As I already said in another article, digital camera's are "hot". And since I have been an IT-professional for over 25 years, people ask me questions about what computer hard- and software to buy, so they can file, edit and print their digital images. I wrote this article to answer some of the software related questions. For the hardware related questions I wrote a different article which is here. I hope these articles will help you to get you on your way.

Computer software changes very fast. Every month new releases hit the market with added functionality, some bugs fixed and new ones introduced. Any hardware you buy now, can be outdated tomorrow. Thank god that's not the case with software! If you're happy with Photoshop 6 for instance, and you don't need the added functionality of Photoshop CS3, why upgrade? But even though there's often no need to upgrade, the rapid changes in the software industry require this article to be updated frequently, or it will be of no use to you. This article has been written on February 6, 2008.

So you bought a new computer and now you want to know what software you're going to need to get you going? Here's a list (by no means complete!) of great programs to choose from:

Operating system
 

• Microsoft XP Professional edition. Still the most widely used operating system on the market. (www.microsoft.com)

• ACD Systems ACDSee Pro 2 - A powerful software platform for viewing, processing, editing, organizing and publishing your photos. (www.acdsystems.com)

• JAlbum 7.4 - This software makes web albums of your digital images. JAlbum aims to be the easiest to use and most powerful tool in this category - and free! JAlbum runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others and speaks different languages. With JAlbum you have full control of the look of the generated album, not just color theme and basic layout, still making an album is just a matter of drag and drop and a button click if you prefer to use one of the many existing looks. JAlbum will process your images, make index and slide show pages and even upload the final album to the Internet. No extra software is needed to view the albums, just your web browser. (www.datadosen.se)

ACD Systems ACDSee Pro 2

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 - If you're looking for the ultimate in graphics power and flexibility, Photoshop is at the top of the heap. Without question the industry-standard. With its steep price tag and learning curve it's not for everyone, but the investment pays off in increased productivity and the ultimate in flexibility. (www.adobe.com)

• Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 - Designed for amateur photographers and digital imaging enthusiasts. It incorporates many of big brother Photoshop's powerful features and interface elements without being too overwhelming to the novice user. (www.adobe.com)

• Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 - Very complete, easy-to-use software for creating professional digital imaging results. By combining automatic and precision tools with an integrated learning system, Paint Shop Pro helps you produce professional results with power and ease. (http://www.corel.com)

• ArcSoft Panorama Maker 4 - Seamlessly combines horizontal, vertical, or tiled sets of images to create gorgeous panoramic photos. The program automatically processes your images, requiring little or no post-process modification. You can even create 360 degrees panoramas. (www.arcsoft.com)

• Qimage 2008 - An application that is capable of producing professional quality prints that exceed the quality of nearly all other photo printing applications, even high end (read incredibly expensive) photo editors. With high quality image noise filtering, blemish and redeye removal, rotation, Lanczos, Vector, and Pyramid print interpolation, and many other "on the fly" tools, this is "the bee's knees" in printing software. (www.ddisoftware.com)

The industry-standard in Image editing programs

• Exifer 2.1.5 - Exifer is software with which you can manage the metadata (EXIF/IPTC) of pictures taken by digital cameras. Because many image editing programs destroy at least some of this metadata (for instance the makernotes) when saving such files, creating a backup of the metadata before editing and restoring it afterwards would be a good solution. With Exifer you can do this very easily. Exifer is so called "postcardware", which means it's free of charge but the programmer would like you to send him a postcard. (www.exifer.friedemann.info)

• EXIFutils 2.7 - The EXIFutils are a suite of command line utilities that can be used to extract and modify EXIF and IPTC data. While all EXIFutils commands can be invoked manually from the command prompt, they are primarily intended to be used in a batch script or other automated background process. EXIFutils is shareware, the full version was US$ 29,00 at the time of this writing. (www.hugsan.com)