Editing

Mharrison1311

Hey guys! I am new to the camera world and was wondering if anyone has a favorite simple and free website they use to touch up their pictures? When I search for some, they are usually just the basic, "change the filter" type websites that teenage girls use to edit their pictures for the good ole' Facebook.

Thanks for your time in advance. (:

bruto

It sort of depends on what editing you intend to do.

I don't use websites, but computer programs, and the two I use most are the Nikon ViewNX2 program that comes with the camera, and a freeware program called Irfanview.

The Nikon program has Nikon specific functions that are best for editing Raw files, changing exposure, white balance, and the like. If you shoot in Raw mode, you can do a lot of basic cleaning up and editing of files here and save the results as JPG. There is also another free Nikon program called Capture NXD which duplicates much of this, and adds some capabilities such as noise reduction and more sophisticated sharpening. Both allow files to be saved in JPG form, including uniform reduction to a specific size, handy for the web and the like. You can take a whole bunch of pictures, fix them up, and then save the lot in a specified folder at a specified size and compression.

Irfanview is a nice quick portable program that does very little image alteration, though there are some basic procedures and you can add Photoshop filters. It is very quick, allowing many options for file format and size, amount of JPG compression, etc., and a very quick bulk conversion utility. It's also a good program for simply viewing pictures. I find this one very quick and easy for many things. It's also very handy for comparison shots, because you can use the copy and paste function to put images next to each other into strips.

Another that does well, though I am less happy with its interface, is a freeware program called Faststone Image Viewer. It has a couple of advantages, reads Raw files well, allows cropping to specific proportions, and has a very nice slide show option.