One of the most important resources a freelance digital photographer can have is a digital editing program like Photoshop. If you are selling your photos online, it definitely helps to edit your photos to a professional quality. If it’s just altering your color scheme, fixing lighting or adding filters, it can all be done by using a program such as Photoshop. A big problem that I get in my inbox from freelance digital photographers is how expensive Adobe Photoshop is for the newest version. If you don’t know, Adobe Photoshop is around $500.00, and although it is a great professional tool, it can be a little absurd and superfluous to have so many tools that aren’t going to be used. You may just want a digital editing program to fix slight changes and aren’t really going to be using the tools for graphic design. You need to find an alternative program that won’t send your wallet to the cleaners.
Your options may be slightly limited, as far as quality and robust digital editing software goes. But there are tons of different options that cut the cost way down. An option that has been getting more popular but can be considered a little bit too gimmicky and not professional enough is online based editing (web based editing). This offers you some basic editing options and a few clever online ideas but falls way short of an Adobe product. What an online based editing program lets you do is; edit everything from the internet without downloading a program. Check out the link at the bottom to see a complete list of sites where you can try out these programs. They are usually free and are very easy to use, but as I said before, they are limited.
If you don’t mind spending some money, then you can get a more basic version of Photoshop called Elements. It’s also by Adobe, and offers you the most comprehensive tools that you can get for the money. This would be your best second option if you are a freelance digital photographer because, it is great for beginners and veterans trying to sell their photos online. Obviously the main downside is that you are still going to be spending a little bit of money. The program cost around $90.00. Still, if you think you want to sell your digital photos to buyers online and you’re in for the long haul, you probably can invest under $100.00 for picture perfectness. You can find the program on Adobe’s site.
Lastly, the only option you have left is to get a find a program online that you can download for free and use whenever you want. These programs are great for beginners, they don’t offer as little as the web based programs and don’t offer as much as Elements or Photoshop would, but still get the job done. The main attraction these programs have is their cost, they are usually free. The downside once again is, they lack a lot of the more professional tools and they don’t have the greatest user friendly interfaces. Some of these programs are a little bit buggy, meaning, they might not work with your hardware, or have they’ll have problems saving files and such. Also, you need to check if they can run on a Mac, if you do indeed own a Mac. You can find a list of the program descriptions and links at the bottom of this page.
There are your Photoshop alternatives, you might need to do some research to find which one best suites you, but I don’t recommend going without any digital editing software. Buyers want to purchase the utmost quality that sometimes your digital camera can’t always master. Read some of my other tutorials to find out more on picture editing.
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