What is a picture editor?

Picture editors are programs that let you change your photographic images. Some are designed to work specifically with photographic images and some can work on any type of images.

iPhoto

Apple Macintoshes come with iPhoto because it's part of the iLife suite. Usually the first version is bundled and then you have to buy upgrades. But the version that comes with your machine for free should be just fine for the uses shown here.

Adobe Photoshop

One of the most well-known, sophisticated and expensive picture editor is Adobe Photoshop. It is so sophisticated (and expensive) that Adobe now makes scaled down versions. Adobe Photoshop Elements is a good choice for a beginning picture editor; it can do everything you need to do and later if you want more power, you can upgrade to the full version of Photoshop without having to learn an entirely new interface.

Adobe Photoshop LE is a version that often is bundled with printers, digital cameras and drawing tablets. If you own one of those, you may already own Photoshop LE.

Photoshop (in all its various incarnations) works on both Mac and Windows. Photoshop Elements can be downloaded from the Adobe web site as a 30-day free trial.

Other Picture Editors

If you don't want to download the trial version of Elements and you don't have a picture editor already, other good picture editors for Windows are Paint Shop Pro and Microsoft Digital Image Pro. You can get these for under $60 if you buy the latest version. Older versions are even cheaper (as little as $10 sometimes) and these programs are so powerful that even an earlier version will be very useful.

Tutorial examples

To simplify the tutorial, all techniques will be shown using Photoshop Elements (the free trial version) on Windows and iPhoto on Macintosh only. But most picture editors have ways to perform these techniques. Once you see how the techniques work in these two programs, it should be easier to find the equivalent commands in your picture editor of choice.

If you don't have a picture editor and you aren't convinced you need one, read the next topic "Do I have to use a picture editor?" to find out what you can do without one.