photo software

not really for sure where to put this topic, but just wondering what everybody uses to edit photos. As much as i want photoshop, its way to expensive. so what does everybody use?

photoshop, adobe lightroom... basic adjustments you can always use what came w/ your camera & use DPP

lightroom is probably your best option, they have been having it on sale a lot recently, its not PS but it for a lot of people it does the vast majority of what you need

One very good app for someone just starting is Photoshop Elements. You can pick it up for less than $100 USD if you live in the US so it's quite reasonably priced.

One big advantage is it has a large user base and has a lot of internet resources (tutorials and such) and books which can help you get underway. Plus, it shares a lot of tools it has "inherited" from the standard Photoshop and the good thing about that is that you will not be a total stranger to some of the things that are presented and talked about here and other photo-related places.

Elements is available for a free trial, by the way. You can go to the Adobe site and download it, no hassles, and use it for a month. If you decide you want to keep it it's an easy process to then pay for and register it.

In the meantime, the free Canon software contains useful tools to help you get started. ZoomBrowser has a basic editor for jpegs. But you will see and hear a lot here about Raw shooting/processing, and Canon provides Digital Photo Professional (DPP) for people who shoot/process Raw photograph files. It also has some more advanced tools for jpegs, so you can work in ZoomBrowser and hop over to DPP at will if you are shooting jpegs. But, you will find that you might want to play with some advanced editing tasks -- things like cloning, replacing backgrounds, stuff that gets talked a lot about here and for such things you really want to look at an app like Elements. Lightroom was also mentioned -- it is an advanced and capable Raw processor (that can also handle jpegs), and has good organizational tools and is also available for a free trial. But, it should be said that Lightroom also does not have the advanced editing tools that you can have with Elements and other such photo editing apps, so the advice to get Elements is still good whether you go with Lightroom or stick with the Canon software.

Picture Window Pro from Digital Light and Color is my standby: http://www.dl-c.com/

If you use a Mac, Pixelmator is a $30 mac-native app that offers most of what elements offers. If you are adventurous, there's always The Gimp, which is free, open source image editing software.

If you shoot raw, then you probably want an application that has raw conversion, like Elements - of course there is always Digital Photo Professional that came with your Canon camera. If you are a mac user, Raw Photo Processor is probably one of the best raw converters, in terms of control and conversion quality - you can use it for free and for a donation of about $20, you unlock several extremely useful features.

Kirk

Lightroom and occasionally Elements

For the money minded..Lightroom is great !