Photo Editing Software Comparison
Today nobody will argue that Photo Editing Software is absolutely a must for any professional and amateur photographer. Even if you are a hater of heavy photo manipulation, you would hardly go without slight image adjusting in digital photography if you want to get some artistic results. However if you shoot family photos and do not care about artistic merit of your images, you may still need a Photo Editing Software.
Digital allows photographers to take thousands of images cheap and digital camera users do not hesitate to take advantage of this. But with hundreds of photos taken at a time, one can easily get lost in an enormous amount of personal shots on the PC. A good Photo Editor will help you easily organize your photos into photo galleries and albums.
What an AMATEUR/ PROFESSIONAL photographer wants from their photo editing software:
 Fast and easy photo organizer
Quick search possibilities (by date, keyword, etc.)
Basic Photo Enhancement: rotation, resizing, cropping, color, exposure, brightness adjusting, noise reduction, red-eye correction, etc.
Basic artistic effects and filters: black and white, sepia conversion, etc.
When it goes to professional photography, we must admit that photo editing has been used since the very beginning of photography. In digital photography conventional dark room manipulation has been replaced by photo editing in Photoshop and other Graphics Software. Modern Photo Editing Programs has grown so powerful that one does not always have to be a professional to create professional photos! Photo Editing software makes photographers’ life much easier, though there are TWO MAIN DISADVANTAGES:
Really powerful editors are equally really difficult to use and learn, as they offer too many complicated features;
A good Photo Editor costs money. The price starts from $500 and more.
Photo editing software to buy: Compare popular photo editing software
Photo editing Software
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Features
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System Requirements
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File Format
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Specials
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Price
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Trial
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Ulead
Ulead PhotoImpact 12
User Rating:
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- Correct red-eye effect
- correct colors with Auto White Balance to
- use a "How-to" Help guide
- Reduce noise reduction
- Create High Dynamic
- Range images
- Select and remove undesired elements of an image
- Extract objects from one image and place them in another.
- use hundreds of effects and filters.
- Create DVD menu buttons, Web and video objects
- Design your own blog pages with Web and Blog Page Templates
- Take advantage of JavaScript™ Effects
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- Intel Pentium III compatible or above
- Microsoft Windows® 2000 Service Pack 4, Windows® XP Service Pack 2 Home Edition / Professional, Windows®XP Media Center Edition, Windows® XP Professional x64 Edition
- CD-ROM Drive
- 256 MB RAM
750 MB available hard drive space for program and content files
- True Color or Hi-Color display adapter with 1024x768 resolutions or higher
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BMP, GIF, ICO, IFF, IMG, JP2, JPC, JPG, PEF, PGM, PIC, PNG, PPM, PSD, PSP, PXR, RAF, RAS, RAW, SCI, TGA, TIF, UFO, UFP, WBMP, WMF, X3F and more
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Special Value Pack: PhotoImpact 12 and PictureShow 4
$139.98
$99.99
Value Pack: DVD MovieFactory 6 Plus and PhotoImpact 12
169.98
129.99
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~$50
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Download trial or buy
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Roxio
Roxio PhotoSuite 8
User Rating:
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- Crop & rotate photos, remove red eye and wrinkles, correct brightness
- Correct exposure, sharpness and color saturation
- Convert into black & white, sepia or watercolor
- Experiment with cloning, brushes, smart edge detection, layers masking
- Capture video bursts along with still images
- Add up to 999 photos per DVD slideshow menu
- Create 16:9 (widescreen) DVD slideshows
- Share with online Peer-to-Peer photo sharing
- Produce cards and gifts from dozens of templates for all
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- Intel® Pentium® III1.6 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent - Windows XP Professional, Home or MCE Edition, with Service Pack 2 or later
- Windows 2000, with Service Pack 4 or later
- 256MB RAM (512MB recommended)
- DirectX 9.0c
- Microsoft Windows Media Player 10.0 or later
- CD/DVD recordable drive
- Color video display adapter with at least 16MB VRAM (64MB recommended)
- 1024 x 768, 16-bit color graphics card
- 16-bit Windows-compatible sound card
- 1GB of free hard disk space for typical installation of all components
- 1GB of free hard disk space for every 5 minutes of video (for video capture)
- QuickTime 6.5 software recommended
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Visit Roxio official site to get information
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Easy Media Creator 9 Suite
($80)
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~$30
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Download trial or buy
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ACDSee Photo Software
User Rating:
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- Use Quick View mode to save time
- Correct red eye and exposure
- Organize photo collection
- Create slideshow with sounds
- Use print layout
- Lock up your private photo folders with a password
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- Intel Pentium® III / AMD Athlon processor or equivalent (Intel Pentium® 4 / AMD Athlon XP)
- 256 MB RAM (512 MB RAM recommended)
- 100 MB free hard drive space (1 GB)
- Color display adapter at 1024 x 768 resolution (1280 x 1024)
- CD/DVD Burner - for creating CDs and DVDs
- Windows® 2000 or Windows® XP or Windows Vista™
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer™ 5.0.0 (Microsoft® Internet Explorer™ 6.0.0 recommended)
- TiVo® Desktop Software - to publish images to your TiVo
- Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 - for Microsoft DirectX file format support
- QuickTime™ 6.0 - for QuickTime file format support
- Ghostscript® 8.0 - for PDF support Windows® Media™ Player 9.0 or later
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BMP, GIF, IFF, JPG, PCX, PNG, PSD, RAS, RSB, SGI, TGA and TIFF and more
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Bundle & Save ACDSee 9 & ACDSee for only US$79.99.
