FREE!!!

I love free.

For years I have been a huge fan of Jasc/Corel Paint Shop Pro. It is an inexpensive alternative to Photoshop and is very good. But at $100 or so it's still quite a chunk to invest in for photo editing when you're an agent just starting out or in a slump...

So enter Google App's Picasa 3 - which is considerably more beefed up than Picasa2.

It's got several easy editing tools, which are generally ample for real estate use. You won't be able to do fancy stuff but the basics are pretty much all you'll need - including a retouching tool to remove dust particles (or even blemishes from faces for your personal stuff). You can also add text to images.

Then drop these images into a slide show and create a movie with it - which you can send out as a wmv file or upload to YouTube. I think it's a little more user friendly than Windows Movie Maker but am not sure - it's nice you can do all the editing and movie making in one place.

I use it to sharpen images, brighten them up, and adjust the color / saturation.

For free, you can't beat it!

Check it out here:

Picasa 3 For Windows

There's a short video explaining all the features.

Absolutely smokin software. I use that in combination with Photoshop and a couple of other tidbits to spiffy up all my photos.

Picasa has been an excellent tool even before 3 came out. Play with the Fill Light & Shadows to get some great contrast in your images (you don't know how washed out they are until you fix'em!)