I use Photoshop

Photoshop is the most poweful tool you can select for your photo-editing. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. They don't know what they're talking about... honestly!

There is a reason why the vast majority of this world's photographers, graphical artists ansd designers have chosen Adobe and in particular Photoshop. Because it's the best. Simple as that.

Personally I have been using it since version 4 or something like that, and on a pc by the way, since I have been a pc-man all my life. I was the editor-in-chief of PC World Denmark a few years. That does carry a certain veneration towards pc's. I have seriously considered a Mac lately, but that story will have to wait.

Back in my professional editing era, I acquired a license for Photoshop, and I kept on upgrading until version 7. I stopped there and haven't touched CS or any other versions after 7. It seems to do what I want and has all the facilities I can think of. And it runs smoothly on my 1.3 GHz laptop, which would not be the case with CS, I'm sure.

Facilities

For my photo work I use certain facilities a lot. On the simple day-to-day arena it's mainly:

• Levels
• Hue/saturation
• Curves (occasionally)
• Brush and stamp tools
• Unsharp mask
• Rotating and cropping

plus a few other things. That is what I use for 80% of my photos. This may not seem quite enough to defend the investment in a program as expensive as Photoshop, but that expense is justified by the remaining 20%, where I work with the full toolbox including advanced filters, layers, layer masks, transparency, adjustmen layers, actions, plug-ins, duotones, font manipulation and all the fancy masking tools I can get my hands on.

When Photoshop's facilities are used to their full extend like that, this program excels and surpasses anything else I have tried.

I am also a sucker for shortcuts, and Photoshop has almost everything assigned to keys, meaning that I can save myself a carpal tunnel syndrome from mouse work by using keyboard shortcuts as often as I can.

I also have a couple of plugins for Photoshop that I love.
One is Dalibor Jelinek's MRWformat software for importing Minolta RAW (MRW) files and the other is Tom Niemann's PTlens, which can be used to adjust lens errors such as distortion and vignetting.