Image Editors: Picture Perfect

If you’re a digital photography enthusiast, taking the photos is just half the fun. The next step is to optimise them, perhaps improve them, or just manipulate them to your heart’s content. Here we look at a range of image editing software to find that magic balance between price and features.

By Bruce Buckman / Tuesday, September 29 2009

In the world of photo editing and graphics arts, Adobe Photoshop has become so dominant a player that its very name has become a colloquialism for photo retouching. But at $1,350, Photoshop is a professional product that won’t be within the budget of most amateur photographers looking for a tool to let them get creative with their images.

While there are some strange purists out there who think that doing any kind of adjustment to your photographs is somehow cheating, most of us are happy to take advantage of the power of our PCs to help give our images a little extra pop. Whether it’s correcting problems like lens distortion and poor exposure or adding a bit of extra saturation and sharpness, editing your digital photos can be a lot of fun. Chances are, when you bought your camera the vendor also supplied some basic image editing and management software, but rarely do these bundled packages do all that you want.

Which is where these programs come in. These image editors ranging in price from the Free GIMP to the not-anywhere-near-free Photoshop promise to help you get the most out of your digital photography.

Photoshop CS4
Adobe's Photoshop is the alpha male gorilla of the group, a full-featured, immensely popular program that is almost guaranteed to be found on the Mac or PC of anyone who makes money from photography or graphic arts. But therein lies the problem; Photoshop is priced as a professional package and therefore not within the budget of many enthusiasts for whom photography is a hobby not a business.

Photoshop CS4 comes with Adobe Bridge, a file management package that lets you browse your image collection on disk, see meta data and shot settings for all your files, and create “collections” of images. Collections are groupings of images that may be located in different locations on your disk. By double clicking on any image you can open it directly in Photoshop, with RAW images being parsed through the Adobe Camera RAW module first. ACR itself is regularly updated by Adobe, adding support for new RAW file formats as new cameras are released, and improving the features of the RAW development module.

Photoshop has a stack of features, many of which aren’t necessarily of use to the average digital photographer, such as its support for CMYK images. The core components that photographers will rely on most are Layers and Adjustment Layers, Actions, the Plug-in architecture, the selection and masking tools, colour management and perhaps its support for full editing of 16-bit images.

Since 16-bit images have 65,536 colours per channel, they make colour images with a massive 281 trillion colours. Since the human eye cannot even see the full 16 million colours in an 8-bit image, it might seem that 16-bit images have little use.

Yet support for 16-bit images is useful when you’re going to be doing a lot of tweaking to the image – for example extreme adjustments to exposure you might apply if changing the exposure on a single RAW image to create multiple variations for use in making an HDR (high dynamic range) image. Photoshop even goes ones better, with 32-bit support which it uses when using the built in “merge to HDR” command, which will combine several files into one HDR image automatically.

Layers allow you to clone all or part of your image as a separate layer and then merge the layers in different ways and opacities to achieve creative effects. Of even more use is Adjustment layers. Adjustment layers are a non-destructive way of applying adjustments to things like levels and contrast, or colour channels by creating a specialised layer to adjust an attribute that applies itself to any layers sitting beneath it. Adjustment layers are non-destructive because they don’t alter the pixels themselves – you can adjust them to your heart’s content without physically changing the pixels in the layers beneath them. With CS4, Adobe packaged up common presets of adjustment layers into the new Adjustments palette. You can also save any custom adjustment as a preset.

The power of Layers and Adjustment layers is multiplied further by the use of selections and layer masking, which allow you to apply adjustments to just selected parts of an image or layer.

Likewise, Actions provide you with a quick way of repeating any complex series of processes you apply to your images with a single click. Actions are essentially macros; you start recording an action, go through all the steps you want, then stop recording. You can then access that set of actions to any file in the future by clicking the play button.

Photoshop also has an open plug-in architecture, so there is a wealth of third-party plug-ins available that add features and effects to the core product, from specialist Black & White conversion tools to noise reduction software. It comes with a robust set of default filters including essential sharpening and burring tools.

Photoshop is also a good performer, managing the application of filters and edits on 15-megapixel, 16-bit images at speed on my aging P4 3.4GHz with 2GB RAM.

