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Free photo editors for Linux, Mac, and Windows

Can’t afford Photoshop? Can’t justify the expense? What do you need in a good photo editor anyway? To me, the absolute essential features necessary for any photo editing app are:

  • Layers and layer masks (alpha editing). These features let you selectively apply edits and filters to portions of the image that you control.
  • Painting tools. Brushes in varying sizes and hardness. For painting masks, mostly.
  • Curves. Essential. A curves adjustment tool lets you control color, color saturation, contrast, brightness, and black white points. Curves is often the only tool I use.
  • Color adjustment. Hue and saturation adjustments.
  • Channel mixer/B&W converter. Some way to make black and white photos.
  • Filters. Blur and sharpen. You don’t need page curl or lens flare.

Without further ado, and in alphabetical order, some free apps that fit the bill:

Aviary Phoenix (Web app–All platforms)

The only web/online app in the list that supports layers and masks. “From basic image retouching to complex effects, Phoenix delivers the key features of a desktop image editor with the simplicity and accessibility of a web-based application.”

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How to Remove Dust Spots in Camera or in Software

Are dust spots ruining your photos and you don’t know how to get rid of them? If so, you’re not alone! Dust is a common issue when taking pictures and can be a huge nuisance that affects all your photos. Fortunately, there are some easy steps you can take to remove them.

dust spots on a photo

In this article I will discuss methods to remove dust spots physically in camera and in software after the photos were already taken.

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Black and White Conversion: Channel Mixer Recipes

Black and white conversion is a mysterious process. There are many ways to do it and none is objectively any better than any other for every photo. So, these are guidelines, really, in the spirit of a recipe. But unlike following a recipe for baking a cake, we are not all trying to create the same photo. Keep in mind that every photo is different and will require slightly different values for any image editing technique.

Here’s a photo I took on a hike recently with my kids:

Meadow path

To compare with the channel mixer conversions below, first I’ll show the results from a simple average color desaturation. This is a simple conversion, it’s fast, and it’s very easy to do. In Photoshop it’s Image | Adjustments | Desaturate. In GIMP it’s Color | Desaturate.

deasat1

Many people, myself included, feel that this method often results in lifeless photos. If you’re going to convert this way, you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you also boost the contrast after the fact:

deasat2

I think the simplicity of just desaturating a photo and boosting the contrast has a lot of appeal.

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Screencast: Creating black and white cutouts

We ran an article last month called Black and White with a Splash of Color. In this video I’ll show you a few additional simple but powerful techniques that will allow you to easily reproduce that effect.

You should be able to use these techniques in any image editor that supports layers and masks such as Photoshop, GIMP, Seashore, and Paint.Net.

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Review: Nikon D90 first impressions

On semi-impulse I bought a Nikon D90 kit last Thursday from Amazon after nearly four years with my trusty D70. I sat down with the manual over the weekend and got to know it a little better. There are plenty of great in-depth reviews of the D90 out there with tech comparisons and sample photos. This is not one of those. I’m just going to give you my first impressions of the D90, especially things about it that made me smile, from the perspective of a D70 upgrader:

  • Live view! Giant LCD! 6.7x image review zoom! Awesome. The D70 screen looks like a postage stamp now.
  • It is perceptibly faster and lighter.
  • I turned on the viewfinder grid, turned off the focus beep, and switched to selected area for focus because that’s how I roll.
  • The default image processing settings are fairly neutral and true to life. In Flickr terms: boring. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but I’m not particularly interested in absolute truth, photographically speaking. I prefer my photos to have a little more pop so I adjusted the default to Vivid which boosts both the contrast and saturation.

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Exposure Blending Tutorial

After posting Getting the Exposure Right, I received a quite a few questions about how I achieved the HDR (High Dynamic Range) version of the mailbox photo (last photo in that article). This tutorial will walk you through the basics of creating the same look by hand. All you need is camera and photo editing software that supports layer masking (you can follow these steps in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and The GIMP, among others).

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Getting the exposure right

One of the most common problems people have when taking photos is that part of the photo (usually the part that they want to see) is too dark or too bright. For example, when taking a photograph of a friend in front of the sunset, the sunset will show perfectly but the friend is a dark, unrecognizable blob. The problem is that the range of brightness in the scene is too much for your camera to record. So it has to “decide” which parts of the photo it wants to keep (the sunset, in this case) and which parts aren’t as important. And it often gets it wrong.

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A solution for perfect group photos

Microsoft Research Group ShotNext Saturday I’m going to be doing about 30 group portraits with two to three poses each. And if you’ve ever taken a group photograph, you know how frustrating it can be trying to get everyone looking the same way at the same time, not blinking, or generally not looking goofy.

If the group is paying attention it might only take two or three shots to get everyone synchronized. Fortunately for me, this is a dance studio so I’m not going to be dealing with inebriated party-goers. On the other hand, many of them are children. So what happens after the shoot when I find one or two photos where I didn’t notice someone blinking?

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