Anyone familiar with PhotoPad?

[bif]

I just downloaded it and it seems like it does everything PhotoShop does. A little bit of a learning curve, but overall, it seems pretty intuitive.

[usonian]

1. First I've heard of it. Commercial Freeware?

https://www.nchsoftware.com/photoeditor/kb/free.html

Is this program completely free?

Yes.

We make this software free with the hope you will like it so much you might come back and try some of our other many other programs.

There are absolutely no restrictions in this version of the program.

Here are the other programs they reference:

https://www.nchsoftware.com/software/index.html

Quite a few.

It will be interesting to see what people think of this.

I get such great jpegs from Nikons that I almost always need only Preview.app to get super results, and I did a lot of medium format film photography.
Beyond that, GIMP, Darktable and RawTherapee for raw files.
I'm so pleased with the jpegs out of the camera that I haven't felt a need to do RAW.
But I keep them all "just in case"
Just in case I have time to deal with them.

[bif]

2. I do minor modifications

Like change the contrast, brighten up shadowy areas. Sometimes I increase the saturation a bit. The main thing I use it for is to crop and change the size of an image. The pix from my phone download at 72 DPI. Which makes them huge. I convert them to 300 DPI which makes them roughly 8 x 10.

[usonian]

3. I find that digital camera sensors block up highlights, but preserve detail in shadows, the opposite of film.

I've had pretty decent luck just boosting the shadows globally. Any unintended boosting of mid and high values can be trimmed with the "middle" slider in most editors (Preview and Gimp) and highlights separately by a slider or a "shadows/overall/highlights" tool.

I *do* at times resort to GIMP to select very dark areas to brighten without affecting the rest of the photo.
This is probably the time to use a RAW image editor and I will learn them soon.

On the mac, I use Preview.app a lot. It does the above, but does not offer editing on selections, or fixing goofs with the heal tool or airbrush. I had one photo with powerlines (gone) and one with lots of birds in the distance. I thought they were dust spots.

I can use Preview or GIMP to export an image in different sizes, but for consistency and workflow, I use Batch Photo Resizer to make small images for messaging (the Mail app lets you shrink nicely to keep the message size down).

Super Photo Upscaler upsizes images using a bunch of algorithms you can choose. It had another name. I just use these for batch processing, because I hate repeated manual operations. I used to use ImageMagick on the command line, but it has to be reinstalled with every mac upgrade. (so use homebrew).

Phone photos are massaged by the phone software and look different from camera photos. If they exaggerate, some iphone models allow RAW images as well as jpegs and heic.

TBH, most of my photos, I sharpen a tad if needed, and use the middle slider in Preview to zip up the contrast a little, and then bring up the shadows if needed, and little else. If I reduce highlights, that seems to increase the saturation, and I'll actually back off saturation or shift the temperature a little bluer (I take a lot of sunset photos). I always try the "Auto Levels" button and almost always back off, just to see what it thinks. Sometimes, startlingly bad. And with some photos, nothing. I find that it (look at the histogram) brightens the highs and moves up the black point. Often that's a nice staring point. My camera's metering setting seems to downplay the highs a bit. and the app seems to set them just below the saturation point.

But I ramble. I hope this helps. I really do keep processing simple.

Some here do use advanced photo editors. I just don't have the time, and I am happy with the results from KISS.

But the RAW files are saved in case I want to go beyond.

[bif]

4. I've been using PhotoShop for ages

But as I mentioned, when I took this old laptop to the Apple store, they upgraded my OS and now I can't uses the old PhotoShop app I bought. I really don't want to pay a monthly fee to use a newer version of it. So I'm going to learn how to use PhotoPad and it'll have to do. I mainly use photos as reference images for painting. So they don't have to be great. I do document my finish paintings with my Nikon, so I have to do a little color correcting on the images. Oh well, this will have to do.

[usonian]

5. You'll be just fine!

Like I said, I use Preview.app most of the time, and I get great results.That, or PhotoPad should work just fine. I'll give PhotoPad a try because I like free software, but especially free and open source.

Kids and students should not have to pay a ton for software. Free and Open Source has great offerings.

If there's ONE or two things that you need in Photosop, GIMP (get an older version from the download link I sent) has all the goodies. I especially like the light curve tool. The very old Unix "xv" program did this in the 80's and I like it a lot.

Keep it simple. My Dad was an artist in oils. Until the 70's and beyond, cheap consumer cameras cameras were clunky. He did portraits of his favorite movie stars and only one family portrait, my niece. I think he worked from movie posters (I saved some) and probably from a nice photo for his granddaughter.

I did a pencil sketch of my daughter in 1994. And that's all.

Pics of me and my brother were taken with a Brownie Reflex. A lesson in humility.

[bif]

6. Unfortunately, I don't think I can use GIMP

I downloaded version x86 and it said my operating system wouldn't support it. And I don't think there's an older version of GIMP out there.

[usonian]

7. Try this

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1096&pid=7103

The gimp download page

https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Has a link to older versions. I can't say which runs on your os, but I am sure there's a forum to ask that.

I run some really old computers and manage to find old versions of software that will run on them (most of the time)

🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀Good luck.🍀🍀🍀🍀🍀

[bif]

8. No luck

I downloaded a couple versions and they didn't work. So far, I've been teaching myself PhotoPad. It's pretty intuitive and is a lot like PhotoShop. And the best thing is it's free!