Affordable Photo Editing Software List

[Steve]

Maybe people can list software they know of here that is affordable and effective? We know Adobe photoshop is pricey stuff, but there are other options too. For starters we have:

Adobe's Photoshop Elements ($99, free trial at www.adobe.com)
Jasc's Paint Shop Pro ($99 download, $109 boxed, free trial at www.jasc.com)
Corel's Painter Pro Their website seems to be down but it's a great program, maybe more so for painting though. I'll look into that.
Macromedia's Fireworks (Not the best for the job, but $299, free trial at www.macromedia.com)
The GIMP ($0, find it at www.gimp.org, sort of hard to use maybe)
ulead's PhotoImpact ($89, comes with royalty free stock photos, some plugins from a good plugin developer, video tutorial, some other stuff. There is a free trial at www.ulead.com)

Does anyone know of anything else? There must be some gems laying about :D

So far, I know for sure that Photoshop elements is great and it usually comes free if you get a wacom tablet or expensive camera. However, PhotoImpact is cheaper and might meet your needs just as well. Both have free trials available, so you can check those out.

[tvalentin]

Microsoft has it's Picture It! application. They do a lite and a full version called Digital Image Suite. The lite version is avaiale free with an MSN 9 subscription or about $50 or the full version is about $99 from memory. They are both listed on amazon.
The lite version has all the basic tools you need to quickly touch up a photo.
The full version has more advanced tools for editing and touching up photos and can apparently accept photoshop plugin (i haven't tried this yet). It is fairly easy to use and does plenty of hand holding if you need it.

Another good feature is the photo organising tool that is included. It lets you organise your photos by in lots of useful ways including date and keyword.

I'm using the full version at the moment to scan and catalogue all our families photos. And finding it very useful.

Hope this is of help.
Tom