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Photo Software for Digital Camera - How to make a choice?

By: Mahesh Mhatre So you own the best digital camera? That is good news. However, did it come with ineffective photo software? Most cameras do. In order to ensure that you take your digital photography to the next level you should seriously think about photo software that makes it very easy to do photo editing, printing, organizing and emailing.
As an example, you may face many challenges after you have snapped a few photos. I think the most troublesome of them all is the red eye. Most photo software comes with a red-eye elimination or reduction method. The red eye reduction method should ensure that the eyes are left looking lifelike by not eliminating the pupil reflection. Using the red eye reduction should be easy. The most easy and useful photo software that I have come across is Photolightning. There are others like Adobe and Acdsystems which are also good.
The most recommended features that photo software should include are:

1) Photo Editing: The ability to fix red eye, lighten dark photos, apply special effects to your photos and resize, modify, crop them. This may also include the ability to adjust brightness, saturation etc. and automatically/semi-automatically enhance the picture quality.

2) Email photos: The ability to automatically reduce photos (in size) for faster emailing and then attach them to an email, or better yet, embed the photos directly into the body of an email.

3) Photo printing: Easily print photos in standard sizes on single sheets of photo paper or on "micro-perf" templates for placement in picture frames. The software should also provide for a way to print entire album pages and index prints.

4) Batch Processing: Easily resize, rename, add captions/watermarks, change format, and change timestamp. This is a time saving feature that every photo software product should have nowadays.

5) The photo album - or organizer: This feature lets you organize your photos by date, keyword, or rating and add captions. A good photo organizer makes it easy for you to quickly find your photos.

6) Backup photos to CD: Burning photos to CD so that you can share them with friends or make backup copies is a very useful feature. It is even better if the photo software remembers which photos have been backed up so that you do not waste space/time backing up photos you have already archived.

7) Create Slideshows: This is an optional feature but very useful indeed. A great feature is the ability to email a slideshow that you have created to friends and family or post it to a website.

8) A photo uploader: This is another optional feature that can be very useful by allowing you to upload your photos to your favorite online photo printer.

9) A How To-Manual

10) …. There are so many possible features that the list may be never-ending.

Many of these features are common to many photo software products, but ultimately it is ease-of-use for your favorite features that is most important. Remember that each and every software package has its positives and negatives so you should look for the proper blend of ease-of-use and the functionality you require.