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Given that I don't have $700 to spend on a license of Photoshop CS4 (I could, but my wife would quickly throw me out the door), does Photoshop Elements 7 provide all of the tools I would need to condition and edit pictures of miniatures I take?

There are a number of freeware tools that you could search for. Or you can often get older versions on CDs included with various computer graphics magazines.

my wife

I had always sort of hoped you were a woman and that you looked like your avatar. I'm disappointed.

You're not really missing much with elements if all your doing is simple levels and hue adjustments. You should be fine.

More questions.

Is Fireworks a good program, or should I go looking for something else? I've used
it in the past (bought dreamweaver once upon a time), and it came with fireworks. I liked
it a lot.

However, with the computer crash came the eventual software reassessment. What options would
you guys recommend for light hobby use?

I use Photoshop Elements. It's economic and very powerful for what you want to do.

G

I use GIMP.
Unlike PS CS4, it's free.
Like CS, it requires much time to master, but simple techniques can be done in seconds (depending on power of your video adapter.)

Ifurita wrote:Given that I don't have $700 to spend on a license of Photoshop CS4 (I could, but my wife would quickly throw me out the door), does Photoshop Elements 7 provide all of the tools I would need to condition and edit pictures of miniatures I take?

What are you going to do with the pictures? If you're just going to put them up on the web, Elements is fine. If you're preparing them for publication, Elements (at least by itself) isn't really sufficient (no CMYK mode, for one thing).

Website graphics for me. That's about all I need it for.

Elements should work fine, then. It has plenty of useful tools.

Elements. Photoshop is great if you can afford it, but just for doing web stuff Elements will be fine

Elements should be fine, and you might even fine the wacky web-based version of PS works for you.

The big secret if you have a need for the other parts of one of the half-dozen CS packages is to take a class at the local community college (maybe $300-$400 depending on your institution) and buy CS on Educational Discount, and it's still cheaper than list. Plus you can probably find a class that interests you... take a photography or sculpting class if nothing else.

I use picasa, free from google.

Allows cropping, straightening, colour changes, tone, light mods.

Usually I just crop and press the I'm feeling lucky button and it is about as close to real life as I can get a photo.

It's surprising how much you can do with Paint Shop Pro, which is pretty cheap, or Preview and iPhoto which come free on Mac OSX. GIMP and similar Unix tools are also easily available on OSX and (I assume) Linux.

There's no doubt Photoshop is the no.1 tool but it is too expensive and does much more than you need for basic digital photo adjustments.

I would advise you to try and make the best original picture you can. There are tons of things you can do to digital photos to improve them, but the better your starting point the less work you have to put in afterwards.

I've seen too many photo projects done at work where the original shots were all digital and required lots of Photoshop work to be useable, which could have been avoided if the lighting, exposure and focus had been done properly in the shoot.

Are you just trying to get your models to look presentable, or to improve your painting after the fact? I have a friend who had a site up with some of his models (this is back at the end of 40ks 2nd edition). His dad was a professional photographer and taught photoshop at the local junior college. His models had an amazing paint jobs after an hour with photoshop touch-ups.

My figures are fine as is. My photo tend to be fine too, as I'm using a light tent with a tripod. However, my light colors are all over the place which I try to fix during post processing. Here's an article I wrote that illustrates the various light colors I get out of my camera

http://www.kan.org/michael/mkp/light_colors.php

Photoshop seems to be the best known application, but does anyone else have good experiences with Paint Shop Pro or any of the other products. The version of PSP I am running is fairly old and doesn't have Auto Level or some of the other more standard tools.

I apologise in advance if you already know the following.

The reason why you get these different colour casts is because the quality of light from different sources is different.

Tungsten bulbs give a reddish light.
The blue sky gives a bluish light.
Fluorescent tubes give a greenish light.

Normally you take a white balance off a white card at the start of the shoot, and the camera adjusts itself to the prevailing light. At least, that's how we do it for video -- I assume still digital will be the same.

If you get a proper white balance, the only problems occur if you have strong mixed light sources in the picture, for example, if you have a tungsten bulb on one side and a fluorescent on the other.

Have you tried lighting your scenes with flash (strobe?)

Another thing to consider is colour correction of your monitor screens. Each screen will be slightly different and the appearance to the eye also changes depending on the local lighting conditions. You can get a colour correction gadget for about $120.

I regret I can't offer advice on adjusting colour levels as I never bother, due to having red-green colour vision defect.

Most good consumer-level cameras can manually adjust white balance, at least. My Canon has pre-sets on the mode dial, so I have one that switches to push white balance a notch and sets macro mode with a simple turn.

Kilkrazy wrote:
If you get a proper white balance, the only problems occur if you have strong mixed light sources in the picture, for example, if you have a tungsten bulb on one side and a fluorescent on the other.

That might actually be the problem. I have 2 halogen bulbs on the sides being softened through the tent and a natural light bulb on the top. Might have to play around with that a bit.