You read my lessons, you have a camera and a number of lenses. You have been taking shots, lots of them. So what do you do now? What method do you use to move them from your camera to your laptop or desktop? Once there how do you organize them? It is nothing like the good ole film days when negatives were kept in boxes or if you are like me, you had them stored in sleeves and the sleeves were in binders. Slides were stored in cubes that fit in a projector. Those days are done for just about all of us. They certainly are for me. I store all my digital images on my laptop and back them up to a second laptop and an external solid-state drive. I have learned the hard way to have multiple back-ups just in case and on occasion, something has happened to a folder of shots on my laptop but still existed on one or more backups.

How do I move them from my camera to my laptop? I use a free software program called Play Memories Home. It has an easy-to-use interface that accesses the flash card slot on my laptop. I remove the card from my camera and just stick it in the slot, the program starts and I hit import photos. The program creates a folder based on the dates the photos were taken and sorts them accordingly. I move the folders around to where I want them, usually into a master folder for the year that contains all the folders of shots taken that year. I can then look at them with a yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily view. The program has some simple post-production enhancements as well. Auto correction, cropping, color saturation, and light adjustments. It does a good job and as I said it’s free and works with any digital camera or scanner.

I do simple spot repairs with Windows 10 Photo Viewer, which is a good program to fix scanned photos, negatives, or slides. It can also remove dust marks from any digital image. For major repairs, I use Corel Paint Shop Pro Ultimate photo editing software, as well as some special programs that came bundled with it including Aftershot Pro 3 a RAW image editor. I have found that no one program does it all so I have multiple ones, including video editors and slide show makers that can add music. I don’t do a lot of post-production, like High Definition Resolution or changing images to look like watercolor pictures, or oil paintings things like that. I tend to make my picture inside my camera and use Corel's one-step photo fix which simply corrects things like color balance, and contrast and sharpens it a bit if the focus is off. I use fade correction for old photo scans, slides, and negatives. It does an amazing job to make an old picture look good. I can do photo animation with another Corel program Photo Mirage. It also came with Corel Paint Shop Pro Ultimate. Paintshop Pro also has sorting/library capability, and it is a good one, I am just used to using Play Memories Home. Here is a dramatic introduction to the software that I have been using for over a decade.

I know that Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom are considered to be the industry standard. But you don’t have to spend that kind of money to get good photo editing management and editing software. Not at all. Take it from me, a person who has been digitally managing my photos since 2006, including scanning negatives, photos, and slides. Now you should know that this is a totally unsolicited opinion. I have no connection other than being a user of Corel. I like their products. I don’t think there is anything else I can tell you. Management of your images is important, the easier you can make it on yourself the better. The information that the programs I have talked about here can provide the way to do just that. The Date the shot was taken, camera settings, other metadata, watermarking if you need it, all these things help you be a good photographer. And that is what these lessons of mine are about.