By Lou Dolinar
Fourth  in a series
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

For the novice photo retoucher and archivist, there's good news: The software you need to get started is at worst cheap, and at best, free.

Most of the manual cleanup techniques we wrote about last week, like cropping and level controls, are integrated into your scanner driver. Windows XP, meanwhile, does a decent job of organizing your photos. Need more power? Download free software from the Net, or spend a few bucks.

It is worth playing with XP's organizing features. You may have noticed, for example, that if you open up the "My Documents" folder, then in the "My Pictures" folder you'll find some neat little thumbnails of all the photos stored therein. What you may not know is that any folder you create can display photos in this format. Just create a new folder, right click on the icon and select "Properties."

Under Properties/Customize, select "Pictures" or "Photo Album." As with the original "My Pictures" folder, this now creates a "Picture Tasks" panel that lets you view the folder content as a slide show, order prints online, or print the picture.

Windows' Picture Viewer, meanwhile, gives you a handful of primitive controls for rotation and sizing, but not, alas, cropping. For simple stuff like that, you might want to take a look at Irfanview (www.irfanview.com), an old favorite of mine by the legendary Irfan Skijan, of Jajce, Bosnia. Skijan's programming skill and benevolence have brought him worldwide fame, as well as numerous proposals of marriage.

The program started out in 1996 as a simple viewer for many of the odd files Windows doesn't support directly, but has since become a lightweight photo-editing program. It has adequate but not great controls over lighting and color, some filter effects, image cataloging and no retouching. However, it is fast and compact, making it particularly suitable to older PCs and works well with Windows basic photo organizing features. It's worth having on your PC in any event because it can read and covert between hundreds of file formats

Picasa2 is Google's free contribution to the retouching wars, and has every photo organization option that Microsoft left out of Windows. While it is a lightweight as editing programs go, controls for light and color and sharpness are mostly automatic and pretty good.

With no manual retouching options, this isn't the program for restoring damaged old photos. Its strength is organizing and doing things with your photos. Not surprisingly, for software authored by a search engine company, Picasa2 rapidly grabs and organizes all the photos into galleries on your hard drive; gives you one-button export to e-mail, allows you to sign up with a half-dozen photo- printing services; exports to slide shows, and even posts your photos to Blogger. Though it is a comparative newcomer, Picasa2 already has a lot of support - one of our regular readers, Stu Gershon (digitaldoc@optonline.net), uses it in his local adult education courses on digital photography.

For a powerful companion to Picasa2, try The Gimp (Gnu Image Manipulation Program, www.gimp.org) 2.2. the open-source alternative to industry standard Adobe Photoshop line. This isn't exactly a tool for beginners - it originally was developed for Unix and Linux, and there also are full-featured versions for Windows and Mac OSX. The Gimp has all the retouching tools you'd ever want, generally modeled after Photoshop's. But you won't find one-button automation of color correction, lighting and so on. Nor does it incorporate a cataloging function.

The industry standard for home photo retouching is Adobe Photoshop Elements, now sold at retail in version 3.0 for less than $100, and including software for managing your photo library, too. Elements is a slightly downsized version of the real deal, the Photoshop CS2 ($599) that professionals use. Of course, "downsized" is a relative term; Elements is a lot more powerful than the original Photoshop of a decade ago that created the whole market for digital photo retouching. You can download afree 30-day trial copy at www.adobe.com. Its automated system for sharpening, fixing lighting, color cast etc. is superb, and I'm rarely able to best its results, even with a lot of manual work.

Apart from its comparative merits versus, say, Microsoft Digital Image suit, the case for Elements is pretty persuasive: Because it works so much like its big brother, there's a wealth of tutorial material available in print and on the Net, free. (Google "Photoshop tips": and "Photoshop techniques" and you'll see what I mean.) There also are scads of classes for the prospective Photoshopper, ranging Adobe's own to those offered by local schools.

If that's not enough momentum for you, consider that version 2.0 is frequently bundled with entry-level flatbed/slide scanners like my $200 Epson Perfection 4180; 3.0 probably will be showing up with newer scanner models soon.