Heartland

I am looking at getting some photo enhancing software to make my digital camera shots look better. Nothing fancy (clean 'em up, take out the red-eye etc).

Is Photo Shop still the best, or are there others that are better?

I have a PC with XP (and an old PC at that).

I'd like your opinions please before I send a PM to Keith...

Thanks in advance!

Photoshop is indeed the Rolls Royce of image manipulation software but I'm sure it'll do far more than you could ever need. I use it professionally and have only scratched the surface, it's a mighty prog. Try Photoshop Elements, it's a cut down version for the 'casual' photographer, you should be able to get a 30 day trial version here http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

Try irfanview - it's a very powerul and "idiot proof" freeware image viewer with some very usable edit functions:

http://irfanview.com/

Of course it's not as powerful as photoshop - but you easily can remove red-eyes, enhance colors, brightness and contrast levels....

If you're going to use Photoshop, just make sure you have enough memory to deal with it. 1gb will be enough. Any less and you will find the PC will start to run very sluggishly.
It is a great program though.

There are loads of tutorials on Metacafe and I'm sure on You Tube as well.

you could try gimp its free....

http://www.gimp.org/screenshots/


although currently trying to learn photoshop cs3

you need the Gimp

• it's free
• it's nearly as good as Photoshop in some areas (certainly for bog-standard image manipulation - Photoshop outshines it 10-fold in certain professional areas, I'll willingly admit)
• it works on Windows, Macs or Linux
• it's open source
• there's even a free tutorial on using it for red eye removal (and other tutorials)

I've got PS 7.0 - any red eye removal tutorials for that version anywhere? Thanks!

I run Photoshop at home in conjunction with FreeHand on 256k, beat that!

If you want nowt fancy, Photoshop is probably total overkill, although if you get bitten by the bug you'll likely want something more advanced at some stage.

It's a long time since I've personally looked at photo editing software, I don't even know what's "state of the art" nowadays. I use an old freebie copy of Paint Shop Pro 5 which I got on a magazine cover disk about 7 or 8 years back, and aside from totally lacking any batch scripting facility it does all I need.

http://picasa.google.co.uk/index.html
free !!
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop ... arter.html
free !!
http://www.digicamhelp.com/processing-p ... ftware.php

lots more free !!

Photoshop for the win.

I've had a bit of a look at The Gimp and it looks OK for most tasks, but I'm that used to Photoshop now that switching would be a pain.

Like James, I've been using Photoshop professionally for years, and I'm still finding new things it can do.

Thanks for all your advice - I'm going to download them all and see which one suits me best.