[Talon 1]

Just started out. I have paint shop pro 4 but thats it which came standard with PC. Can anyone reccommend something to be starting off with. Not to complicated but does a reasonable job!

Thanks

[RAH]

I've long been a fan of Paint Shop Pro. The latest version is 9. I'd recommend it over Photoshop Elements. That used to be a no-brainer as far as I was concerned, partly because Jasc (PSP) was a friendly small company and Adobe (Photoshop) was yet another "evil empire" software company with overpriced software. Corel recently bought out Jasc, so that factor has lessened somewhat, but PSP is still more powerful than Elements, and in my opinion has a better, more cutomizable, and more standard interface. Of course, like most software issues, this is a matter of taste.

[Gramayr]

You can get the 'gimp' bundled with magazines, never used it but its free and supposed to be ok. I've always used photoshop - since that is what I was brought up on at college.

[sidrat]

The latest version of Photoshop Elements, V3, is very good with an album type package built in allowing you to catalogue all your photos. It has two main areas for correcting images depending on how deep you want to go into manipulating an image. The quick edit is ok for an all-in-one 'one click' correction or the standard edit gives you full control over all the tools. As previously mentioned it depends on what you want to do and how much time you want to spend learning a package, I have the full blown Photoshop but these days I find I can do most things in Elements 3, I thoroughly recommend it.

Pete :~}

[madmike]

Hi Free,
A while ago someone on BF mentioned a new FREE prog from Google called PICASA2. I downloaded it and have found it very good both for collating my many photos, and also for improving images. For some reason it seems quite a small prog and does not take up much memory but it's also very powerful.
It also seems to handle RAW images OK, certainly the ones from my 20D.
Give it a try.

Cheers,

madmike

[Corax67]

Hi Free,

I use Photoshop CS at work (because they can afford it!) and Paint Shop Pro 9 at home - on balance I prefer the more friendly interface of PSP.

Photoshop has an incredible range of tools, but therein lies its problem - for general photographic manipulation it just takes too darned long to find the bits you need for a simple tweak.

Would highly recommend PSP and earlier verions such as v7 can be found very cheaply on the net & I have seen it bundled as free fully working software on PC magazines

[Talon 1]

Originally Posted by madmike

Hi Free,
A while ago someone on BF mentioned a new FREE prog from Google called PICASA2. I downloaded it and have found it very good both for collating my many photos, and also for improving images. For some reason it seems quite a small prog and does not take up much memory but it's also very powerful.
It also seems to handle RAW images OK, certainly the ones from my 20D.
Give it a try.

Cheers,

madmike

Thanks to you all.
I think Madmike i will give it a try, its a start !

[RAH]

Probably the best deal in photo VIEWERS (as opposed to manipulators) is IrfanView, a very popular freeware program. It can display just about any image format and has a lot of useful functions: copying images to different directories, thumbnail generation, web page creation - which I use alot - etc. It does have some editing capabilities too - sharpening, brightness/contrast, resizing, etc. And it's totally free and supported by one guy. Get it at: http://www.irfanview.com/

I think that Irfan's editing capabilities are just about as good as those in Picasa, although Picasa has a bunch of cataloguing functions, which is its main point. I did not like it, however, because it seemed awfully "aggressive," for want of a better word. From what I've read, it can rapidly expand the storage used by your images because it doesn't just keep pointers to the images it catalogues, but makes copies. Just seemed a bit blouted to me.

Regardless, get Irfan anyway. Great viewer.

[snowyowl]

I use Gimp, it's free and downloadable. Apparently it does everyhting that Photoshop does. There are some excellent on line manuals as well as several books written about using the program.
Another free program that I downloaded recently is Photofiltre.
It seems easier to use than Gimp but I'm still just playing with it.

[Gramayr]

You can often get old versions of Photoshop at computerfairs - though the history tool is useful when you want to go backwards whe editing.