Software for photo improvement

Although the new digital cameras do a great job, there are difficult lightning conditions in which they fail more or less. Also you want sometimes to crop your pictures to get a better composition or remove unwanted objects, like power lines in the front of a beautiful temple. For this kind of improvement, there are many photo improvement programs which can do even much more then this.

To give you one example how much is possible, a picture which I took from a plane, before and after correction.

So don't delete your pictures to soon, thinking they are no good.

Digital cameras have difficulties in low contrast (as landscapes from a distance)

and high contrast situations (especially buildings against an overcast sky).

There are several (even free) programs who can easily correct these kind of problems.

Several portrait pictures can also do well with some improvement.

See examples BEFORE and AFTER improvement 

Of course this is also a question of taste, so you can adjust it your way.

I have tested MANY programs, known and virtually unknown, during the last 10 years and improved ten thousands of pictures. Here are my favorite programs:

If you want free software Irfanview is a good program, which can do a lot with pictures: improve, viewer, slideshow, photo and web albums. Irfanview is also easy to use. This is my standard software for quick picture viewing and simple picture manipulation as cropping, resizing, gamma correction and enhancing. This can be done also batch wise for a series of pictures. It is important also to download the plug-ins! You can also use photoshop plug-ins in this program.

 If you want the maximum in picture improvement Corel Paint Shop Pro ($ 80) is an excellent program. Paint Shop Pro has more possibilities like removing of unwanted objects (clone brush) etc. The new smart photo fix works good in most circumstances. You can get a free demo of this software, so you can try it out for yourself.

A general program which I really like is ACDSee Pro. This is an all-in solution with many possibilities and very easy to use. I use this for the photo collages in this web, flash slideshows, text in pictures, organizing and so on.

There is no program which can handle all the difficult lightning situations, so depending on the circumstances there are more options.

An excellent plug-in is AutoEye ($ 129). Not cheap. but it can do sometimes miracles to your pictures.

DxO Optics is a winner of several important awards. I tried it out on a lot of my test pictures and even in the full automatic mode the results were almost always good. Highly recommended. Price range from $ 169 to 299. In the automatic mode DxO has the best average improvement. In difficult high contrast situations Shadow Illuminator  ($40) is a fine program. Ashampoo photo optimizer ($10) works good and easily in low contrast situations as does Irfanview.

If you are interested in the perfect portrait Portrait Professional ($45) is a really great program, see also Dream Girls.

A last remark, don't think that the expensive Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom software, expensive DSLR cameras and more megapixels give better results. The contrary is the case. Try for example to do the portrait improvements, which I could do (as a first time user) immediately due to the extreme user friendliness of this program in Adobe Photoshop (especially when you are also a first time user). It will take your ages or you will not succeed at all in getting the same results, see also dream girls for more examples. Even the free Irfanview does it as photo enhancer mostly better then Photoshop.

As a multimedia producer I use many different kind of programs, therefore user friendliness and intuitive use are very important for me.

There are many ways of presenting your digital photos. There is software to help you with that: from a kind of imitation of the old photo album to the more sophisticated way of making a slideshow on DVD. I use the excellent Photodex Proshow Gold ($ 70) or Producer for that. This is really a great piece of software with many possibilities, and it is also easy to use.

It is possible to zoom and pan together, which gives a result that almost looks like a movie.

It has many ways of transition of the scenes and of course titles and music are also possible.

The quality of the slideshow on the DVD is very good and stays good, also during strong zooming and panning. Seeing the results on my big flat screen Sony Wega TV, I was really stunned.

 If you want it really easy and almost automatic then Ulead’s DVD Movie factory ($ 50) is also a good choice, although the possibilities are rather limited compared with ProShow. This program can also handle many kinds of video: digital video, (Super)-VHS and so on.

If you want to make web galleries, you can use Photomeister or Arles Image Web Page Creator ($49), which has more possibilities, but takes more time to learn. I use Arles for all my web galleries.