Photo editor any reccomendations please
Photo editor any reccomendations please
Author
Discussion

Gary11

Original Poster:

4,162 posts

230 months

Monday 13th December 2010
quotequote all
Hi I need an easy to use "photoshop" type program to enable me to compress pictures and add to a document with some text text Ive tried picassa but the thing comletely overan and tried to organise my whole photo library and was IMO hard to use any suggestions would be most wellcome.
G

james_tigerwoods

16,347 posts

226 months

Monday 13th December 2010
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GIMP?

Marc W

3,782 posts

240 months

Monday 13th December 2010
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Gimp if you want a free one or Photoshop elements if you want a paid for version. Both good, I'd say Elements is better, but then it's not free!

Gad-Westy

16,577 posts

242 months

Monday 13th December 2010
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I've been playing around with Gimp for some time now and I'm not a huge fan. The interface is unintuitive and the software seems prone to frequent crashing. On the plus side it's free!

I like the look of Elements. I understand it doesn't do HDR which is a real shame. Anybody able to say whether it can do panoramic stitching like CS4?

Ultuous

2,291 posts

220 months

Monday 13th December 2010
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Paint.net is worth a look - nowhere near as powerful as GIMP, but it sounds like the OP's needs are fairly basic and it's a very neat, straightforward program!

LongQ

13,864 posts

262 months

Monday 13th December 2010
quotequote all
Gary11 said:
Hi I need an easy to use "photoshop" type program to enable me to compress pictures and add to a document with some text text Ive tried picassa but the thing comletely overan and tried to organise my whole photo library and was IMO hard to use any suggestions would be most wellcome.
G
Sounds more like Document creation along the good old Desk Top Publishing (DTP)lines than photo editing. MS Office tools allow you to re-size images and Word is usable too.

If you don't have access to MS Office, Open Office might do it (It's free) and there are non MS alternatives - for instance the Serif products are quite powerful and not too expensive especially as previous versions seem to be on offer regularly.

If you use a Mac I would guess that some similar software will be available, possibly as supplied by Apple in the OS but I don't know Macs at all so that really is a guess.

Hmm. Just found this free offer.

http://www.serif.com/desktop-publishing-software/?...

Might be a good place to start?

ZesPak

26,101 posts

225 months

Monday 13th December 2010
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Ultuous said:
Paint.net is worth a look - nowhere near as powerful as GIMP, but it sounds like the OP's needs are fairly basic and it's a very neat, straightforward program!
+1 for Paint.NET, for those basic things it'll be more than enough.

GIMP is free, but that's actually the only good thing I can say about it :/ (I really wanted to like it though!)

Gary11

Original Poster:

4,162 posts

230 months

Monday 13th December 2010
quotequote all
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!

rottie102

4,033 posts

213 months

Monday 13th December 2010
quotequote all
Gary11 said:
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!
Really?? I can't think of any photo editing software that would be easier and more intuitive to use...
As for scanning the whole library - well, you shouldn't have clicked on every OK without reading... wink

ZesPak

26,101 posts

225 months

Tuesday 14th December 2010
quotequote all
Gary11 said:
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!
to be correct: Paint.NET is not from MS self.

Gary11

Original Poster:

4,162 posts

230 months

Tuesday 14th December 2010
quotequote all
rottie102 said:
Gary11 said:
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!
Really?? I can't think of any photo editing software that would be easier and more intuitive to use...
As for scanning the whole library - well, you shouldn't have clicked on every OK without reading... wink
Please dont be a clever dick I didnt click every ok without reading! Im just not a computer geek and didnt like the thing taking over all my files and reorganising them ect and found it hard to use for my task.

rottie102

4,033 posts

213 months

Tuesday 14th December 2010
quotequote all
Gary11 said:
rottie102 said:
Gary11 said:
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!
Really?? I can't think of any photo editing software that would be easier and more intuitive to use...
As for scanning the whole library - well, you shouldn't have clicked on every OK without reading... wink
Please dont be a clever dick I didnt click every ok without reading! Im just not a computer geek and didnt like the thing taking over all my files and reorganising them ect and found it hard to use for my task.
Sorry if it sounded like that. All I meant was - Picasa is really really good and worth a second shot!

