philbard
lvl.2
United States
Offline
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Lightroom is really more of an image management and conversion from raw software, but it will do some basic editing. It was moderately priced for purchase as a standalone application, but recently Adobe went to cloud delivery of Lightroom (and Photoshop), you now have to pay a monthly fee, I think $10, to use it from the Adobe Cloud. Since the Inspire shoots in jpg you don't need to have a raw converter, but images shot in jpg that are not well exposed or have color problems aren't as editable as raw files since the jpg format isn't as rich with image data as raw. If you have a long tonal scale, something with deep shadows and bright highlights, you will be able to recover more of those tonalities from a raw capture. But then you need a converter.
If you are on the most recent version of OSX (Yosemite), iPhoto was just released as Photos, it has some basic editing tools but will not convert the .dng files, just checked that. But it is free. Even iPhoto has some tools as well, but neither of them take you beyond basic control over value and color.
Of course Photoshop is great, but not appropriate for beginners and not cheap. There is a standalone version called Photoshop Elements, inexpensive at $69 right now, that has some of Photoshop's main image manipulation tools and may be the best value for the money. They offer a 30 day trial as well. Here is a link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements.html
I've been a commercial and fine art photographer since the '80's, and have mostly used the Adobe products, so can't offer any insight into some of the other programs out there, sorry. If you go the Adobe route there are lots of tutorials for their products out there, YouTube videos, Lynda.com, etc.
Good luck... |
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