simple photo editing ?

[stonehill]

What would be a easy program to edit my photos? I will mostly be cropping, taking out red-eye, slight color changes etc. I've heard alot of talk about photoshop elements, but is it easy for the novice computer users?

I'm tired of standing in Longs editing my photos for hours. Please help!

[Norm in Fujino]

Nothing worthwhile comes without some effort, so I might suggest you bite the bullet and look for a free online tutorial for Photoshop and get into the swing of Modern Computer Life :D . Most good tutorials start out from the basics, so you don't have to feel rushed. You can also get a program like Paintshop pro with similar online tutorials. Do a google search for the name of your program together with "online tutorial" and see what comes up.

[hornpipe]

What would be a easy program to edit my photos? I will mostly be cropping, taking out red-eye, slight color changes etc. I've heard alot of talk about photoshop elements, but is it easy for the novice computer users?

I'm tired of standing in Longs editing my photos for hours. Please help!

Try downloading Picasa2, it is simple, easy to use and free. Just Google for Picasa2).

hornpipe

[judge9847]

If you're in the UK or know someone who is, in the current edition of Digital Camera Magazine they're giving away a copy of something called PhotoClean Express which does everything that you say you want. I've had a play with it and to be honest, it's OK but not up there with the best of them. However, it's one-click clean up for things like red-eye, some noise reduction, sharpening and those sorts of things. I'd say that someone who's new to it, it's good.

It might be the same with Picassa but I don't know that software but from what I've read about it, it's really a management thing with some adjustment facilities built in. But it's free and it may be something that you find you like.

But in the fullness of time I'm sure you'll find that PhotoClean and Picassa are not enough for you. As you get used to what you're doing you'll want to do more and I'm absolutely certain of that.

It's then that you can turn to things like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro to do that bit more for you. However, all those sorts of programs do have learning curves and you have to stick with it to get what you want out of them. It is well worth it though and you'll find there are many free tutorials on the web for either program and lots of them are very good indeed.

Personally speaking, I'm reluctant to tell you to go for Photoshop because it's much, much more than the digital photographer will require. And its very expensive indeed. Elements and PSP also do more but the cost is way down the scale and frankly, in the first few months at least, you'll get more from them than you will with Photoshop. I'm sure of that.

There are also some free items like the GIMP and IrfanView, both of which are free and have many people singing their praises around the internet. The GIMP used to have a bit of an odd installation program/system but I don't know if that's still true. Either one will do what you want and many people will say they're better at what they do than some of the commercially available packages.

[gary_hendricks]

Hi stonehill,

A great program is Ulead PhotoImpact 10, if you're a beginner. It has good wizards to guide you through the image editing process. If you want a more powerful program, then Adobe Photoshop CS would be better.