Gary11

Original Poster:

4,162 posts

230 months

Tuesday 14th December 2010
quotequote all
rottie102 said:
Gary11 said:
rottie102 said:
Gary11 said:
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!
Really?? I can't think of any photo editing software that would be easier and more intuitive to use...
As for scanning the whole library - well, you shouldn't have clicked on every OK without reading... wink
Please dont be a clever dick I didnt click every ok without reading! Im just not a computer geek and didnt like the thing taking over all my files and reorganising them ect and found it hard to use for my task.
Sorry if it sounded like that. All I meant was - Picasa is really really good and worth a second shot!
Oh OK thanks for the advice!

Skodaku

1,805 posts

248 months

Wednesday 15th December 2010
quotequote all
I could be missing something here, (not for the first time), but this sounds as though it's actually a document formatting issue, not a photo formatting one. If using MS Word, just drag your pic onto the page - it will be too big and in the wrong place - but then left-click the image and the border around it will display 8 little squares. Use these to resize the image by left-click-and-hold on one of them then drag it in the required direction. Using one of the corner squares will allow you to drag the image diagonally to re-size it whilst holding proportion. Once you have pic the right size, just drag it to wherever you want it, add text somewhere and start again with next pic.

Sorry if that's complete horsepucky but that seems, to me, what you're aiming for. Apols if it's not.

sgrimshaw

7,587 posts

279 months

Wednesday 15th December 2010
quotequote all
Gad-Westy said:
I like the look of Elements. I understand it doesn't do HDR which is a real shame. Anybody able to say whether it can do panoramic stitching like CS4?
Elements has something called Photomerge Exposure - basically HDR by another name.

It also does Panoramas.

Why not download the free trial from Adobe.

jimmy156

3,834 posts

216 months

Wednesday 15th December 2010
quotequote all
rottie102 said:
Gary11 said:
rottie102 said:
Gary11 said:
Oh thats great will perhaps try the microsoft for ease I dont need much beyond compressing 8 pictures to fit an a4 sheet and adding a description to each and then uploading I found the picassa to be a world of pain!
Really?? I can't think of any photo editing software that would be easier and more intuitive to use...
As for scanning the whole library - well, you shouldn't have clicked on every OK without reading... wink
Please dont be a clever dick I didnt click every ok without reading! Im just not a computer geek and didnt like the thing taking over all my files and reorganising them ect and found it hard to use for my task.
Sorry if it sounded like that. All I meant was - Picasa is really really good and worth a second shot!
I'm with Gary11 on this one, i use picassa occasionally on a work computer and its a complete pain in the ass. Personally i have PSE really great and intuative to use, although the organiser workspace has done the annoying thing of running out of memory and not displaying thumbnail pics for anything past a certain point... but i dont use it anyway as i just organise things by naming the files they are in!

Gary11

Original Poster:

4,162 posts

230 months

Thursday 16th December 2010
quotequote all
Skodaku said:
I could be missing something here, (not for the first time), but this sounds as though it's actually a document formatting issue, not a photo formatting one. If using MS Word, just drag your pic onto the page - it will be too big and in the wrong place - but then left-click the image and the border around it will display 8 little squares. Use these to resize the image by left-click-and-hold on one of them then drag it in the required direction. Using one of the corner squares will allow you to drag the image diagonally to re-size it whilst holding proportion. Once you have pic the right size, just drag it to wherever you want it, add text somewhere and start again with next pic.

Sorry if that's complete horsepucky but that seems, to me, what you're aiming for. Apols if it's not.
Yes manually resizing every image is what ive had to do ...gets tedious when you have to add 30 pictures, and you accidentaly near the last one to edit hit a wrong key and the whole doc turns into a rubic cube!Thanks anyway.

I need to send them to a folder compress and rezize all the pictures together ideally.Then I can send them to the doc .I need 8 pics to an A4 sheet.

Colin RedGriff

2,541 posts

286 months

Thursday 16th December 2010
quotequote all
For easy (and free) image resizing - I think irfanview is hard to beat. You can batch resize files easily as well as applying other changes at the same time (eg rename, output to different folder)


www.irfanview.com

rottie102

4,033 posts

213 months

Thursday 16th December 2010
quotequote all
Sorry for defending Picasa once again wink but from what I understand your problem would be easily solved by using COLLAGE function. You just add the pictures you want from your library, then choose which format, size, how you'd like your borders etc. You can move pictures around, swap the over etc. Once you're done just create a collage, next you just add text wherever you want. And then to finish it off you can resize the whole thing to whatever you want using EXPORT function. And you'll have multiple pictures, with text, easily fitting the A4 page, ready to print.