I did some searches to see if anyone was hinting at a price somewhere but didn't find anything. I imagine a couple or three hundred dollars since it looks like it's designed to compete with Aperture which is around 299. I just really like the way it lays things out in the Library filmstrip and the way the workflow proceeds from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. I've never used any truly high-end program so I don't know how to compare it to anything else. (I don't even know if it would be in the "high-end" category. I do know that I like it better than the Photoshop I'm using now, which is also Adobe. I've been reading reviews online and some are from the earlier betas so they're not very flattering but they improve over time. I don't know; it's just that it's free right now and something to "play" with. MichaelAT

I found the info and will paste at the end of this post but the picture can be pretty big. salbwil just tell us what program you are using to resize and right click on the picture and click properties on the drop down menu and tell us what size it is. Here are the posting instructions from the webmaster at hearth.com: OK, so hereÂs the deal - your member photos (in your member profile) is limited to a small size - about 150 pixels (dots) square. The little Avatar next to your posts is limited to the same or maybe 100 each way..... Regular pictures, like in this forum, can be fairly large - almost full screen (1000 wide by 1000 high) and up to 200KB (200,000 bytes). But, many folks donÂt know the basics of email and web pics - IÂll try to explain. Pictures sent to the web and by email are best at what is called "screen resolution" meaning that they somewhat match the size od the dots on our monitors. For our purposes, this is aout 72 DPI (or dots per inch)..... What the average person needs is an "Image Management Program" and NOT the one that comes with Windows! If you are a PC user, download the free program called Picasa - This will organize and store all the photos on your disk and also allow you to export smaller copies (for web, etc.) and to even fix the photos up a bit! Apple users already have an image management program, iPhoto, which comes with every mac. To prepare web photos in iPhoto, simply select the photo or photos, go to Export (or it might say Share in newer versions) and when the dialog box comes up use the part that says "scale no bigger than" to select what you want the size of the exported photo to be. For purposes of this board, a photo with a width of 400-700 is ideal. Now, with Picasa, it is pretty much the same thing. Select the photo or photos and go to Export to Folder- the box shown in the picture below will come up and then you can select the picture size - say 480 wide as in this example. The other slider will compress the file size so the picture loads faster. In most cases, anything over 50% is good. If you want to learn more about this stuff, dig around on the links at: http://www.hearth.com/hcc/ - these are links from a course I teach at night school. If you are a user of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, use the "Image Size" dialog bx to convert your photo to 72 DPI and approx. 400-600 pixels wide (the height will work out automatically) - then use "Save for Web" and tryjpg "medium", file size should be really small. Of course, donÂt save changes to the original picture since you still want that big on your computer and for yourarhiving and storage.

I use Photoshop CS2 exclusively now, waited for years for it. I bought 2, one for myself and one for my gdaughter for $299 each from Adobe, WACOM had a promo w/my tablet and I used my Elements that came w/my cam to give to my gdaughter so she could keep upgrading. But starting with Elements is good. They may have more specials when you want the full power of Photoshop and where you can upgrade at the cheaper price. I started with Paint Shop Pro which is cheap, but Photoshop is what most of the pros use, the industry standard. I've read that Picasa isn't too bad, but somebody keeps sending me their photos from their website, and the quality is not too good, I don't know if it's because she doesn't know how to use the camera properly or Picasa resizes and compresses them too much.

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.