CS4 is arguably the most photographer friendly version of Photoshop yet, with its new Adjustments palette and new photography-centric Adjustment layers like Black & White and Photographic Filters. There is very little in Photoshop CS4 not to recommend it to the digital photographer except the price. Even then, many amateur photographers are willing to foot the bill for the full feature set and clean user interface Photoshop offers.

In fact, we'd score Photoshop much higher than 7.5 if it weren't for the price.

Paintshop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate
Paintshop Pro, which came under Corel’s stable a few years back, has been around in one form or another since 1992. So it’s no surprise that it’s an extremely robust, well-designed and fully featured product by now. What is surprising is exactly how much power it manages to pack in for just $195.

Paintshop has many of the functions that Photoshop offers; you get both layers and non-destructive adjustment layers, layer masks and selection tools and adjustable brushes for applying corrections. If learning how to use all these tools the Photoshop way isn’t your thing, Paintshop provides a good selection of “instant” enhancement tools, including the One Step Photo Fix (if you really want to let the program have control) and Smart Photo Fix tool that lets you adjust brightness, colour balance, sharpness and saturation all from the one dialogue. In the Effects menu you’ll find a bundle of more and less essential effects including an excellent Black and White conversion tool that lets you pick the colour of your “filter” from a colour wheel.

The dialogue boxes for these tools offer before and after previews, and these preview panes can be enlarged by resizing the dialogue box. You can also choose to have the full preview enabled on the background image. Many of the tools also have an “Advanced Options” tick box which reveals the actual parameters being adjusted by the basic tool and gives you more control if desired.

In addition to the separation of advanced and simple tools within the program, there is also an Express Lab mode. Express Lab lets you load up a bunch of images into a film strip, and then move along them applying a series of quick fix corrections.

This latest version of Paintshop has added an effective merge to HDR function that lets you combine a series of pictures of the same scene, taken with different exposures, into a single HDR (high dynamic range) photo. It’s as effective as the similar tool found in Photoshop, but I often prefer to have more control over the HDR process, and so found I could use almost the same layer and mask-based process to get the job done in Paintshop as I could in Photoshop.

Paintshop even has an attempt at built-in noise reduction, with a One Step Noise Removal tool that has decent, if not outstanding results. Since Paintshop can use many Photoshop plug-ins, I tried using my third-party Neat Image Pro noise reduction plug-in which, with the exception of not reading the image shot settings, was otherwise able to do its job just as well within Paintshop. Paintshop supports 16-bit images in a limited way; some effects and tools will prompt you to convert the image to 8-bit first, while others will work just fine on 16-bit.

Paintshop Pro comes with healthy support for RAW files ( I had to install the latest update to get support for Canon 50D RAW files). But its way of opening them was perhaps the biggest disappointment in the program. Paintshop opens your RAW files directly into the editor without going through a RAW development module, which means you don’t get the opportunity to adjust white balance, exposure, curves and so on first. It’s not the end of the world, because you can adjust things once in the program, but I much prefer the concept of “developing” my RAW files, and then editing them.

Photoshop Elements 7
That Photoshop price hurdle was recognised by Adobe many years ago, which led to the creation of Photoshop Elements. As its name suggests, Elements takes parts of Photoshop related to digital photography, throws out bits not needed by the amateur photographer (such as CMYK), adds in a file organiser, photo sharing module and a “create” module where you can make up photo books or slide shows, all wrapped up in a novice-friendly interface that provides plenty of help for just $196.

Elements Organiser has some great features, such as its text search based on file names; type a word or phrase and it will automatically start filtering out non-matching items. If, like me, you tend to put keywords into the file names of your post-processed pictures, this is a real boon for quickly finding images you want. You can also tag images with keywords. You can apply a range of image adjustments directly from the Organiser without having to fire up the Editor.

Unlike Adobe Bridge, the Elements Organiser works on a catalogue system; you must import files into the Catalogue to be able to see them in the organiser, a task which is done automatically if you use Elements Photo Downloader to transfer images from your media card or camera to your PC. You can mark folders as “watched” so that Organiser will import new files from there into the catalogue, but I still prefer Bridge’s approach of showing the actual on-disk files.

Elements contains many of the key features that make Photoshop so popular; it has both layers and adjustment layers, selection and masking tools (although Layer Masks are only supported on Adjustment Layers) and supports many of the same plug-ins as Photoshop. Elements doesn’t have Photoshop’s Adjustment palette, but it does have the Smart Brush tool, which combines the process of adjustment layers with auto selection of parts of the image as you brush. It’s a good example of the main difference in approach between Elements and Photoshop; Elements is all about using many of the same tools under the surface, but packaging them in a way that makes it easy for a novice to do quite complex changes without having to learn the individual processes involved.

