Best program to use

[shutter_mom]

I am looking for a good photo editing program to play around with some of the pictures I have taken. Is there a decent free program anywhere out there that is whirthwhile? Any suggestions are welcome.

[kirbinster]

The thirty day full-version trial of Lightroom is free.

[Doug Sundseth]

Lightroom is very good and you can try it for free. The same is true of Photoshop. (I've purchased both.)

If you need free forever rather than free for a month, though, take a look at GIMP.

[Doug Pardee]

A lot of beginners seem to like Picasa.

[ObsessedwithPhotos]

If you just want a simple straight forward editor use Picasa. If you want to use more advance editing. Us GIMP.

Personaly, I use Picasa to edit everday type thing. I use gimp to edit think I will post on here etc.

I will be getting Light room or Photoshop soon =)

[taschrief]

I use LightRoom3 for importing and organization. Minor adjustments and downsizing .jpg files for e-mail is simplest in Picasa 3.0. For critical development of RAW photos I prefer Digital Photo Professional, but am learning to use LR3, instead. If you have photos that really need to be 'Photoshop" 'ed, PhotoShop Elements 8.0 is quite adept.

[smcilree]

Check out Paint.NET. It's free and much easier more user friendly than GIMP. It's available at Paint.NET - Free Software for Digital Photo Editing, The only possible drawback is that it is Windows only.