Software
After the shutter closes, tools from my digital darkroom.
Adobe Photoshop CS3
There aren’t going to be many people out there that will argue that Adobe Photoshop CS3 is anything less than then de facto standard for digital photo processing. While it might seem very cost prohibitive and calling it feature rich would be an understatement, it is still the most powerful piece of software I’m fortunate enough to use. I was lucky, though, because as part of a web design certificate program I took in 2007, I qualified for academic pricing and was able to pick up the entire Adobe CS3 suite for practically a steal.
I am in no way an expert at using Photoshop, and I find myself switching between tutorials on your to make web graphics for site designs and how to touch up over exposed images. One benefit is that the user community in the blogosphere is so vast that you can usually find anything you need to know about Photoshop online somewhere. There are also more books on Photoshop than would fit in that study of yours, leaving you high on choices and low on time to cover everything.
One bit of personal advice I can give you is practice, practice, practice. Don’t try to learn everything at once. Find things you need to do often and become an expert at those. If you’re only doing a small set of functions on a regular basis, don’t feel the need to learn everything about every menu.
Also, CS4 is right around the corner, so it will be interesting to see what new features and automation gets added to Photoshop next.
View Adobe’s Photoshop homepage.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0
Don’t want to pay for the full version of Photoshop? I don’t blame you. If you’re looking for a more affordable solution and don’t need all the bells and whistles that the full version gives you, check out the smaller version, Photoshop Elements. I actually started learning Photoshop Elements with version 2.0 when I bought my Canon 20D, since it was included with the camera. That worked for me for about an year or so before got my hands on CS3 and really started to shoot in RAW mode.
I’ll still use Elements every now and then when I don’t want to power up my laptop for a small image. My desktop still runs the 2.0 version, although I did get a version of 7.0 when I bought my Dell XPS laptop in February, 2008.
More details from Adobe on Photoshop Elements.
JetPhoto Studio
I mentioned JetPhoto in the GPS section as the software package that I use for geotagging my photos with location data. That is really about the only thing I use this software for, although there are other features in this software package that might be interesting to some.
I don’t overly like the way the way it forces you to create albums within the application and the way it mostly duplicates your files into special physical folders on your hard drive within those albums. It ends up using a lot of storage as a result, which may be an issue for some.
If you don’t need the GPS features, you can probably use the free version of the software and not have to upgrade to the Pro edition. For $25, you can go with the Pro edition as I did, which is a relatively good deal.
Visit the JetPhoto homepage for more info.
Canon EOS Capture
No doubt my favorite gadget software is the remote capture software that came with my Canon 20D. It allows me to connect my camera up to my laptop and control all the settings and even trigger the shutter from my laptop itself. There is even a timer utility that I have played with to put together a few time lapse videos. Also, when using this remote capture utility, the photos are stored on your computer’s hard drive and therefore isn’t limited to the space on your memory card. I love it when my gadgets work together. 
There are other great utilities that came with my Canon, including a full featured photo browser and organizer and hooks into it’s own RAW viewer. I honestly haven’t player around with much else other than the capture and browse utilities. There are probably a few others that would be worth using, too.
Microsoft Photosynth
Another cool piece of technology recently released is the Photosynth application from Microsoft. I first saw this last year when it was still just in preview mode as part of Microsoft Research, but haven’t spent enough time with it since it officially launched.
The concept behind Photosynth is that it can take a series of photos you have taken from a given subject from different angles and stitch them together. It goes beyond that, though, by attempting to stitch them together in 3D and offers you a viewer that use you to navigate your collective photo collage in 3D as well. It is completely browser based and soaks up a lot of bandwidth, so be sure you have a true broadband connection if you want to do some neat things with this one.
I’ll be checking this out in more detail and will be adding stuff to the blog about it when I do.
In the meantime, check out Photosynth for yourself.
AndreaMosaic
AndreaMosaic is a very basic, yet very powerful mosaic generator. It allows you to take your a large quantity of your photos (the more the merrier), select one photo you would like to use for your mosaic. Then, you let it run for a few minutes to a few hours and it generates one of those mosaic images that when viewed from afar looks like one image, but when viewed upclose is actually made up of smaller versions of all your other photos.
I played with this a few years ago and giving it another go around now that I have a better laptop and thousands of photos to use, I’m seeing much better results. It’s free and a good way to kill a few hours if you have a large number of photos to use.
Checkout the AndreaMosaic homepage for more details about the software, and check out my Mosaics set on Flickr for more examples.
If you want to comment on AndreaMosaic or your experiences with other mosaic software, you can post it here.
DisplayFusion
DisplayFusion, created by Binary Fortress Software, is a nifty little desktop wallpaper manager that, among other things, allows you to turn your desktop or your multiple monitors into a beautiful display for your favorite photos. While you probably wouldn’t classify this as photography software, it is a fun and free (I do recommend the Pro version, though) utility that gives you another option to display your photos.
I initially was introduced to DisplayFusion by a co-worker who found it while trying to setup different wallpaper backgrounds for his dual monitor system, but I was more curious when I found out there was integration with Flickr, which is for host my photos online. After a reading more about it online and installing it for myself, I was hooked and upgraded to the Pro version.
My favorite feature of this app, and which is why I use it, is the ability to find photos on Flickr, download them to your PC and use them as a rotating slideshow for your desktop wallpaper. That was helpful for me because it’s never easy to pick just one favorite to use, and I don’t feel like changing it manually whenever I take a new photo I want to use. I just grab it from Flickr, add it to the rotation, and viola.
To learn more about DisplayFusion and to take the free version for a spin, checkout the website at http://www.binaryfortress.com/displayfusion. You’ll need the Pro version to use the rotating background photos, but there is a free trial for that as well and trust me, it’s worth it.