Lol. When I saw "
I am a PURIST" I heard my own voice in my head screaming that same thing 2 or 3 years ago when I got my first DSLR. Like you, I come from a film background (still shoot with my Olympus OM-2s!). So when I was told that photo manipulation was SOP with these digital cameras, I bristled at the idea. "That's cheating! You should be a good enough photographer that your pictures come out the way you want it without any editing at all!" Seriously, I was adamant about that.
Until I learned.
Consider this:
1. Pretty much all the great/professional film photographers of the past century and a half did post-process editing. You've heard of dodging and burning, right? Cropping? Those and many others were standard darkroom techniques for producing a desired result
after they took their picture. So post processing is nothing new, not even to "purists" (Ansel Adams reportedly spent years processing "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" - arguably the most lauded photograph of all time - before releasing it.
Check out the before and after.)
2. This was the argument that finally won me over. Modern camera sensors record insane amounts of data when you click the shutter button, but here's the thing:
it doesn't necessarily show you a true record of what you saw when you bring up the picture on the LiveView screen, your phone, or a monitor. This is particularly true when you shoot RAW. What the camera shows you is kind of a desaturated version of Real Life, allowing you to then play with all the data it stored behind the scenes to make things either true to life, or enhanced.
Why would it do this? Primarily because your eye is a better camera than your camera. Think about it. We automatically white balance, to take just one example. You walk through a room with incandescent lighting and see a white wall, it looks white. Go to the next room with LED lights, and the white wall looks white to you there as well. Walk outside into bright sunlight and look at the snow. Looks white, right? We have AMAZING processors, far better than our cameras. Unless you perfectly dial in the white balance every time the light changes, the white you see in your picture probably won't look like the white you saw when framing the picture. Auto white balance has come a long way and does a great job overall, but even then it can still be fooled if the majority of the picture is either all white or all dark. And when that happens, the camera will under or over expose anything else in the frame. (
Here's why.) If you don't compensate when you take the shot, you sure aren't going to have a "PURE!", true-to-life picture unless you post process. It's not cheating. It's compensating for your camera not being as good as your eye. Bring back details in the shadows that your eye saw, but your camera didn't show you! Color correct! Erase that smudge caused by a chunk of dust you didn't know was on your sensor!
BTW, if you shoot in JPEG you'll see your pictures out of camera actually look better than RAW. That's because your camera does some basic post processing in JPEG, making the picture look like what it thinks it should, given all the data it collected on the processor. That's right - even your camera isn't "pure", at least in that mode.
If you like taking pictures and leaving them the way the camera shows them to you, that is absolutely fine. I don't think anyone is gonna argue with you about a matter of personal taste, least of all me. Have a blast with it! I did for good number of months myself, and was quite happy. But seriously, don't think that processing your pictures is somehow "NOT PURE!". History, and technology, argue against that.
Besides, once you get into it, it's a helluva lot of fun. You really should try it - make a copy of your picture to process, then compare it to your OOC (Out Of Camera, ie. unprocessed) version. You will probably be surprised at how often you say, "Now THAT'S what I saw when I took the picture!" at the processed version.
To answer your question: I started with a very basic processor that came with my HP tower, but several months ago started a subscription to Lightroom, with PhotoShop and their cloud service bundled, 10 bucks a month. It's amazing.
Again, I'm not criticizing your choice at all, or your stance on photo purity. If that's the route you want to take, go for it! But if you're doing that because you think your camera is giving you the exact picture you saw in your viewfinder, I hope my information perhaps gives you something to think about. "Post processing" doesn't mean making things look artificial. To the contrary, it often means adjusting for the way DSLR's take and display data to make the shot look real again.
Hope this helped!