This approach extends to its three-tier editor interface. In full edit mode, you have access to all the controls; in Quick Fix mode the full controls are replaced with a right-hand pane that lets you perform common adjustments; while Guided mode is just that – a series of wizards that hold your hand through a range of image adjustments. Within this section is a feature to replay some action sets, but there are a limited number of actions included. You can use Photoshop actions within Elements (providing they are feature compatible with Elements) but bizarrely, there appears to be no way for you to record your own actions within Elements, an omission that smacks of removing features to justify the lower price of Elements, rather than being a sensible choice for the product itself. Limiting Layer Masks to Adjustment Layers only is a similar irritating “feature”. Elements also has only limited support for 16-bit images – to use any of the layer-based tools you must convert the image to 8-bit first.

Photoshop Lightroom 2.4
Adobe's Lightroom is not a conventional image editor. At first glance, it looks like a professional version of Photoshop Elements; it has the same division into modules for organising, editing, printing and sharing. Like Elements, it uses a cached catalogue in the organiser. But the clue to what it is really about is that the image “editing” module is called Develop, not Edit. Lightroom is all about non-destructive editing/development of images (including full 16-bit support) and management of them. True, its official target audience is pros, but it’s a favourite among enthusiasts too, especially if you are primarily a RAW shooter (although it works on JPEGs just fine).

The Library module, in addition to letting you manage and filter your photos by keyword tags and other criteria, also provides quick develop options. Moving to the Develop module gives you access to the full set of options for tweaking your images. Everything you do in Lightroom is non-destructive; the pixels of your image are never altered. Instead, meta information about the adjustments you’ve made is kept in the catalogue. Version 2 added the ability to do local (as in part of an image) adjustments as well as global changes. To make local adjustments you apply an adjustment brush, painting a mask onto the image. You can then alter that adjustment at will by clicking on the “pin” that represents it on the image and moving sliders to change the level of adjustment. You can also apply graduated filters to an image and edit them. In both cases you can adjust exposure, saturation, clarity, contrast, brightness and sharpness.

This local adjustment ability is good, but it still falls short of the power you get from a more dedicated editing tool, using selections and masks. It is fiddly to use and not as powerful ultimately as the tools programs like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro give you. It can also be memory intensive.

Lightroom is automatically integrated with Photoshop, if installed, so you can send an image to Photoshop for further editing, or merge a series of images to HDR or a Panorama from Lightroom, to Photoshop. If you don’t have Photoshop, you can set up any third party app as an external editor.

Apart from the local adjustment tools, Lightroom has an extensive set of global adjustments, like a souped-up version of Adobe Camera RAW. You can apply noise reduction, sharpening, the full range of colour adjustments and much more. There are even camera profiles you can use to reproduce the colour settings on your camera. If you’re not the kind of person who does a lot of pixel-level tweaking, or adjustments to selected parts of your images, then at $572 Lightroom is more than capable of operating without reference to an external editor. Even if you do need to do tweaks beyond Lightroom’s local abilities, adding Photoshop Elements or Corel Paintshop Pro to the mix gives you most of the power of Photoshop at a much lower price.

PhotoImpact X3
While I have no insight into the thinking at Corel HQ, it’s hard to escape the feeling that they put PhotoImpact on their books when they took over Ulead simply as a by-product of getting Ulead’s video applications. That’s because PhotoImpact, while (with some caveats) a good product, doesn’t really offer anything that Corel doesn’t have with PaintShop Pro X2. Nor can it really be positioned as a “novice” product to PaintShop Pro’s “advanced user” niche, since both products offer features for novices and advanced users. And at $179, it’s close to Paintshop Pro in price. So why would you opt for PhotoImpact over PaintShop Pro? Well, you probably wouldn’t.

Like Paintshop, Photo Impact has both an Express Fix mode and a full edit mode. Express Fix lets you apply a range of quick adjustments like exposure or colour saturation, either as one-click presets or with sliders, including a single-click noise reduction tool. There’s a more advanced noise reduction tool on offer in full edit mode, with control over luminance and colour noise. It does an adequate job, but is not as good as third party tools like Neat Image.
PhotoImpact supports RAW files, but the last RAW file update was over a year ago in July 2008; so no support for my Canon 50D test images but my 350D images loaded fine.

