First is Picasa .This started off as something Google gave away to manage your photo collection and has grown to a really powerful tool for the average digital photographer. It is more than adequate for managing your files, with extra features like the experimental tool "search by color". It has a quick and dirty collection of editing tools, like sharpen, straighten, and fill light to name my favorites. If you do a good job with the camera, Picasa might be all you need to give your photo that last bit of snap. Finally Picasa rounds out its tool collection with a slide show maker, a collage maker, a movie maker (with sound), and of course the ability to store your images on the web via Picasa Web Albums. We use it in many of our workshops and here at the palzot blog.
IrfanviewThis has been around even longer that Picasa. Its user interface is a bit more stark than some of the modern software, but it is fast, really fast! Its greatest strength is viewing photos and all the EXIF tags contained within, but it has plenty of image manipulation power too, like resizing, renaming, color depth change, converting to gray-scale, and a panorama maker. Make sure you go to the .net site not the .us one. The current version is 4.23.
Now if you need all the extra stuff like layers, selections, channels, cloning, dodging-burning, but don't want to spend any money, than there is the Gimp. Wow! this baby is loaded. It works in Windows XP and Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux and is available for free download at the web site. I just downloaded and installed version 2.6.4 for Windows and all went without a hitch. Everything about this program shouts fantastic, including the attitude of the community that develops and supports it. I am committed to spending more time learning and using this wonderful program. By the way, UFRaw makes a free plugin that allows Gimp to work with RAW images.
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