Photo - Editing Software

You all know that the perfect image seldom jumps out of the camera when you first look at your newly shot images.  If you're lucky, you may just need to crop out a distracting feature or straighten up the horizon.  However, you may need to go much farther and give the image some real "punch".  To do this, you need a heavy duty photo editor like Adobe's expensive Photoshop Creative Suite or Photoshop Elements (a much more affordable package).  You might be interested to know that Adobe has released an old, yet very powerful version of Photoshop CS2 (2005 vintage) that is freely available on their website along with a workable serial number.  Anyone interested can go to the following website http://www.snapfiles.com/get/photoshopcs2.html to get more details and to download the Windows version.  It is also available for Mac on the Adobe website.

I, myself, am a Linux user and have grown to love the venerable Gnu Image Manipulation Program called GIMP for short.  The program was originally written for Linux computers but has now been ported to both Windows and Mac operating systems.  GIMP is freely distributed software and has no advertising or other restrictions.  It is updated frequently by the user community and has many freely available plugins.  It is very comparable in capabilities to the full blown expensive version of Photoshop.  However, it doesn't have anything like the overhead demands on your computer which you will find with most Adobe products.  Anyone interested in the Windows version can get it at the following link http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Editors/GIMP.shtml  I would also suggest that you get the free addon plugin package http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Plugins/GIMP-Extensions.shtml that provides hundreds of creative ways to manipulate your final image.  If you shoot your images in raw - which all of you should do if you plan to do post image manipulation - then you will also need the UFRaw program that links to GIMP
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ufraw/files/ufraw/ufraw-0.18/ufraw-0.18-setup.exe/download.

Now you have no excuses not to Photoshop or Gimp your images!