Need to get better at post processing

I have been playing around with Elements for a while now, though, I STILL do not feel… comfortable with it. Sure, cropping is easy. As is red-eye reduction. The auto-fix for lighting is usually spot on. The problem is, are those are all the simple things. I have played around with some settings, and have a kind of cool looking picture of a stack of CDs. As well as a cool Black and white art looking thing of a picture of a tree. The panorama shot, from my first post, was also done in this program, but I had step-by-step instructions to follow, to access it.

Yesterday, I started doing watermarks on my pictures, since ultimately, I would like to sell some into stock photography. That was another thing I had to look up, though, it works almost the same, in paint.net and Elements. So, this leads me into my next topic. What applications do I have installed on my PC?

Right now, I have the following:

Photoshop Elements 6

GIMP

Paint.net

Neat Image Great for reducing noise in pictures

Picasa

Microsoft Picture Manager This may seem odd, but I like to use it to quickly open, and resize files. One gotcha with it, save the file you are editing, but DO NOT save over the original, which it prompts you to do, when you close it. I luckily had a backup of the picture I was working on, when I got hit by this Microsoft “feature”.Most of my tools were free, or came bundled with another product. Neat and Elements being the 2 I have paid for. There are a lot of neat, free tools out there, if you can find them.

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