Photoshop software is ideal if you want to retouch digital images, apply special effects to your images and will also help you prepare photographs for the web. If you need to resize images, add filters and styles, Adobe Photoshop is the software for you.

Adobe has created many different forms of Photoshop, but the for the amateur photographer or the professional who is new to digital photography Elements 2 is very easy to understand and comes with a low price tag and a host of creative tools that help with image manipulation.

The brushes available in Photoshop give a massive choice for retouching images. Images are adjusted by painting with the brushes over the area you want to change. Red eye in a image can be removed in less that two minutes. Items can be removed from an image. For poor quality images there is a sharp tool to sharpen certain areas of an image.

There are 15 types of file format that you can save your images to, giving you the possibility of creating images for a large amount of different projects. This includes images for the web, for slideshows, and for many different forms of printing.

Photoshop elements also help you create images for the web easily. Most photographers at some time during their career will want to create a website, and with Photoshop, preparing images is simple. It also helps you to resize images that are being attached to an e-mail.

Creating a web gallery can be a lot of work but Photoshop can open a group of images, resize them, create a thumbnail gallery and create all the navigation HTML buttons for your site. It will create a folder for your web files and save it on your computer.

Elements 2 also contains a slide show, which is a convenient way of presenting images. Slideshow presentations are saved in PDF format making them easy to e-mail or download. To view a slideshow you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer.

Also included in Photoshop is a video frame capture tool. This allows you to capture any frame from a video and save it as a stand-alone image. Images created for frame capture can be edited the same as any standard image.

Where the need to edit colour is great, Photoshop has a wide range of tools that will help. Colour images can be turned into black and white shots in less than five minutes. You can also add filters to images to warm them up or create different tones.

The most important part of Photoshop is the Toolbox. This contains all the editing tools that allow you to burn, dodge, clone, blur, sharpen or smudge an image. This box also contains handy tools to crop and zoom in on an image.

There are many artists world wide who make a living by retouching images with advanced image software. Learning how to use Photoshop correctly will be a massive boast to your digital photography, and if you are a keen photographer it should become part of your digital darkroom.