I have been using the Microsoft Digital Image Suite software for processing photos for years. Now my software and computers are becoming obsolete, and I am going to have go to Windows 10. The Microsoft Digital Image Suite program will not run on Windows 10, and there appears to be no Microsoft replacement for it. Does anyone have any recommendations on a replacement? I have looked at Adobe, but they want $10 on month and want to store everything “on the cloud.” I am not comfortable with that. The closest thing to what I have had that my computer expert has recommended is Photoscape, but I have not been able to get the white balance feature to work on it very well. Does anyone have any recommendations? Thanks.
Have you looked into GIMP? It's a free open-source program that is similar to Photoshop. I'm not too good with it but it seems to be capable of just about anything.
What are you looking to do? GIMP is great and free. If you want to pre-process images from a camera first, RawTherapee is amazing and also free. You can easily play with the data the .raw saved. https://rawtherapee.com/ Here's a video of a guy going through it:
I am looking mainly to take close-up pictures of coins and process them. I tend to need white balance help with the camera that I have.
GIMP is a full featured free software which will do just about anything that Photoshop can. It's a little less user friendly than photoshop, but the free price is nice.
I'm cautious about using GIMP due to my limited technical abilities. Play with the white balance in PhotoScape first, and then maybe try GIMP
GIMP has both an auto white balance adjustment, or of course you can manually adjust r/g/b values. I have not used it to read in raw image files and adjust color temperature values like I do in Photoshop, so I don't know if it has that mechanism.
I use 'Photoscape', and it's free. Does just about everything I need to. Also too.....you can crop in the round.
Have you tried installing it on 10? I've been running a lot of old software on 10 that you wouldn't think would run. I'm still running Word and Excel 97 on 10
I also use GIMP. If you have some familiarity with other photoshop-type software, you'll pick it up quickly. But if you have very little, you might find it has a little bit of a learning curve.
I like Corel Photopaint which I've had since around 1998. About 20 years ago I had free CD copies of Adobe and Corel. I decided on Corel which is more targeted towards business owners and 'common folk' needing to process images rather than the high level Pro Artists using Adobe. Just upgraded to the 2019 version from the older X5 after my laptop was sent in for repairs and I couldn't find my old X5 install program. X5 (2012) and the Corel Photo-paint 2019 both run on Windows 10, Macs, and probably older windows. Once you own it you keep it forever. I stupidly forgot to burn a backup CD with my X5 and registration which is why I upgraded. It's a full power package for single frame images and may even do animations (which I don't do). I use it for processing literally thousands of images on my websites. Without it I could possibly function with the free editors but it'd be very inefficient. A background I quickly created from a B&W eagle image by using a "drop shadow" in Corel.
I have both Gimp and Photoscape. Love the cropping and combining ability of Photoscape and the Auto White Balance of Gimp.
I throw in another vote for GIMP, even though I use an older version of Photoshop. If you're dealing with white balance issues, try to do this with a Camera RAW processor using the full dynamic range of the camera. If you start with a JPEG, you are already down to 8 bits per color channel and some quantized colors because of the compression. Also, Photoshop does not require you to store stuff in Adobe's cloud storage, although it will let you if you want. Here's some info in the form of an article about the top 10 myths/concerns about the Creative Cloud.
I use FastStone for simpler processing and Photoshop for more complex manipulation. FastStone is free. I have an older version of Photoshop, so no monthly fee. Also use IrfanView for specialized tasks like dealing with jp2 files. IrfanView is free too. Cal
