is one of its most useful and powerful features. NIK software made this feature a key part of its popularity.

In expert hands there’s almost nothing PS can’t do. It’s that good.

But both LR and PS cost a lot and may well be overly complex for what you want to do.

For example I have two photo editors. The first was free and comes from Olympus cameras and I use it to edit my RAW images out of my OM-1 and OM-5 cameras. OM Workspace while free remains a really decent simple RAW photo editor (all RAW editors will also work on JPGs too).

My second RAW editor comes from Alien Skin a company that’s been around since the beginning of digital photography (maybe longer) and its current product is Exposure 7. This editor’s super power is it comes with pages and pages of presets. While you can edit your images on your own Exposure 7’s presets featuring all kinds of film stock and black and white emulations and auto framing and a lot of other stuff can make editing really simple and really fast. I like it a lot.

Are there other RAW editors? GIMP is free. Capture One is very popular among some pros as is DXO and there’s a long list of others to pick from.