Sherry, beautiful photos of a wonderful assortment of butterflies. You are so blessed to have the land and the environment to provide so much diversity of plant life for the little creatures. Since you mentioned the constraints of the software that came with your new camera, there is free photo editing software called Picasa 3 by google that is very good for basic editing, cropping and easy uploading. It allows you at least a gig of free web album space and provides the code to use to insert photos into the Gardenweb forums. This is what I use for much of my editing, cropping and uploading for use on-line. You might want to take a look at it since it's 'free'. No cost to evaluate and keep, if it meets your needs. Here's a link to my Picasa garden web album, that I've been adding to for a couple of years. Nothing special here but when I want to share a photo with a friend or insert code for a photo into a forum message, it's really quick and simple to do. This will give you an idea of how the photos present on-line. The nice thing is, as long as I leave the photo in the album, it will always display, no matter how old the forum message gets to be. With all of these photos, I've only used a small fraction of my free web album space. You can also create different web albums and assign some to be private albums; for instance, family photos you might wish to share among your family. __Garden Flowers - plants I so enjoy your (and everyone's) photos so please post more frequently. ~Mary Here is a link that might be useful: Picasa 3 - free photo editing software & on-line album space

GreenieBeanie, I tried the .Mac service and was actually very disappointed in it - but that is a completely personal observation here. On June 18th I instead registered the domain name http://www.myblogpix.com (aptly named) and use it for hosting all my blog pix on my blogs (I maintain three blogs at present). For $11.95 a month I have 2 Gig's of storage, 25 Gigs a month in transfer allocated, and can have up to 25 email addresses that will hold 2 Gigs each. It works for me. I love iPhoto too BTW. It has been my primary means of keeping my photos organized on my Mac. Since I moved to Louisiana on March 15th of this year I've taken over 2,200 photos! Yes, that's a lot, but I figure a digital camera is such a wonderful thing and years from now the photos will still be in pristine condition - no fading, cracking or crumbling. And of course - I make regular backups to DVD to insure I never have to worry about losing my precious photo collection. A few days ago I started writing a Mac Software blog. I plan to add a brief review and link regularly to some kind of useful Mac application I run across. While some may be commercial (shareware) I am planning to try and cover only freeware applications as a rule of thumb. I'm finding my passion for gardening and my passion for computing work so well together it's as though that's how it all was meant to be from the get-go. I am Borg. You will be assimilated... Here is a link that might be useful: My New Mac Software Blog

My guess would be that particular pic above was done in Photoshop since it is done pretty exactly as far as alignment w/ the counters, etc. You might be able to get a rough approximation using paint but I'm not sure you are ever going to be able to take a picture of a piece of granite or something and align it right on top of your counters in a realistic way in a Paint program. If you have just a few pics, then someone on here would probably photoshop them for you? I can do it if you'd like, but probably not until Monday.

I like the last photro, also! "I'd b&w the pic but keep the kids in color. I have done that using Gimp, a free photo editing software. " "You could even photoshop out that electrical wire strung across." I was just playing around with my camera this morning and composed the following B&W from the view out my back door. I kept the beautiful red tree in color. I also used MicrosoftPictureIt to delete the power lines that run in front of the tree. Not a great job, but was fun.