need help

[john sharon]

at the moment i do not have a photoshop program all i have is the windows photo gallery.
how can i resize my photos so i can upload and share them. and which photoshop should i get is it worth spending the money for CS5 or just a get CS4

[Mat]

Hi John

I don't know about CS5 or CS4 but at the moment there is a public release or Lightroom 3 Beta 2
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom3/
This is free and will work until June 30 when I think the full release will be available. This will let you resize the images. There is also ACDSEE that will cive you a month of trial.

Mat

[Cage]

If you happen to have 'Office' it includes a program called 'Microsoft Office Picture Manager' which you can use to do basic editing, resizing etc.

Cheers

Kevin

[Invictus]

Hi John,
You will find quite a lot of info in the New to Photography section.
In fact it may be overwhelming at first.

Kym posted some info/links about software that will assist you in this situation:
Kym's original thread

In addition to Aperture (for Mac) and Adobe Lightroom (PC and Mac) there are some free Digital Asset Management (DAM) programs:

http://www.irfanview.com/ IrfranView
http://www.xnview.com/ XnView
http://picasa.google.com/ Picassa from Google

A more comprehensive list of DAM software is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari..._image_viewers

Any of those three mentioned will do the job and more, and are available free.

Cheers,

[ricktas]

There is also The Gimp, which is completely free and uses similar menu system to photoshop. I wrote a small review on The Gimp, here

[bigdazzler]

Yip ... Get GIMP mate. Its very capable, and as Rick says, does a lot of the things that youll use PS for. To be honest, PS is probably way overkill for now. I used GIMP for a long time before upgrading to LR+PS.

[Mat]

I agree, Gimp is also good

Mat

[QueenBeesWax]

I use to use Picasa before I got Photoshop. But I'd try Gimp for now.

[SnowA]

I'm a recent Gimp user. It's powerful but takes a bit of getting used to, ie. learning curve.

Picasa 3 is nowhere near as featured, but it covers all the basic functions and its interface is way easier to use than Gimp.

If you're not experienced in any kind of program, I'd suggest trying Picasa first and then move to Gimp if you end up wanting to do more.

For resizing alone irfanview's batch processing function is also pretty easy.

[Jeanette]

if i am doing a ton of photos from the kids sports etc i use picasa ( great for horizone work too)
but more individual ones i use the photoshop

[phild]

If you just want to resize without any manipulation, and you have WinXP, download the free image resizer powertoy from Microsoft, it integrates in to the explorer shell and gives a simple right click option to resize for single or multiple files.

If you have Win7 or Vista, VSO image resizer is free and works similarly.