Picasa-style soft edits?

avekevinavekevin Registered Users Posts: 11 Big grins
edited February 21, 2007 in Finishing School
I have been using Picasa for my basic editing tasks but I am somewhat unhappy with the overall feature set of the software for making more advanced changes. Sooo...I am on a quest for a new software package.

One of the things that I really like about the Picasa interface is the ability to apply "soft edits" that don't directly change the original image file. What would be even better is the ability to make multiple soft edits to a single file so that you can choose from several options (say for different print sizes, coloring, effects, etc, etc).

Are there any other software packages that provide this capability?

Thanks!
Kevin

_____
http://avekevin.smugmug.com/
http://photostore.cytsantacruz.org/

Comments

  • LuckyBobLuckyBob Registered Users Posts: 273 Major grins
    edited February 21, 2007
    Quite a lot of Photoshop's functionality can be accomplished as soft-edits. The only major things that aren't "soft" are filters (although a duplicate layer has worked for everybody for quite some time, and Adobe's working on this for CS3) and image size/crop. I havn't used Elements for quite some time so I don't know how much of it is "soft" anymore, but I'm sure it's quite a bit compared to older versions.
    LuckyBob • Gallery • "You are correct, sir!"
  • colourboxcolourbox Registered Users Posts: 2,095 Major grins
    edited February 21, 2007
    You might want to look at Adobe Lightroom, released two days ago. It's completely built around soft edits. The corrections are held it its database. You don't get a changed image until you export or print. (This is also true of Lightroom's competitor, Aperture, but Aperture is Mac only and if you're using Picasa I presume you're on Windows.)

    Lightroom has a Virtual Copy feature so that you can achieve the multiple soft edits you want. You only store one image, and each Virtual Copy is just a different set of settings you have applied to the one image. What's convenient about it is that the Virtual Copy appears as a separate image in the list, even though there is no actual separate image (until you export one). Kind of like how many of us would like duplicates to work in Smugmug (heh).

    If you want to watch some movies about Lightroom, there's all over the net but here is one particularly good site. Here is the Virtual Copy movie.
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