Which editing software?

[Doubler]

PhotoshopCS3 is a very powerful progarm and expensive. It is designed primarily for the professional or commercial photographer. Elements 6 and Lightroom are all hobbiest need.

 

[NancyLynn]

NancyLynn,

I have been working with PSP 8.1 for a while now (and it's really good and powerfull) and have XI but did not install it because of what you had said about some of your favorite tools being removed. Did you find what you were looking for such as Grey World Balance and others? Can you now use XI for all your retouching?

Thanks.​

I did a Google search and found others like me who missed the old tools and had found where they hid them. If you have a favorite tool from PSP 8.1 that is not in XI it should be in View-Customize-Commands-All Tools. You can grab the buttons on the right and drag them to the toolbar. I've added back in Grey World Color Balance, Manual Color Correction, Automatic Contrast Enhancement, and Automatic Saturation Enhancement.

I also now use the Adjust-Color Balance tool quite a bit. I pick a spot that should be white for the eyedropper that appears when you hover over the left picture and it does a decent job of correcting most of the time. Sometimes I have to adjust the temperature - just remember to move the slider the opposite way you think you should. If it is too purple, move it more toward purple.

My previous challenge with this tool is that most of my underwater pictures were so far off from white that the software didn't recognize anything as potentially white that should have been white. If I have that problem now, I do a preliminary grey world color balance or channel mixing to get closer to white before I use the Adjust-Color Balance tool.

Long answer, but I'm no longer using both programs for correction since I have managed to find where they hid the missing tools.