Quick & dirty photo selection & editing in the field

I'm doing some sports photography and wish to select photos and do basic editing so that the pictures can be displayed at the event.

I'd like recommendations on the hardware and the software.

The editing will be limited to cropping and making the colours more vibrant - nothing subtle. It will be used away from mains power and I'll be carrying the blasted thing all day - a laptop will likely be too heavy and too expensive.

I'm assuming a netbook will be up to this kind of basic editing. Am I wrong?

Can anyone recommend fast software for this? Fast in terms of workflow and the demands placed upon the system. I'm thinking Picasa without the power and complexity ;-) All I want to do is crop then make the colours more vibrant. Pics to be displayed on a projector during a party so I presume vibrant colours and lots of contrast is what's needed, not anything subtle? Pictures for any other use will be processed at home on a desktop.

Any comments appreciated.

I am using Photoshop CS5 on a Aspire 1810TZ. Battery lasts about 6 hours when working, or 10 hours when surfing ect.

It's perfect, at least when you are already used to photoshop. But it should be able to handle all the other picture editing software as well.
I'd recommend working inside, or buying something like a "screen shade".

Cost: About 800$
--
http://www.striking.ch

hesbehindyou said:

I'm assuming a netbook will be up to this kind of basic editing. Am I wrong?

Click to expand...

No, this is possible although the screen size and resolution may cause some frustration.

hesbehindyou said:

Can anyone recommend fast software for this? Fast in terms of workflow and the demands placed upon the system.

Click to expand...

IrfanView is fabulous for this kind of work. Very fast and it will run on just about any old hardware.

The editing tools are somewhat limited but cropping, brightness, contrast, saturation, and more are no problem. It will also host Photoshop/8bf plugins and there are quite a few (even free ones) that will work well in the type of scenario you describe (e.g. for curves-like work).

IrfanView will also handle most RAW file formats. And it has excellent facilities for converting/resizing batches of images.

I never travel without it. Historically, on a very old and underpowered laptop; more recently on a small $300 netbook.

Highly recommended. And here's even more good news: it's completely free!

http://www.irfanview.com/

Thank you both for your replies. A netbook sits in front of me and a copy of Irfanview is about to be thrown at it. Irfanview appears to be perfect - you can crop, fiddle with colour, batch resize and batch sharpen - perfect. Thank you again.

hesbehindyou said:

Thank you both for your replies. A netbook sits in front of me and a copy of Irfanview is about to be thrown at it. Irfanview appears to be perfect - you can crop, fiddle with colour, batch resize and batch sharpen - perfect. Thank you again.

Click to expand...

Excellent. I should have mentioned one weakness of IrfanView: color management.

It does optionally handle JPEGs (and TIFFs) will embedded ICC's. So, if you often shoot AbobeRGB you'll need to turn on that option and there's a small peformance hit of course.

Do not enable the option to apply a display calibration profile if you're going to be editing images. Images will be saved with the display profile applied which is BAD and definitely not what you want. But laptop/netbook displays are not typically up to snuff for justifying calibration anyway. I don't think many folks do that except on very high end laptops running CS4/5 etc.

Personally, I love IrfanView for mobile operations and it works perfectly for me.

Paint.NET is also worth considering, although apparently it is also weak on color management, and may even be completely unmanaged.

malch said:

hesbehindyou said:

Thank you both for your replies. A netbook sits in front of me and a copy of Irfanview is about to be thrown at it. Irfanview appears to be perfect - you can crop, fiddle with colour, batch resize and batch sharpen - perfect. Thank you again.

Click to expand...

Excellent. I should have mentioned one weakness of IrfanView: color management.

Click to expand...

photo mechanic...nothing is faster

I agree with those that use IrfanView, excellent tool.

I would suggest another, that for me, has superseded IrfanView. It is called FastStone and it is also a free program. Take a look, you'll like it!
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm
Regards, Jim
--



Odds N' Ends album here:
http://www.pbase.com/jimh/inbox&page=all
Z album here: http://www.pbase.com/jimh/marilyn_the_car&page=all

Jim N'AZ said:

I agree with those that use IrfanView, excellent tool.

I would suggest another, that for me, has superseded IrfanView. It is called FastStone and it is also a free program. Take a look, you'll like it!
http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm

Click to expand...

The ability to fix red eye looks promising for if the demons appear at the evening party. I notice they also do a smaller, simpler product called Photo Resizer that will crop, rotate, resize and rename too. Have downloaded both for a quick play. Cheers Jim.

Fastzone Image Viewer was the one that got used. The workflow in the cropping window made it very fast & easy. Thanks again.