As always, Art's link deserves a "clickie:"

      www.plankroad.org.

Our 'cat society is obviously infested with sadists determined to persecute me with endless recitations of the features of their good digital cameras while I suffer along with my antique 2MP snapshooter. I've had to move a bucket next to my computer seat for drool control to finish reading all of the above.

I have seen what more state-of-the-art cameras can do. 'Catter Phil visited with us at the WVA festival and shared some great pics he'd taken with his Canon SLR (model not noted). He asserted that they were all taken with "automatic settings" and he got crystal clear images where I, and four or five others who shared pics from the same events got "mostly mud." Even most of the pics from other "cheap" cameras were as good as, or better than, what my POS gets (although my "superior skills" got some better shots than some with slightly better cameras did, of course.) There were two discoveries:

1. You usually don't really have to have a "program" that comes with a camera to offload the images. If you can make the USB connection, WinXP at least will recognize the camera memory as an "external USB drive" and you can copy and paste the images just as you would do for files of any common kind. Note that some cameras save images internally in "proprietary formats" so you do need a program that recgnizes the format, but being unable to do anything with the images shouldn't prevent copying them elsewhere - so far as I've seen.

2. I really need a better camera.

For the benefit of those others who might have less than modern small cameras:

Unless taken in full daylight outdoors in midafternoon full sun, virtually every shot with my camera requires "lightening" to be useful. Since most of the "action" at the fests where I've taken the majority of my digital snaps is either in the dark around a campfire, in the dark under a puny streetlamp, or in deep shade under the trees in the campground, I have to "pull up" at least 80% of the shots I get. (My camera is limited to ASA100 equivalent, and the built in flash is essentially only useful for "fill.")

Automated "corrections" in my PSE 2.0 program, and in similar programs I've (seen like some cited), can do "sorta good" corrections, but if your original images are really bad like mine, you'll do a lot of "fussing" to get much improvement. You can also "fuss with" brightness/contrast etc, with similar "sorta good" results - maybe.

After doing it this way for a while, I "got the book" and learned that if you:

copy the image base layer to a new layer (a drag and drop in PSE) and

change the new layer type to a "screen" layer,

you have, instantly, exactly the same colors, but twice as bright. Drag the new layer onto the copy button for additional effect. In PSE, you can reduce the density of the last layer you drag to get "just right" brightness when anything starts to be too much.

If you have to drag more than 5 or 6 layers to get bright enough, you'll probably find that the image was actually underexposed, and you'll start to see "halos" and degenerate colors; but for most images that are just a little off, it's a very effective correction.

This one simple discovery compensates for one of the major defects of my inadequate camera, and is largely responsible for my continuing with "digital" photos at all. People with really good cameras may need it only rarely; but those with the cheap 'uns may find it handy.

John