What program is best for photo editing

Brian,

Have a look at: http://www.picasa.com/

It's a free download and once installed it is easy to import your photos from other programs. It has a host of editing gizmos and you can send pictures by email direct from picasa without having to bother about attachments.

I find it very easy to use and it seems to be a lot simpler than the program that came with my digital camera (Fuji). Would be interested to hear your opinion.

Cheers Rod.

Hi Brian and Maragret,
Picasa is pretty good and is a free download, certainly good enough for 95% of what I do ACD, I think that is the name is also pretty good - but not free. For the more advanced - serious editing Paintshop Pro is good but a lot more complex.

Cheers John and the Dragon

HI Brian - just replied to you on the caravanners forum.

Hello again Brian

I use Adobe PhotoShop Elements v2, which is probably the software that came with your Canon Camera. It is a 'light'version of PhotoShop, which has been a long time professional standard.
I recently bought a book 'The Digital Photographer's Guide to Photoshop Elements' from Photo Continental at Mt Gravatt. I intend to work through this as part of my holiday reading for our upcoming trip. We like to send custom made postcards home to our friends, to make them jealous!
I have also seen lots of smaller publications at the Newsagent's- some come with sample photos etc.
If you want to get any of the better shots printed professionally, I can send you details of a very economical service at Sherwood in Brisbane- a 20 inch by 30 inch print from a 4MB photo file cost $25.00- less than the frame I had it mounted in!

Best wishes
Bob

Brian,

The full version of Photoshop is wonderful if you have the time and are an enthusiast. What it will do is amazing and there are many good books on how to use it, including visually oriented ones such as the 'Teach Yourself Visually" series. All available from Amazon.com who deliver to Australia very efficiently and much cheaper than local bookstores. They also have a version for Photoshop Elements.

Doug.

My own requirements for photo editing have been fairly limited - I might occasionally want to brighten a photo, slightly amend the hues, or perhaps crop the photo to a smaller size. My daighter, who has a lot of experience in this area and also completed a web design course, warns that it is often a waste of time editing the colours too much, because a photo will often look completely different on different monitors - so unless a photo is really "way off", I don't edit them at all except for printing, as her advice has proven to be correct.

For me, the greater challenge is organising photos, and indexing and arranging these in such a way that they all make sense when we sort though them later. For that purpose, Adobe Photo Album (not to be confused with Photo Shop) is quite efficient and has a simple range of of editing features which meet my needs.

Cost, I think, is about $100 and is very easy to use (but the latest version only runs on XP, not previous versions of WIndows).

Phil

I thought that there would be a few others that like playing around with photos like I do.
The copy of Photoshop that came with the camera is Photoshop Elements 2 which I understand only has some of the features of the PhotoShop 7 full version. I saw Havey Normans are selling Photoshop Elements 3 now ($175) so my new program is already out of date.

I will have a look at the program that was mentioned earlier to down load, but now that I am in reply mode I cannot see who sent it or what the name of it was.

Thanks for your replies.