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What software should I use to process my images?

Image processing via computers has been with us for some time and most users of PCs will have at least played with a few of their 'snaps'.

Although the likes of K3CCDTools and wxAstroCapture can produce good quality images, but they do not provide the flexibility that is available via something like PhotoShop.

Photoshop is well known and is typically rated as the best of available image processing software. It should be! Photoshop CS3 costs several hundred pounds! The best price that I could find was £399 !

Fortunately, there are many alternatives which will serve our purposes very well, and which are much cheaper, or even FREE.

Users of Microsoft Windows and MacOS have a wide choice. Have a look here.

Users of the Linux operating system have a more limited choice. Nevertheless, in non-commercial situations, gimp can provide a very viable alternative to the likes of Photoshop The main limitation of gimp (which is not relevant here) is that all images are processed in 8 bit tone resolution. If higher tone resolution is required, then cinepaint can do this (16 and 32 bit resolution). cinepaint was formerly known as Film Gimp and was developed from gimp by motion picture studios to retouch images in 35mm films.

Both gimp and cinepaint are FREE. They are also available to run under Microsoft Windows.

Try to select an image processing program that will provide for layers, tone correction via curves and unsharp filtering. Beware that some of the cut down versions of commercial software that are given away free with printers, etc, might not provide for correction by curves.

OK, I've chosen my software. How should I process my images?

Image processing software can be very complex. First impressions can be daunting. Fortunately, most use similar naming of the various functions, so I can refer to them in general terms.

I will describe how I go about getting the best out of a single image that might be produced by the likes of K3CCDTools or wxAstroCapture. This is likely to be a JPEG or BMP file, but this isn't too important. Most image processing programs can read a wide range of file formats.

Action number 1: After loading your images, always save them under different names in the native format of your processing program. This avoids the risk of ruining original files. In the case of JPEG files, repeated loading from and saving to the same file can result in gradual loss of detail.

These actions will typically be found at the top left hand side of the screen under 'File>Open' and 'File>Save As'. Do not use 'File>Save'. This will simply overwrite the original file.