A thorough and thoughtful article on How to Clean a Camera Lens – by folks who have cleaned more than a hundred thousand lenses – LensRentals.com

Digital Photography Software for PCs – Highest Quality, Mostly Free :

File Management (Painless, Single-key Image View) – ZtreeWin

(This software is simply outstanding! ZtreeWin is so useful, so good, and so reliable it should come with every computer. It is not free, but it is inexpensive. Thank you Kim Henkel.)

Image Viewer (Instant Raw and Jpg) – IrfanView (free)

(Instant view of a single image; supports almost every one of hundreds of photographic image file formats including Raws. Thank you Irfan Skiljan)

Image Viewer, fast from thumbnails (with one-key Raw file convert to view) – FastStone (free)

Not PhotoShop ! “Designed To Frighten And Intimidate” — Aughhh !

Photoshop is the most awkward program to use I can recall. No to Photoshop. If you read about it you will realize PS was originally intended as a Graphic Designer program – not photography correction  software.

Lightroom (by Adobe)

However, giving credit where it is due, as horrible as Photoshop is to use, Adobe’s new LightRoom is almost the polar opposite; its almost easy. And with version 3 – it seems almost ready for professional use.

Update January 2012 Because Adobe canceled support for Windows XP (still the most popular Windows version) with LR Version 4 – I no longer recommend Lightroom.

Yes, I use a few (dozen) other image correction programs not described here. (You have to subscribe to get my secrets ;-) )

Shrink Photos Easily for Better Emails (for free)

So you don’t CLOG up your friends’ emails with giant RAW photos you can to shrink your photos for free at PicResize.com or ReSizeJpeg.com

Anti-Virus – Avira (free for personal use)
 

( I no longer use Anti virus products from McAfee, Norton or any products from Symantec. I am not alone in having horrible experiences with their products and “support.” On my own systems, in business and when I help friends these are the first products I remove and replace them with Avira or one or two others (Kaspersky if you have lots of free disk space). They are problem free (the others aren’t) and does not noticeably slow your computer down !)Virus Resistant Web Browsers – Opera (free), FireFox (free)

 

(I never use MicroSquish Internet Explorer as so many viruses directly attack through this perpetually leaky and slow browser. And anyone who tells you Apples/Macs have no viruses is bragging about their own ignorance. I no longer use Macs for image editing.)

Spyware Removal – Spybot

Backup Software called XXClone

Thorough, detailed and clear article on “Pattern Noise” also called “Banding Noise”.

High Quality Equipment Links: Canon Rumors

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