Another arrow in your image-editing quiver

I've extolled the virtues of Irfanview for photo editing several times, and use it regularly myself. But it does have real limitations, particularly in its colour-correcting abilities. So I was pleased to come across what we might call a companion program, Fotografix, which makes up for much of what Irfanview lacks. The first big virtue of Fotografix is that it is tiny, and it runs without needing to be installed, so you can carry it on a memory stick. Although it's a no-frills program, it has many of the functions of PhotoShop, such as brush shapes, layers and masking. Its interface is pretty basic, but used in conjunction with Irfanview, I would say the pair would do 90 percent of your normal imaging tasks, and at a very reasonably price (like, free).

Emailing photographs

One of the benefits of digital photography is being able to instantly email pics to family and friends. But you will quickly clog up their inbox if you send the file just as you download it from your camera. Fortunately, there are several easy ways to solve this, by reducing the size of the photo.
Using Irfanview, you can open the pic, then go to Image/Resize-Resample. In the dialogue box, halfway down you will find the option, "Set new size as percentage of the original". Half is probably acceptable, and when you save the pic, give it a new name to indicate it is a smaller version of the original. Incidentally, when you save a jpeg image, you can specify the amount of compression. It is a trade-off - the higher the compression the smaller the file size, but the lower the quality of the saved image.
There is also a useful tool buried in the Windows XP and Vista systems.
Select a photo by right-clicking on it, and from the pop-up menu choose "Send to, Mail Recipient." (In Vista you can also click the email icon on the toolbar.) A dialog box will ask if you want to make the pictures smaller before you send them. If you choose to do so, Windows will create smaller versions of the photos and send them to your default email program. Also, notice the "Show more options" link at the RH foot of the box, which allows you to choose the emailed size of the pic.
Windows shrinks the photos by reducing their resolution. The resulting image will look fine onscreen, but won't print very well. When you send photos this way, it might pay to mention this in the body of my message, and offer to send the full-size version of any photo the recipient wants to print.