Freeware

Freeware is a software that is distributed freely without charge. It may have a big brother program which you can upgrade to for a charge but mostly they are great little stand alone programs.

Professional

If you want top be like a professional with a complicated program then GIMPShop is for you. GIMPShop is an open source replacement for Adobe Photoshop. It does a pretty good job of imitating Adobe Photoshop. A friend of mine who was a regular user of Photoshop found he adapted to it quite quickly. It has good features and runs well so my friend has not gone back and won't even if Photoshop were available free.

Simpler Version

I prefer a simpler program myself and have found the French program Photofiltre to be excellent. The free version does all I want and more and has many extras and add ons or plug ins that extend the effects available. (For 30 euros you can get a registered version with even more features called photofiltrestudio but the free version and free plug ins do everything I want.)

Organizing Images

Organizing photos is a breeze with the free IrfanView. IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista. It is simple for beginners and powerful for professionals. This program has a useful plug in for editing exif data with your jpeg images. It also has a free plug in for lossless rotation of jpegs. If you don't understand these then you don't need them!

Filtering Noise

Finally noise is something that makes photos less perfect than they can be. Noise isn't something you hear but speckles in what should be areas of pure color and they are common with the less expensive cameras and when taking pictures in poor light without flash. JPEG (.jpg) image compression doesn't save all the information in an image. It compresses images so consume only a small amount of disk space (e.g. compared with .bmp), but also damages them with a "blotchy look" and "JPEG artifacts". Most graphics editors have JPEG as a default format. And almost all digital photo cameras save images in JPEG format.

JpegEnhancer is a simple and extremely powerful program that lets you restore the images damaged by low-quality JPEG compression. It also is a free download.

Do It All For Free

So that is what I use - try it and see how you get on. And remember although I have safely downloaded and used all these programs it is VERY IMPORTANT to have good, up to date anti-virus software on your computer if you are going to download programs from the Internet.