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Software tools

Chances are, your camera came with some software that assists in the transfer of images from your camera to PC via the USB cable or docking station. This software may also provide some basic image viewing or basic editing functions allowing image rotation and cropping.
 
Otherwise, there are many different imaging programs available that might be categorized according to their primary strength such as viewing, editing, organizing and printing. But there is a lot of functional overlap between products and they are being enhanced constantly. In your day to day use, you will probably include two and perhaps three products. If you are only interested in the basics, you can get away with an image viewer or simple image editor with basic editing functions such as rotate, crop, image enhancement (for brightness, contrast, red-eye removal, sharpness, colour balance), and printing. If you are want to get more adventurous and creative, choose a good image-editing program.

	Image viewers provide the basic tools for viewing and manipulating images, but have limited editing capabilities. Programs and utilities that fall into this category include (possible) the program supplied with your camera, the features built into Windows My Pictures, and a fast (and free) viewer called Irfanview http://www.tucows.com/preview/194967
	Image editing programs provide the tools to edit photo images and in many cases, allow you to create new images for web page creation and generate slide shows. Popular image editing programs include Adobe Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Picture It!, Ulead Photoimpact and Photosuite. All are very capable of doing fairly advanced editing; some are easier to learn than others.
	My personal favourite is Paint Shop Pro since it is full featured yet not difficult to learn at least for doing basic image editing.   A free trial version can be downloaded at www.tucows.com  Tucows is a great site for other Shareware programs - ie try before you buy! Image Organisers represent a new class of products. Although image editor program are beginning to include some image organizing functionality, a separate image organiser program is much more powerful. They are geared to organize your photo image collection into a database allowing you to sort, filter, and retrieve images on your hard drive or collection of CD-ROMs. If you have a lot of images and have the time and interest to bring order to your collection, certainly look into these programs.
	Products in this category include Picasa 2  This is a MUST! Picasa is FREE software that helps you instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa, it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognise - I use it! It will also do basic image editing functions.
	SoftPerfect File Recovery is a FREE and very useful tool to restore accidentally deleted files from USB flash drives, CF and SD cards and other storage media including hard and floppy disks,  It supports the popular file systems such as FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and NTFS5 with compression and encryption. If your important files disappeared and you can?t find them in the recycle bin, try this software product and get the files back to life. Easy to use, no installation is required. You will need to use a "Card Reader" - just slip the SD card in the reader - run the File Recovery program and point it to the SD card - the rest is easy.  http://www.softperfect.com/download/file_recovery.exe