MySoftware's MyHoliday Photo Editor lets you create and customize photos quickly and easily, making one-of-a-kind holiday greetings and personal keepsakes. Easy to install and use, the program lets you capture photos from your digital camera or scanner and edit them on your desktop. Edit out red eye, resize images, and crop photos. A wide selection of color filters, distortions, textures, fun frames, and holiday borders let you customize your photos. You can even adjust brightness, contrast, and lighting. MyHoliday Photo Editor also comes with a free seasonal screen saver and bonus holiday clip art.

View original and edited photos simultaneously with this program's handy preview tool. Save your photos for posting to the Web or printing in JPEG, TIF, BMP, PCX, PNG, Targa, or WMF file formats. MyHoliday Photo Editor works seamlessly with MyHoliday Greeting Cards and MyHoliday Mailing Labels, so you can design and produce meaningful and memorable holiday cards, newsletters, and invitations, festive labels, and more.

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On the recomendation of others on this BB I downloaded Neat Image. I have not played with the settings at all, and in general it does a great job of removing noise on its own. However, yesterday I took some pics at the zoo, got home, did all the usual adjustments as well as some sharpening. Pulled them into neat image to remove the noise and was not happy with the results. Animals like Elephants and Rhino's lost all the detail in the skin. Instead of the skin being all rough, neat image assumed it was noise and smoothed it out.

How do you guys use neat image ? do you use the default setting or do you adjust the setting ? If you adjust the settings, which ones do what ?

re:

I see exactly the same type results you do Ouzo.

For sure, a by-product of minimizing noise is a loss of detail. A lot of what you lost on this image is probably the result of letting the program do the auto profile function.

I'm still learning this app myself, and I think it does a nice job, but you really have to fine tune the noise profile even to the extent of having several profiles for use on approriately similar subjects.

I would be interested to hear from more users too.