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Sunday, August 2, 2009

Essential Free Software tools for The Digital Photographer

    This is a list of software (Mostly free)  that i have found useful in my digital workflow. If you don't see your favorite program here, please drop a comment and i would love to try that one out. Photoshop and Lightroom are not free but i have given the nearest free alternatives that I use.

     

       

  1. Gimp / Photoshop -  Gimp or Photoshop allows us to adjust the exposure settings, create HDRs Panoramas, work with layers etc. Gimp is free and is good enough for most purposes while Photoshop will cost a lot and has a few more options to play with.

  2. Picasa / Adobe Lightroom – Picasa is a good free photo organizer and viewer for viewing your collection from Google. Lightroom is an expensive offering from Adobe and is a complete photo workflow including integration with Photoshop. However it does not have all the layers and advanced features of Photoshop, but is great to work with a batch of images

  3. Irfran view – Irfran view is a great photo viewer (Free) and has some basic editing features as well. It supports a wide range of formats and the best feature I see is the batch processing. If you want to quicky resize 1000 photos and or rename them, adjust some parameters like sharpness while you do that, I have not seen a better tool than irfran view to do that.

  4. Microsoft Synctoy 2.0 – This is a great little free tool from Microsoft that allows you to take backups of you photos/documents. It can be scheduled and you have a lot of options to customize your backup

  5. Microsoft Live Writer (Photo Bloggers) – If you blog then this is a wonderful free tool from microsoft that works with most Online blogging services

  6. A Flickr Account and Flickr Uploadr – The best social network for photographers. If you are new to photography, the you must join for a free account. Flickt uploadr is a free tool that lets you add images to flickr.

  7. Twitter – I post the photo links on twitter whenever i upload photos or blog articles. this will help my friends who are not on flickr to follow me

  8. more to be added……

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