Photography is an expensive hobby, isn’t it?
Cameras cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, and lenses cost even more. Add on filters, and all the other required accessories, and you’ll quickly be staring at an empty wallet.
Fortunately, you can get some relief when it comes to software. Here are five great applications for nature photographers that are completely free:
GIMP – Photo Editing
The GIMP is an image manipulation program, and has many of the same features as Adobe Photoshop. It was never meant to be a replacement for Photoshop, but it does have nearly all the tools required for nature photographers: curves, levels, shadows/highlights (with plugin), RAW support, and layers (with masking).
The two big features missing from the GIMP (but planned for a future version) are adjustment layers and support for 16-bit images.
GIMP
Qtpfsgui – HDR
Don’t ask about the name (and yes, I spelled it right!). Qtpfsgui is a High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) tool. It works almost as well as the non-free Photomatix tool. It’s not very user friendly, so look for a tutorial here on PhotoNaturalist soon.
Qtpfsgui
Stellarium – for landscape photographers
Stellarium is an excellent tool for visualizing the sunrise/set, and moonrise/set. It’s very user-friendly, and you can easily look at a date in the future and see where the sun/moon will be at a certain time of the day. This is a wonderful tool to help you plan great landscape shots.
Stellarium
Google Earth – for landscape photographers
Google Earth is another great tool for landscape photographers. It shows you the elevation and terrain of a specific area, which can help you determine if the sun is going to set behind a mountain or hill.
Google Earth
JAlbum – for making web photo albums
JAlbum is a great tool for making your own web photo albums. Usually, I prefer to use Flickr for displaying and sharing my photos, but sometimes it’s nice to have independent galleries too, hosted on your personal blog or another site. JAlbum is user friendly and has a ton of different “skins” for your album, so you’ll surely find a design you like.
JAlbum
What did I miss?
I know there’s a lot more than 5 free applications out there for photographers, so what did I miss? What great programs have you found that might be helpful for nature photographers (and that are also free!)? Please share by leaving a comment below!
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About the Author: Steve Berardi is a naturalist, photographer, computer scientist, and founder of PhotoNaturalist. You can usually find him hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains or the Mojave Desert, both located in the beautiful state of California.
Related posts:
- Free software for landscape photographers
- 5 great resources for nature photographers
- How to create intimate portraits of nature
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i am a great fan of Gimp and Qtpfsgui, thanks for the info on the others,
Other free tools that I use are :-
faststone image view http://www.faststone.org
photoscape
microsoft ICE – great for 1panorama’s
I also really enjoy photo! 3D for my screen saver -also has a tool to create galleries with very interest backdrops and quite a cool, simple editor too.
Hi Steve,
Great stuff. I really need to check out Stellarium, sounds prety cool.
I write a blog: freephotostuff.blogspot.com full of free photography stuff, so feel free to check it out and post them here if you like.
Some favorites: Google’s Picasa3, NikEfex pro filters, onOne free lightroom & ACR presets…
I like Picasa as an image organizer to complement GIMP’s image editing capabilities. Between the two of them, I don’t really need Adobe’s programs.
@Jenny – that screensaver software looks pretty cool! too bad there’s no mac version
@Chris/John, good call on Picasa.. I was thinking about mentioning it in the article, but I’ve never used it before (I just use Apple’s iPhoto for organization).. always hear good things about it though!
Glad to see you mentioned the GIMP. My husband is very pro open-source software, so he actually turned me on to it. I still don’t know how to use half the features available in it, but I do like what I know how to use. I too am a fan of Picasa. That’s my main program for dealing with my photos at present, and it works well with the Blogger platform.
Thanks for a great article, I am using JAlbum on my site for my gallery images and find it absolutely awesome. Love the idea of using google earth for chechking out surrounding terrain on future photo shoots. I am a mac user and often battle to find great software that is free. Cheers
@Heather – the GIMP is definitely an awesome program. For some photos, I’ve found that the “Curves” feature in the GIMP works better than Photoshop’s!
@Delme – I use a mac too, and agree.. there’s not as much “free” software on macs as there is on PCs. Luckily though, most of the really good stuff is free and open source, and ported well to the Mac (i.e. GIMP).
There’s a free moon position calculator at http://www.findthemoon.com. You just put a target in the sky in a google-earth like screen and it will tell you when the moon will be in the target. It’s good for precomposing and planning moon landscape shots.