The line that divides simple amateurs from those with more serious ambitions is shooting RAW. This avoids the in camera processing you get automatically with the JPEG format like sharpening, raising the contrast and increasing colour depth. Sure you can adjust these aspects and more in JPEG files on your PC, but RAW gives you more leeway for recovering finer detail and enhancing dynamic range, for cheap nike air max 95 women example those blow outs in bright sunlight and areas that appear almost black to eye. That doesn't mean you have to shell out hundreds of dollars for Adobe Photoshop. We'll look at three in between choices here: Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, Corel Paint cheap New Balance Shop Pro Photo X2 and ACDSEE Photo Pro 3. You can pay a lot less if you shop around as we'll see in the conclusion below, and you can save more if you can live without 'Ultimate' versions or live with OEM versions. All I care about is getting my photos to look the best they can without too much manipulation, so this doesn't impress me at all. The other thing I care about is how intuitive and easy to use these editors are because I don't have days to work through tutorials. The difference lies more in the way the results are achieved, and how easy these editors are to work with. The panel on the left, the 'Learning Center', offers simple answers to the question 'what do you want to do?' 'Adjust' brings up a panel that offers resize, rotation, straighten and crop plus Express Lab, One Step Photo Fix and Smart Photo Fix. Once you select your option, the 'Learning Center' tells you what that option does. Levels for example. Why on earth would you hide those in a sub layer of a drop down menu, hidden under Contrast and Brightness? It sits there among controls for skin smoothing, backlighting, fill flash and depth of field. Opening Full Edit produces nothing more than a message that I've set up no layers. I've no idea how to do that, and no time to dig through the manual so this is another failure. On the plus side, the guided edit is pretty comprehensive. When you shoot RAW, you can even change the White Balance after the event. Always. On the other two, they come and go and move depending on which View Air Jordan 1 Mens you're in. In Pro3, you go + or to raise or lower one side until it's straight. The photos pop up one by one which means you can't forward arrow to the next, and all the photos end up stacked on top of each other. For one, the edit sliders have no + fine adjustment on the numbers as in Pro 3. You can edit a photo and say DONE, and PSE 8 won't ask you to save it. The organiser is a separate program and takes forever to launch, and going back and forth between editor and organiser is ponderous. Instead of a one room studio, they give you a house full of rooms. Every authentic cheap nike air max shoes time you want to do something different, you have to leave the room you're in and go to another one. When you loaded a RAW file, it would simply show a few extra options. It was simplicity itself and my first reaction to Pro 3 was: give me back that wonderful simplicity of Pro 2.5. On closer acquaintance, Pro 3 isn't all that different. It now gives you two windows: one to 'Develop', the other to 'Edit' (see screen shot above). This seems to follow the example of Adobe's popular Lightroom. In the Develop mode, whichever element you work on opens in its own small window inside the big panel. Switching to Edit brings up a different menu but changes nothing else in the main window. The main window shows four buttons across the top: View, Quick View, Manage, Process. When you first click on a photo in Windows Explorer, Pro 3 opens it instantly with Quick View, avoiding the ponderous Raising the Titanic like opening of the PSE or X2 suite. When you click on individual photos for editing, they come up in a few seconds. Fine editing is another: in the Lighting mode shown on the left, for instance, you run the mouse up over areas of the photo you want to lighten up, with the left button pushed. To darken areas that are too bright, you use the right button and a down motion. It's the same with the Advanced Colour option, it's dead easy, highly intuitive, and works a treat. An batch editing is easy: once you've made the adjustments to one photo, you just apply them to a selected batch. Pro 3 is a photo editor, pure and simple, and is the slickest at it. And most of the editing tools it offers work on JPEG files as well. Pro 3 cannot (and doesn't try to) compete with the other two on the feature/function scale, except for its database manager/organizer which is every bit as capable as the others here.