You get Layers and Layer Masks, but the implementation is a tad clumsy, in that you must click a button to switch in and out of edit mode for the masks. While Layer Masks are somewhat cumbersome to use compared to Photoshop, Elements, or Paintshop Pro, I was able to effectively merge two different exposures of an image using Layer masks. You do not get Adjustment Layers, however.

PhotoImact has a huge library of effects and enhancements that you can access from the Easy Palette, but, at least for me, the bulk of them fall into the novelty category, although there are useful effects for creating calendars and cards. Yet despite these cartoony features the program also has a very good selection of tools for basic image adjustments, such as levels, channel mixing, white balance, blur and sharpening and so on. Many tools have a set of presets, with an Option button if you want manual control. What’s more, the manual option gives you a decent-sized before and after preview. It is also, like Paintshop Pro, able to use many Photoshop filters (the Neat Image Photoshop plugin worked within PhotoImpact).

But PhotoImpact has a dark side. Users have complained that previous versions of the program suffered from memory leaks that caused slowdowns. Whether this is true, I don’t know, but I do know that as I used it became progressively slower on my system while editing 15-megapixel images until I got an out of memory message. At this point I also found that it refused to open files; I had to restart my PC to resolve the problem. There are clearly bugs here that have gone unfixed, and it’s hard to recommend a product that the developers appear little interested in supporting with RAW support updates or bug fixes.

GIMP 2.6.6
The GIMP is the Open Source community’s favourite image editor, and with good reason. With a retail cost of absolute zero, you get a very powerful image editor than can give even Photoshop a serious challenge in some areas.

GIMP’s interface has come a long way and in its current (2.6.6) version, is a pretty solid affair. Each image opens in its own iteration of the app, a Mac/Linux metaphor Windows users might find confusing, but other than that it’s a clean and straightforward interface.

You get most of the essentials tools; Layers with a robust Layer Mask system, a good collection of filters and image adjustment tools to correct colours, saturation, contrast and so on, selection tools and adjustable brushes, and support for RAW files via the rather good UFRaw plugin.

GIMP, however, isn’t a program that will put the novice photo editor at ease. Despite its reasonably friendly interface, many of its tools use extremely geeky names and parameters without much in the way of explanation, meaning you need to invest a bit more time in experimentation than you would with Photoshop Elements or PaintShop Pro.

GIMP comes with a plug-in architecture and there are some excellent plug-ins available, including G/MIC, which amongst its large collection of tools includes noise reduction. The noise reduction provided via G/MIC, is of a high quality, but like many things GIMP it is not-self explanatory, so some Googling for tutorials is required.

You can also use scripts, via Script-Fu to automate actions; again there are plenty of Scripts available online. But again, the process of creating your own scripts to automate tasks, using the Script Fu console, is not novice-friendly, and certainly not as straightforward as Action recording in Photoshop.

While GIMP has many of the crucial tools Photoshop boasts, there are gaps. GIMP does not support Adjustment Layers, nor does it have 16-bit image support. Both are additions planned for the 3.0 release of the product. There isn’t a nifty merge to HDR feature either, but again I found it simple to do basic HDR tasks using layers and layer masks.
You do get a very serviceable heal tool for correcting blemishes on photos, and GIMP has support for ICC colour profiles.

There were a few key annoyances for me in GIMP, apart from the lack of Adjustment layers, and the user-unfriendliness of many tool descriptions. Firstly, the preview windows in the tool dialogues are too small. Yes, you can zoom in the preview and make it slightly larger by resizing the dialogue box, but since most of the box is taken up with the tool’s parameters, this latter approach doesn’t get you much extra preview space. If you can’t have the tool previewed on the background image, then a decent-sized preview in the dialogue box is essential.

Secondly, there was GIMP’s performance on my (non-Dual Core)Windows PC. It was noticeably slower than Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paintshop Pro at doing tasks like applying filters to images. Its performance on Linux and Mac systems may be better, but for users without a high-end Windows PC, it lags behind the commercial competition in speed. When you are getting an otherwise very impressive product for free, it seems churlish to complain about such things, but it is precisely because GIMP is so good in many respects, that you want it to shine across the board.