Gadgets & Technology
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
RP: photoshop question
[This is a repeat from another board]
I've been using my Canon editing program for the majority of my photo editng. But lately I've been wanting to get a little more in depth and am looking into photoshop. If you use/have photoshop, do you have elements or CS4 (or CS3, etc.)? Of couse there is a huge price difference, but will elements be useful for a while for me or should I go all out and get CS4? Thanks for any input!
Re: RP: photoshop question
In all honestly, unless you are a graphic designer, go with the cheapest version of Photoshop you can find. A lot of the upgrades from CS3 to CS4 are things you won't use with basic photo editing. Some stuff is neat, but completely NOT worth spending hundreds of dollars on.
I've worked closely with both these versions, and I really couldn't tell you anything very different between them. Of course, I worked a lot more with Illustrator than Photoshop. So maybe you should wait for someone else's opinion.
When you say "in depth" - what exactly do you mean?
What kind of editing are you looking to do?
For your usualy photo editing, Photoshop Elements will do the trick.
I own the Adobe CS3 Suite. I use Photoshop for photo editing, but I could do pretty much anything I do in Photoshop in Elements as well.
I just mean that I want to go beyond the basic saturation/contrast editing and get a little more into specific editing within the picture, as well as retouching, etc.
I have looked at Lightroom also, but I was somewhat confused what the major differences/advantages were.
I have used both, and I much prefer the full-on Photoshop. However, I would never pay the price they want for it, so I only own Elements. (This preference may be because I first learned on Photoshop 6; after that, I still prefer my old version of Elements to the latest edition.)
Elements definitely gets the job done for non-professionals. If I were to try to start doing photography as more than a hobby, I would spend the money on CS4, but there's no way I could justify that price as an amateur.
I'm big into photography and photo editing. I used Elements for a while, and it is a great starting point. I'd start with that and see if you enjoy it, have the patience for it, etc. From there, I moved to CS3. With CS3, I have the ability to use Photoshop actions specifically for CS3 and it has opened up a whole new world. You can buy actions that are for Elements, but I like the CS3 actions much more. You can typically find free ones online, but you can also find sets of actions that you can buy.
I'd still say start with Elements, though, and then go from there. When you get Elements, buy a Scott Kelby book on photo editing specifically in Elements and it will keep you busy for a long time!
I'm only just starting to brush the surface of this stuff myself, but there's also some open source options. The GIMP is an open source program that's similar to Photoshop, and Inkscape is similar to Illustrator.
We'll just not tell H about this little fact, m'kay?
Lightroom 2 has the tools you'll use on photos most often, like adjusting white balance, crop, rotate (straighten a horizon), organize (TONS of features for organizing), add vignetting, fade/boost/adjust colors, do gradients to make areas darker, lighter, etc. It combines the really powerful tools from CS2 in awesome ways. I learned a lot about it through Digital Photography School dot net user forums and tutorials all over the web. There are also a ton of actions that come with it and that you can buy, if you want to automate some things (making black and white, or sepia tones, or cropping, adding a watermark, etc.) The Adobe site also has online web tutorials that ROCK - check 'em out, for sure. I have several professional photographer friends and most of them do EVERYTHING in Lightroom 2, never have to worry about PS. Scott Kelby also has a book out on it. Never hurts to try it - free for 30 days. :-)
GIMP is awesome! I love it. And it's FREE!
"They say with time it gets better. Not true. With time you only get used to it."
I have used both the full Photoshop at work and Elements at home. Elements will do pretty much whatever you would want to do with personal pictures and is MUCH cheaper. If you are not in a hurry, Best Buy and some others usually have it even cheaper on Black Friday and the things like that can be bought online so you don't have to stand in the wretched line. The doorbuster big-screen tvs demand that you are actually there, but many of the things that are great buys can be bought online on Thanksgiving day.
Photoshop Elements and Photoshop pretty much have the same tools and options in the menus, although the menu items will be under slightly different sections. You can Google photoshop elements tutorials or photoshop tutorials and adapt them. There are thousands of them with step by step directions and a lot of the new ones are video tutorials, which are even better.