You will almost certainly want to do some editing on each image. The image may start out too big for a Web page, where anything greater than 10 KBytes needs to be cut down to avoid exhausting the patience of most viewers. It may have some extraneous parts. For example, in an image of Uncle Louie with his cute little dog, you may want just the dog. Such changes call for an image editor. Which one should you get, learn, and use?
The Rolls Royce of image editors, without a doubt, is Adobe Photoshop, http://www.adobe.com. If you decide to really major in image editing, this is the editor for you. But don't expect to learn it in an afternoon. There are people (including us) who have used it for years and are still learning. This editor also can cost several hundred dollars.
Adobe also offers some more modest editors such as Adobe Photo Deluxe, which is targeted at home use and is available for under $100. This is in the category of a fun tool. It is easy to learn and can perform significant functions, but it is not intended to be a professional tool. There are several other image editors around, including some designed specifically for Web use.
One way to get started is to download for a trial period one of the top 5 downloaded applications on the Internet, which is one of the most useful image editors around, namely Paint Shop Pro. http://www.jasc.com. Although we are Adobe Photoshop users, for quick jobs, we actually prefer PPS. It is priced under $100, is suitable for serious users, and just keeps getting better and better.
We are going to give you a high-level walkthrough of some highly useful and common functions that you can perform on an image using Paint Shop Pro. This walkthrough would look very similar for other editors as well, although of course many of the menus and items would have different names.
