Programs for touching up photos

sailgal

Hello - I made the huge mistake of leaving my date stamp. I tried Inpaint and Wondershare and they were ok but not great. I had a beautiful mirror water shot that it looked like a grey blotch after that - I tweaked it a lot. But I am now wondering what would be better? I have to get this right. Is there a program that can do a better job and possibly be my "go to" software for after-shoot editing? Many thanks for your input.

bruto

You might try the freeware "Faststone Image Viewer." This has a fair number of editing options, and includes a "clone and heal" edit that works pretty well. If the surface of the water is fairly consistent, cloning will do pretty well. If the cloning isn't invisible, you can often then switch to "heal" and soften boundaries with that.

The results can only be saved as a JPG, so you can't modify an original NEF file (though it will read the NEF), but that's usually what you want to do anyway.

Nikon's Capture NX-D (also free) works on NEF files, and includes a touch up brush which works nicely for dust and scratches but isn't as easy to control for real cloning, and is more like the "heal" option in Faststone.

sailgal

Thank you for your thoughtful and quick reply. Unfortunately the program doesn't work with Mac. I'm going to see if I can find a PC to use and check it out.