candler, Back in the Win 95 era I bought a flat bed UMAX scanner. Really a good unit and came with Adobe Photo. The UMAX wouldn't work on the 98 system and I went through a couple scanners and ended up with an Epson 2480. In the meantime, I had I purchased Abobe Photo Delux Home Edition 4. It is the best of 4 or 5 software imaging packages I've tried. I finished scanning black and white family photos for the years 1916 to 1966 just before Christmas. Not really difficult, just time consuming. If you spend a little time learning your software you'll be surprized what it can do. For example, half of a B&W photo is in shade. So, with your image software you trace the shaded portion to define the working area and then begin to lighten and increase the contrast until it matches or comes close to the unshaded area. Creases in the photo can be overpainted with the clone function. Select the color or pattern at the crease and use that to paint over the crease. And the list goes on. It is astounding what can be done. Some will tell you that if the detail is not in the photo then there's nothing that can be done to enhance it. Don't believe it. I have copied eyes from one photo and pasted into another; change portions of the background that contain farm equipment or the neighbors dog. Get a decent scanner with a decent speed. Nothing is so frustrating as waiting for the thing to do what its supposed to do. Use the image software that comes with it and if it won't do what I've described, go to plan B. Hang in there. Its a wonderful project you're starting. Bob Central Arizona.

Can someone please advise. I'm looking at purchasing PhotoShop Elements 7. can anyone tell me how good or bad this program is? and also Does anyone know about CS3 version 10? please advise. P.s. I only want the program to edit my own pictures. Not for professional use, and not for video's. Please advise what you think would suite me best. thanks.

I use Paint Shop Pro but rarely use it for virtual wall paint. I have gone so far as to scan a real paint swatch and "clone" the scanned swatch color onto a wall, it's so far off it isn't funny. When I do use PSP for wall color, it's all eyeballed ;) Oceana, the lower the opacity is, the more that will show through on the wall (shadows, etc.). So you have to fiddle withe the opacity setting in your software. I just use the paint manufacturer's software, but even that is not accurate to real life because of computer hardware differences.

Have an organized hierarchy of folders just for your photos. You will have to decide where you want them and make the folders. When you plug in your camera, I have to use a card reader, but many models that isn't needed, your computer will ding when it has recognized the camera as new hardware. Go to Windows Explorer (obviously if you are on another platform this won't work), and navigate to the new drive assigned to your camera, it will be under all your C:\ files somewhere showing as F, G, depending on what else is on your system. They may be in a series of folders on in just one folder, depends on the flash card. It might be a folder called DCIM, then when you open that or click on the plus beside it, it shows something about your camera name. Open the camera folder(s) (one at a time if there are more than one), and you should see thumbnails of your photos start to be generated. When all the thumbnails show, do an edit>select all. Then do an edit>copy to folder and navigate to the folder you want to put them in. Then click ok or some prompt. Windows will show your photos being copied unless there are just a few in which case it will go very fast. If you don't want to copy all the photos, select individual ones by holding down the ctrl key after highlighting the first one and select those you want. Don't let up the ctrl key until you've selected all the photos you want. If you want a block of files but not all of them in the folder, highlight the first one you want, hold down the shift key and highlight the last one. That will select every photo in that series. Copy to the folder you want as before. If you want all but the first several or so, highlight all of them, then do an edit>inverse selection and it will automatically select all the ones you didn't highlight. These are just little tricks to make things speedier once you get used to it. That's all there is to it. It gets to be second nature. Be sure to back up all your photos at least one place, preferably two, like an external portable hard drive, dvd, cd or something, and don't alter the originals in any way. If you edit them in Photoshop, save them in a new folder. It's good to open your photo, duplicate it, close the original. That way you can't accidentally overwrite your original unless you try very hard. The copy gives it the same name with copy # added. I have a Work File for each month where I keep photos I've worked on in Photoshop, sometimes a subfolder for a special event. Maybe Picasa requires you to use your desktop which is clumsy and dumbed-down way to archive your photos imo.