Photo shop/light room

Looking at getting a photo package but don't know what to go for which is the best one for general photography advice please

What do you do/want to do in pp ?

PS is a deep editing application. LR is too, but is a great way to catalogue and display your pictures too.

The Adobe photographer package is great value in my opinion. LR + PS + Portfolio for £10 per month

As Peter stipulates above, it depends on how deep you want to get into it. I've tried Darktable (free, not dissimilar to PS) which is worth a go to see how you get on with the multitude of options. If that's just too much involvement for you then there's options like LR which is a bit more 'scaled back' and Luminar 3/Luminar Flex (and soon to be a Luminar 4). The latter is quite intuitive but many people, myself included, have found some issues with it being sluggish. Luminar Flex definitely improves matters but you don't get the libraries aspect so you have to use a different program to organise the files.

If Luminar 3's performance was that little bit more consistent, I'd use it without hesitation. It's particularly good for editing jpegs quickly, but hangs up a bit with Raw.

That's a bit like asking which is the best car for general motoring - ask 5 people and you'll get 6 opinions!

pschlute asks one of the right questions - What do you do/want to do in pp? The other one is - What experience do you already have? Answer those two and (a) it's easier to give useful advice; and (b) it will be easier for you to make a decision. There's a big difference between the best tools for minor tweaks to jpg's and major, creative editing with RAW (DNG or PEF) files. And it depends on the computer you'll be using - Windows PC, Mac, Linux PC, Android tablet, iPhone .... some packages don't work with some operating systems.

The only advice I can give without knowing your answers is keep it cheap (or better still, free) until you are sure you know what you want to do and keep it simple until you understand what all the complicated bits are for and know you need them. Free software (either freeware or bundled with a scanner or printer) kept me happy for many years - only paid money when I knew what I needed and couldn't get it easily from the free stuff.

Good luck!

Steve

You can download trial versions of all of the paid-for editors like ACDSee, Affinity Photo, On1 PhotoRAW, Lightroom, Photoshop, Capture One, but quite honestly there is no one package that 'does it all'. Lightroom + Photoshop is a brilliant combination and would probably suit 99.9% of your needs, but so would On1 PhotoRAW 2020 + Affinity Photo or Topaz Studio 2 + their AI plugins.

The best thing to do is to try one fo the free ones like Gimp or RAWTherapee to discover what can be achieved.

You'll also need to consider whether to shoot RAW or JPG but that's a whole new discussion. FWIW, just shoot RAW.

Although I need to use Photoshop CC, for various reasons, if I were starting again I'd be looking at the free editing suites; Peter has summed up quite a few options.

It's so easy to get bogged down with digital imaging, so keeping things as simple as possible is often the best idea.

It really comes down to user preference, Phill, and the only way to find out what floats your boat is to try a bunch. If you're on Windows my personal suggestion would be ACDsee, which I've been very happy with (it can be had for pretty cheap compared to some other paying software as they do special offers quite regularly). I found/find it to be very intuitive and straightforward compared to others I have tried, with qualitative results. But I want to move away from Windows and into Linux land and am learning Darktable (freware which runs on both systems) - it has a steep (for me) learning curve, but I think it will be worth it.

Trying a few is really the only way to get an idea of how they work for you... but will eat up a fair bit of your time in the process.

It can also depend on the level of processing you want to do ? How many You tube videos each system has as reference. How are you going to learn the system. If your a landscaper. Do you just purchase Lanscape Pro or do you want to actually edit everything yourself. Which can be very time consuming.. None of the editors are actually bad. But has already been said. Only you can decide which one floats your boat....

Tried the one supplied on CD with the camera?

Another aspect worth considering is how powerful your computer is. A number of these photo editing programmes are very resource intensive. That coupled with the relatively large file sizes of some latter day digital cameras can quickly grind your PC to a rapid halt. PC power therefore is an important consideration also when choosing editing software.

I have been using Faststone Image Viewer (it's actually an editor) for many years. It's not all singing all dancing incomprehensibility like PS or LR but it's free and does a very competent job. Even now, I still learn something new with it due to its sheer versatility.
Get it here link

thanks for all the help
i am trying faststone

Good choice. It's only worth getting something fancier (and pricier...) if it can't do what you want. I still use it for some things in spite of having paid for something fancier.

Steve