Brian Swale wrote:
> Hi all,
>
[snip]
> So I have been looking for a program with brush / clone / "airspray" tools
> that
> can be finely tuned and which are capable of being adjusted to being applied
> very gradually in tiny steps.
>
You may want to evaluate this:
http://www.photofiltre-studio.com/frames-en.htm
It's fast, small, does layers, and has the tools you seek. And like
Irfranview, it can use 8bf plugins/tools. Two that I use a lot are very
handy -
http://free.pages.at/easyfilter/smartcurve.html
a very good curves tool,
and
an LCE tool
http://www.photo-plugins.com/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_details&gid=1
[snip]
>
> Last night I downloaded all 12MB (two files without the Help) of the XP
> version of The Gimp. Download took about 80 minutes !!
>
> With a lot of experimentation over about 3 hours I was able to ascertain that
> several of the brush, clone etc tools can be screwed down low enough to
> make fine, incremental adjustments, and although they are small tools, if the
> image is at 200% or 300% when editing, that doesn't seem to matter.
>
> So, the way I am thinking is that The Gimp might well become my main tool
> for extensive manipulation, and that the $130 NZ that I was prepared to part
> out with for PWP will go a long way to getting me a 2 - 3 GHZ machine
> already loaded with XP.
I've used the GIMP a bit. It's quite a bit slower, much larger, and
harder (at least for me) to use than photofiltre-studio. (pfs)
Another option to consider is ImageMagick if you are comfortable using
the command line, but it only runs on Win 98 and above. The learning
curve is a bit steep, but the program is very powerful and both 8-bit
and 16-bit versions are available (free).
http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows
I use imagemagick on 16-bit raw scans to expand the histogram without
clipping and do a safe touch of LCE. That gets me about 90+% of the way
in 16-bit. It's all done on a set of scans in a batch file. I then do
fine tuning, manual dust removal, etc. in pfs.
--
Russ Butler (NJ USA)
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