Photo Editing Software for Mac? - 1
Looking for expert advice! My name is April and I'm very passionate about photography. I'm currently a beginner, but I'm actually quite talented and self-taught. I love to take lots of pictures and I'm working on starting my own business as lifestyle/portrait photographer. I've already created a business page on Facebook and Wix to showcase some of my work. I also bought my first DLSR camera (Nikon D3100) and the 200mm lens last year. I also just bought the Sunpak DigiFlash 3000 external flash, but I still don't have any kind of professional software to edit my pictures with so I've just been using programs like iPhoto, Picasa and PicMonkey, (etc… Lol)! I've been doing mostly all of my editing on my mac mini, but I recently bought a new iMac (iCore5/version10.9) so, now I just need the latest photo editing software. I want something professional, but not too complicated to learn. I'm willing to spend the extra $$$, but I want the most for my $$$ as well!
Did some research and here's what I have so far:
Adobe - Currently you can get Photoshop CC and Lightroom for $9.99/m
Adobe Elements - Apparently the watered down version of Photoshop and Lightroom
Aperture - Seems like a decent program?
Capture One? Corel? ACDSee? OTHER?
***What are the differences - pros and cons - how they compare - price - abilities - watermarking/tools - effects - organizing - batch edit - sharing - compatible w/all major still image formats including RAW, etc?
Photoshop works pretty well and has a great layout. It may take a bit to figure out all of the controls, but with some testing it will be quite easy for you to understand. A free option that also works well is gimp. Gimp has most of the options more commonly used by PS users, but it's a tad more difficult to figure out.
Aperture is geared toward photography, similar to Adobe Lightroom. Photoshop and Elements are more general-purpose image manipulation programs.
If you want to get professional, you need to be at the very least well-versed in Photoshop. For right now, GIMP is free and does nearly everything Photoshop can do. I would suggest you ask around and find one of your mac friends who can hook you up with a copy of Photoshop, but since we all know this is a terrible thing to do, try GIMP out until you can justify the expense.
BTW, Adobe puts a huge discount on their products for students. You may qualify for such a discount no matter what your level of study is.
For photo retouching (I think you are talking about this when you say "edit"), Photoshop CC is the gold standard.
For editing (picking the best from the rest), Photoshop CC bridge (included in the program) and Lightroom 5 are the most used by photographers. With Lightroom 5, you can batch process huge numbers of RAW files.
What is wrong with the Nikon Software [NikonView2 and Capture NX2] which came on the software disc with your camera? Not only does it MATCH your nikon camera but it also handles Nikon RAW images [.NEF]; why pay for something that you have already paid for?