Runs on: Windows, Mac, Linux (requires Adobe AIR)

This is a great program for landscape photographers. Have you been ever out on a landscape photo shoot and wanted to know where exactly the sun and moon would rise and set. This program written by Stephen Trainor does just that. You get an embedded Google Maps layout on the left where you can find the location of your choice, select the date you’re after and it will let you know what time and angles the sun (and moon) will rise and fall at.

And if you have ever found that great location and the sun is in the wrong spot, you can look forward into the future and know exactly what time of the year is the best time to photograph that location.

If you have thought about “I wonder what time of year the sun would be in that direction”, now you can find out!

Go to TPE’s web site

WXTide32

Even though this program’s last release is back in 2007. It’s still considered a pretty powerful piece of software, and almost essential to landscape photographers. The program is used to predict tide movements. You can find tide information out from the news or from various web sites etc, but this being a standalone application, will let you see tide info offline, right on your computer. Just set your location of choice, and it can be used to print things such as tide charts with oscillating wave display, tide calenders and much more.

It even shows the sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset and the moon phase for any time from 1970 to 2037. The tide graph (shown below) shows handy it is to see what tide phase sunrise or sunset coincides with.

Go to wxtide32 web site

Photojunction

Runs on Windows, Mac

This piece of software is mainly for professionals who have a product line, and need a tool to design and manage albums and books. Photojunction use to be available only at a cost for its usage license, but recently they have teamed up with a few companies and have released the software for free usage.

It works very well, and is used by many photographers worldwide for designing wedding albums, portrait books, digital magazine style albums, and a whole lot more.

It can integrate with your local lab and publishers if they support it.

Visit Photojunction’s web site

XnView

Works on PC, Mac, Linux.

A very neat little program packed with features. It can load and display almost every known image format. It is a good “Image Management” tool if you can not afford some of the alternative commercial products (e.g Photo Mechanic, ACDSee).

Visit XnView web site.

Alternatives: ACDSee (commercial product, though somewhat a lot faster).

IrfanView

Runs on Windows.

This is a free image viewer. If you’re still using the default photo viewer in Windows, then you need to download and install this. Just simple quick image viewing.

Visit IrfanView web site.

exiftool

Runs on almost anything (based on Perl). Windows and Mac executables available.

Very handy command line too for bulk editing EXIF and IPTC data. For advanced users only! It requires using a command line, but its a great tool if you want to do batch commands such as:

• stripping EXIF data, or only certain parts of it.
• adding IPTC data to lots of photos (e.g adding copyright notices)

I might even do a tutorial on this later, on how to use exiftool to batch edit EXIF/IPTC data.

Visit exiftool’s web site.

Hugin

Runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD.

This is a  great open source free piece software for stitching multiple images together to make a panorama.

The best and most powerful stitching software available in my opinion is PTGui Pro. Although this isn’t as good as PTGui, it is up there with the best of them, and all things considering it is free, well worth a try.

Later versions of Adobe Photoshop can also stitch photos using its Photo Merge tool. However it isn’t as advanced as Hugin or PTGui it doesn’t give you the fine control over individual control points and distortion correction. Hugin easily beats Photoshop in my opinion.

Visit Hugin web site.

Alternative: PTGui (commercial).

Enfuse

Works on Windows, Mac, Linux.

I use Enfuse a lot, especially on stitched panoramas where I have bracketed shots. Where I would normally use a tone mapped HDR processing method, I now prefer to use this tool as I feel it gives me better look results.

There are many GUI (graphical user interface) front ends if you don’t want to mess around on a command line.

Visit Enfuse web site at panotools.org

Alternatives: Nothing any exists, its a very unique technique. Various HDR  tone mapping could be considered an alternative, but it just ain’t the same.