Never noticed how things towards the edge of the frame get a bit stretched and distorted on a uwa lens?

It would at the edge of the shot, with a UWA lens...

So how does he do that without panning (slightly)? If he hadn't panned slightly to the left, the red brick house would be at the edge of the shot.

If anyone heard the clip from the very funny Shipping Forecast spoof on the Today programme this morning, here is the full version!

Yes he panned the camera. This makes a difference!

Yes it will. (DNG).

I feel there is more potential for confusion with Lightroom, and while I would recommend that program generally, I would not necessarily recommend it to Louise (sorry Louise!)

Doing general contrast tweaks, and cropping etc in any version of Photoshop is very easy. The trouble with some workshops is they sometimes give you too much information all at once whereas Louise may just want to start off with a couple of things and then progress gradually. I would also recommend sticking with jpeg and forgetting about RAW conversion for the time being...

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop-cs2.html

Photoshop is well worth wrapping your head around, and whether you're using Photoshop or Elements, you'll find most people will be familiar with the software and therefore able to help out on any specific queries you may have. There are also loads of online tutorials and plug ins that make things easier and simpler for you.

For me, Photoshop CS2 is a good bet as it's free, and very full featured. This is pretty much the only program I use these days.

Photoshop Elements is also great. In practise it's very similar to the full featured Photoshop. You will have to buy it, but you'll get a more up to date version.

Lightroom is mainly for people who shoot RAW (not that you can't edit RAW images with Photoshop too!) but I would forget about it for now and get to grips with Photoshop / Photoshop Elements.

As I said the actual size of the image was reduced, there was a small amount of compression but I saved as 'max. quality' so not a significant amount. (The file size was reduced slightly but this is probably because the actual image ended up being smaller).

Louise, I've just tried it. After editing I saved the picture at max. quality and the image size was reduced to 3500 pixels wide (from 4672). (The saved image was 300ppi as per the original, not that it matters much - the overall image size is far more important).

This is good enough for printing at A4 but like most of these cr@ppy online photo editing services, I wouldn't recommend this program as a primary image editor. They're designed for mobile uploads destined for Facebook really.

Get a decent proper photo editor like Photoshop CS2 (which is free) and learn how to use it. Forget these gimmicky online editors. All the time you have wasted on them would have been better spent getting to grips with Photoshop IMHO!