Bundle & Save ACDSee Pro & Ipswitch PhotoMover for only US$149.99.
Other products available:
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~$40
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Download trial or buy
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Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0
User Rating:
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- Fix flaws and remove objects
- Convert to b&w
- Adjust exposure
- Create composite
- Create and customize a layout
- Create slideshow with sound, flipbook,photo galleries
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- Intel® Pentium® 4 or Intel Celeron® (or compatible) 1.3GHz processor (dual-core processors and those with Hyper-Threading Technology supported)
- Microsoft® Windows Vista™ (32-bit only), Windows® XP, or Windows Media Center Edition (XP and MCE require Service Pack 2)
- Windows XP: 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended)
- Windows Vista: 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended)
- 1.5GB of available hard-disk space
- Color monitor with 16-bit color video card
- 1,024x768 monitor resolution at 96dpi or less
- Display driver compatible with Microsoft DirectX 9 or later CD-ROM drive
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Visit Adobe Photoshop official website to get information
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Photoshop CS3 ($650)
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~100
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Download trial or buy
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Corel
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI
User Rating:
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- Get assistance in a built-in Learning Center
- Brighten, rotate, resize, crop, remove red eye, cut out objects, sharpen images
- Correct lighting and color, smooth wrinkles
- Correct perspective
- Change color of special objects
- Reduce noise
- Convert to b&w, Infrared, Sepia or the Channel Mixer
- Decorate your photos
- Add captions or tags
- Calendar View
- 16-bits-per-channel editing, color management settings and Raw file conversion
- Create logos, add text, graphic
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- 500-MHz processor
- Windows Vista™, Windows® XP (SP2), or Windows® 2000 (SP4)
- 256 MB of RAM
- 500 MB of free hard-disk space
- 1024 x 768 resolution display, 16-bit color
- Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6.0
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Visit Corel official website to get information
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Visit Corel official website to get information
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~$70
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Download trial or buy
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Microsoft Digital Image
User Rating:
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- Import from your camera to your computer
- Organize and easily find your pictures
- Fix red eye and the most common problems
- Share with friends and family with e-mail
- Create slideshows
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- 800-megahertz (MHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 800-MHz 64-bit (x64) processor
- 512 megabytes (MB) of system memory
- DirectX 9-class graphics card
- 32 MB of graphics memory
- 20-gigabyte (GB) hard disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space
- Internal or external DVD drive
- Internet access capability
- Audio output capability
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Visit Microsoft Digital Image official website to get information
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Visit Microsoft Digital Image official website to get information
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~$49
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Download trial or buy
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Aperture
User Rating:
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- Import image to you PC quickly and easily
- Organize photos into projects and albums, group sequences of shots together and search images
- Tweak RAW Decode setting (reduce/increase image contrast)
- Auto Noise Compensation
- Adjust hue, saturation, brightness, luminance with Color Meter
- Adjust exposure, histogram, levels, color, highlights & shadows, White Balance
- Sharpen edge and use RGB Channel Mixer
- Crop, straighten, correct red eye, reduce Noise
- Manually stack alternate shots
- View multiple images side-by-side
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- Macintosh computers:
- 15- or 17-inch PowerBook G4 with a 1.25GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor
iMac with 1.8GHz or faster PowerPC G5 or Intel Core Duo processor
Mac mini with Intel Core Solo or Duo processor
Mac OS X version 10.4.8 or later
- 1GB of RAM required
2GB of RAM required for Mac Pro
- ATI Radeon or NVIDIA GeForce Graphics card
- 5GB of disk space for application, sample projects, and tutorial
- DVD drive for installation
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RAW, ARW, .CR2, .CRW, .MOS, .NEF, .RAF, .RAW, .SRW, .TIF, .OLY, .DNG(1), JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, PDF, PSD(2)
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Visit Aperture official website to get information
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~$270
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Download trial or buy
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