Photo Editing Software? - 1
I'm looking for suggestions for free or cheap photo editing software. I have RAW NEF files from a Nikon and am trying to use View NX2 but it takes almost 10 minutes PER PICTURE to edit/save - this is unreasonable! View NX won't load the NEF file - I get a message that NEF files are unsupported. Photoshop keeps freezing, Bibble works, but saves the NEF files as JPEG at the same MB as the NEF and 14MB+ is too large to upload online. When I save it this way and use the converter from View NX2 it compresses to about 10MB which is still too large. View NX2 editing the JPEG photos works well, but takes a 4MB picture and compresses it to 1MB or less --- so am I missing something with one of the programs or does anyone recommend a photo editing software that actually works? I've got about 400 pictures, NEF files that need to be edited - but it's going to take a month using View NX2 and I can't find anything else that works. Suggestions or advice would be helpful!
BTW, I'm using a Toshiba laptop, 3 years old, 2.2GHz processor, 2GB ram. I don't have the money to get a new laptop or pay mega bucks for software - but there's got to be something that works!
Added (1). I'm also using Vista and I need the files after editing and converting to be around 5 Mb.
If you are using Windows 7
then follow the steps
1.open the picture with Photo viewer or with any other program
2.open Snipping tool [type in search box to find the program]
3.capture the image & save as. JPEG
then the final image should less than 1MB [MAX: 800KB]
if you are using Windows XP
1. Open the image with appropriate program
2.press Alt+Prtscn
3.open MS_Paint
4.press Ctrl+V
5.save as. JPEG format
that's it you have done!
Enjoy!
Perhaps "gimp" with the "UFRaw" plugin or "digiKam" will work for you.
Full-size images generally need to be scaled down for most web applications.
I recommend saving your edits in their full size with layers (if your chosen application supports them) in the app's native format or tiff, and then saving a flattened and reduced jpeg or png for web.
Sounds to me like a memory issue. With time, you've installed lots of programs on your computer, a lot of those might be running "silently" in background. In effect your computer has less and less memory available for programs you decide to use.
Run Ccleaner, and go to side menu's Tools button, then hit Startup button and disable from auto startup all the one that look non-essential (most of them… )
Restart your computer, you might be shocked by its newfound speed and the photo software performance might also benefit quite a bit.
Which Nikon camera? Have you installed Adobe Camera RAW? Which version of Adobe Camera RAW are you using. Does the version of Adobe Camera RAW you are using support images from your camera? Every time Nikon brings out a new Camera, Adobe has to hack the file format before it can be included in a new version of Camera RAW. So there's a lag in support, and older versions of Adobe Camera RAW won't have that support, And older versions of Photoshop can't use the newest versions of Camera RAW.
Adobe does have a DNG converter which is free, so you could go down that route.
Your best bet is probably to use a version of Nikons own RAW processing software, that supports the NEF format from the camera that took the images.
You say "Bibble works, but saves the NEF files as JPEG" - well OBVIOUSLY! - Bibble has to process the images. How else are you going to view them? Are there no setting in Bibble to allow you to use an uncompressed format such as TIFF? I would be very surprised if there wasn't.
Your laptop is probably the reason everything is running slow. 2GB is not much for running Photoshop certainly, and I would imagine it will toil with most image editing software.
I'll be honest in saying i don't know much about this subject but take a look at gizmo's http://www.techsupportalert.com/
and check out these reviews I use lightbox
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-digital-editor.htm
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-web-based-image-editor.htm
Take a look at here http://topbestprice.com/top-20-best-selling-photo-editing-software/. You can choose you think is the best for your preferences.