New to Digital Photography

[Guest]

Just bought the new Minolta DiMage G500 and have now
about 146 mb of photos that I don't know what to do with
on the computer. I do have the new hp photosmart 7960
which can do basic editing but I would like to learn how
to use the computer for storage and editing.
I am not happy with the DiMage software (much too
complicated for a newbie) and Photoshop Business
Addition 1.1 which came with my Dell XP is also mind
boggling for a beginner.

Can you recommend a software program for me ?

 

[Yves Alarie]

I would suggest you look at Microsoft Digital Suite 9.
You can get it for about $60.00 after the usual rebates at places like
Wal-Mart, CompUSA, Costco etc.
It comes with a manual, not very good, but when you open the software you
get excellent on screen help as you go along to edit a photo and also the
Help files are very good.
This being said, The Suite is really two programs. One it for editing you
pictures, the other for managing where your images are, naming them etc.
This one is Digital Image Library. When you open the software, you get the
software for editing images. You click on Digital image library and it
brings you to how to store and retrieve images rapidly.

Do yourself a favor. We get lots of "I lost my pictures".
After you copy your pictures to a folder on your hard drive, select all of
them. Look at the menu on Picture Task on the left of the list of your
pictures files and click on "Copy to CD" and copy these pictures to a CD-R
or CD-RW so you have a backup.
Next, select all the pictures in your folder again. Right click on the
selected pictures and click on Copy on the opening menu. Then, hold the Ctrl
key down and press on the letter V. This will make a copy of all the
selected pictures in your folder. Same name as the original files, with the
word Copy of in front. When you edit, you edit Copy of, never edit your
original file.