Photo editing program

[Matthew Anderson]

Just recently gotten into underwater photography and need to know what the best program is for editing.
Currently using Sony capture one cause I have a Sony rx100 V

Any thoughts

 

[bmorescuba]

Opinions will vary greatly, but if you shoot a lot of RAW and are willing to put in a little time to learn, Adobe Lightroom is a fantastic program for editing underwater photos. You can see evidence for this by the number of u/w photo shops that offer classes (and even entire trips!) devoted to Lightroom. You can still get a hold of version 6 standalone, but you might as well bite the bullet and get the photography subscription license. Support for 6 has ended, so if 6 doesn't support RX100V RAW, you'd be out of luck. The sub gets you Photoshop, too. I prefer Lightroom Classic CC, as opposed to Lightroom CC, which is more cloud-centric but lacks some features of Classic. At the least, you can try this package for one month and see if you like it (Creative Cloud pricing and membership plans | Adobe Creative Cloud). You can find literally thousand of hours of free tutorials online about how to do everything.

 

[Chris Ross]

Capture One can do most of what you need and it also has cataloguing capability, you'll find plenty of tutorial material on Phase One's site. The Raw converter in Capture One is up there with the best. If you need more like cloning tools etc, just add something like Photoshop elements or even paint shop pro. Don't give subscription money to Adobe for no good reason.

 

[Laurie S.]

I use Lightroom followed by a little final touch up in Photoshop.

 

[Matthew Anderson]

thank you guys. looks like im going to be going with lightroom

 

[kelemvor]

One drawback to the Adobe products is that they take some skill to use effectively. Another is that they're kind of expensive. If you're just looking for something to touch up your dive photos (color correction etc) then check out stuff like LAND & SEA SCUBA | Fast, Easy photo editing software It's not a great UI but it's both easier to use and cheaper than photoshop or lightroom. On the flip side, it's not nearly as powerful or flexible.

I use both Photoshop and Land & Sea.

 

[RTee]

For the past two years I used the Adobe CC subscription and then realized that I never found the time to use the other softwares beside Lightroom. This year, I elected to cancel my registration and purchased Lightroom 6 stand alone. While 6.14 (similar to 2015.14) is the last update they made for that version, it meets all my needs. Lightroom might seem to be fairly complicated to use effectively, however, there are plenty of videos and tips available on the Internet to assist you. The beauty with this software resides in the fact that in addition of improving White balance and colors of your pictures (within reasons), it also allows you to adjust localized lighting in your picture (increase lighting in darker spots and reduce it in over exposed areas. I am pretty sure you can have a Lightroom CC 30 day free trial available from Adobe and then see if it meets your expectations.

 

[Manneca]

I use LR 6.14. (The last update includes my not yet purchased camera, so I'm good for the time being.) Color correction is great; there's lots more that you can do to improve your pictures, too. I just finished a Backscatter class (wide angle plus LR). I'd suggest after you master what you think your pictures most need and if you are serious about your images taking a LR course specifically geared to underwater. I hate the subscription model, but I think I'll probably be moving to it sometime this year. The subscription version has tools that LR6 doesn't have.

 

[muzikbiz22]

Stick with Capture One.

 

[Coldbloodeddivers]

Capture one here too!