Cheap and Free Software for Photographers on a Budget

Every photographer knows that image editing software is an essential part of their craft. Even in an elegantly posed shot with the perfect lighting and perspective, there can be one tiny detail that's off. Perhaps a bride has a blemish that she'd hate to remember when looking back on the pictures from her wedding day. Maybe the pictures from their anniversary party have left Grandma and Grandpa looking washed out, and a light sepia filter would do the trick. Whether you're cropping, airbrushing, editing contrast or adding text, photo editing software is the essential second step for all digital photographers.

Adobe Photoshop, arguably the most well-known photo editing software on the market, also happens to be one of the most expensive. Purchasing a legitimate copy of Photoshop costs much more than most people could afford on a photographer's salary, even less so if taking pictures is simply their hobby. While the monumental price tag attached to Adobe's popular software is disheartening, Photoshop is far from being the only option for image editing. In fact, there are a variety of free and cheap image editors, some of which are geared towards amateur photographers and others which will provide functional editing for the pros.

1. GIMP

Perhaps the most popular free image editor available, GIMP is an open source image editing program that is based around users downloading plug ins and add ons in order to customize the software to meet their needs. With the right setup, GIMP can easily mimic the functions of more expensive image editing software- the setup just takes a bit of legwork to perfect. In its most basic form, GIMP is a great tool for even the most novice photo editor, but when customized, it packs a punch.

2. Corel Paint Shop Pro

Paint Shop Pro, an image editing software formerly owned by Jasc, features an excellent suite of photo editing and imaging editing options. PSP allows users to create macros, a recorded series of edits that can be quickly and repeatedly performed on a batch of images. While Paint Shop Pro isn't free, it generally retails for around $100 and is often discounted. For an experienced editor, Paint Shop Pro is a pretty straightforward and self-explanatory piece of software. While it may look complex to a novice image editor, the software offers a convenient and effective tutorial to aid the learning process.

3. Picnik

For amateur photographers who mostly stick to taking family snapshots and consider photography a hobby, editing photos via an online editor is a definite option. Picnik is just the sort of editor that is appropriate in this situation. Picnik is free to use and easy to understand, featuring intuitive controls that are easy to navigate even without having used photo editing tools in the past. Picnik has an automatic photo fix feature which balances the brightness, contrast, saturation and color in a photo to create a nicer looking image. There are also plenty of filters available to dress up pictures and create artistic effects.

About the Author:
Written by Joseph Riley. Joseph is a photo enthusiast who lose learning and teaching all he can about photography, he buys all of his cameras and photo equipment online at snappit.com.au.

Posted by Ravi Kolhe | 5/29/2013 | Continue Reading...

Reliable and Free Backup Software

For workplaces and even homes commonly rely on backup software due to the various benefits on offer. Backup software offers a big selection of backup and restoration features and also provides a range of hardware options for creating bootable backups. By doing this, you can create different places in which you can store you desired data such as hard drives, CD ROMS and DVDs. When you find a good backup software program, it will also include convenient additional features such as scheduling capabilities and even virus scanners.

Redo Backup and Recovery is a brilliant free program which is an imaging backup tool which slightly differs from the rest. To use it, you download an admittedly large ISO file and the burn it onto a CD or even place on a USB rather than actually installing yet another program onto your machine. The user boots from it to start a simple tool in which can effectively backup you r drives and restore them at a later date, even if Windows doesn’t start up.

AOMEI is also free to use and is a simple and easy to navigate system. You choose the drive or partition to back up and the destination drive, and then click Backupper will be creating an image for you. There are also options where you can encrypt or compress your back ups. On AOMEI you can restore individual files or folders, the entire image, and also there are disk and partition cloning tools. The only negative for this program is that you can’t schedule backups, they must be done manually.

Like the majority of free to use editions of this kind of software, EaseUS Todo Backup Free has a few limitations of course. However, this must not bring down what is a very handy and effective program. The program can run both image and file-based backups (scheduled or manual) you are also able to run full of incremental backups. There are additional tools such as cloning and wipe drives. The only main limitation is that you don’t get encryption with the software.

About the Author :
Louise currently writes for Synthesis IT, through experience she knows how important it is to backup data.

Posted by Ravi Kolhe | 5/10/2013 | Continue Reading...