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Folks should know that many of the online photo-printing services permit customers to crop, fix red eye and do other minor enhancements with free software such as that from the Shutterfly Web photo service available at www.shutterfly.com and from its competitor Snapfish at www.snapfish.com. I prefer Shutterfly because Snapfish makes you sign up as a customer before letting users download the software to make edits.

In terms of simplicity and lack of bother, nothing beats Picasa, the free photo-handling software from the Google search service. Picasa mainly focuses on letting users keep track of all of the digital images that build up on their hard drives, but it also includes editing tools that meet most folks' needs with little fuss. It is at www.picasa.com and it is well worth a look for anybody with a couple of dozen photo files scattered about the hard drive.

If you're into serious digital photo work, take a look at GIMP, an amazing, and free, open-source image-editing program that delivers a great many of the same powers as expensive commercial applications like Adobe Photoshop CS or the consumer-level Adobe Photoshop Elements. The GIMP (GNU image manipulation program) comes up with a display very much like Adobe's famous Photoshop workspace, offering a broad pallet of tools with icons that look a lot like the ones in Adobe's software. You can download this open source treasure at www.gimp.org.