Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
ensuring that future generations will be able to open our image files long after their original
proprietary format has become obsolete.
Ironically, Photoshop’s openness has had a somewhat stifling effect on the commercial
growth of other companies. This software has been so dominant, ever since Layers in
3.0 allowed users to isolate parts of the image and work on them separately, that most
graphics art professionals regard it as a “must-have” product. Even the difficulty of learning
Photoshop, generally considered to be its only weakness, has brought commercial
benefits to its developer because people are reluctant to learn new software once they
have invested time and effort elsewhere.
Yet the market is changing. Many photographers expressed a desire for software that had
functions relating specifically to photography rather than all the painting, drawing, and
design functions of Photoshop. Recognizing this as a valid argument, Adobe created
Lightroom and packed it with viewing, sorting, and processing features, plus a one-click
option to dip into Photoshop for retouching and other specialized work. Without doubt,
future development will see features like retouching being transferred to Lightroom,
making it potentially the new leader in an increasingly competitive market.
The User Response
Users devise strategies of their own to stay alive in the digital world. One successful strategy
has been to ignore the full Photoshop product in favor of the lower-cost, entry-level
Photoshop Elements edition, and then—and here is the vital point—load it with plug-ins.
This has given many users the best of both worlds: access to the most popular functions
of Photoshop, plus the latest third-party algorithms for such processes as sharpening,
rescaling, and noise reduction.
Users who try to steer clear of Photoshop find they still need a host editor to get the benefits
of all the available plug-ins. Many, but not all, plug-ins work with other editors such
as Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo, which is itself becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Having acquired Ulead Technology, the third-placed developer of image editors, Corel
is in a much stronger position to mount a genuine challenge to Adobe’s dominance.
A third strategy, one that is becoming increasingly viable, is to use a selection of standalone
software from different vendors. Nikon users are fortunate in having the option
to use Nikon Capture NX to its full extent, as it provides RAW conversion for Nikon
output, plus image editing of JPEG and TIFF files from any camera. Nikon Capture
becomes substantially more powerful with every new release and with the addition of
Nik Software’s U Point technology it allows you to work on specific parts of the image
without the need for Photoshop-style masks, selections, or layers. If you then want to
add best-of-breed sharpening, noise reduction, and image rescaling, you can purchase
another stand-alone product to do the job.