free vs commercial software

[911newbie]

Dear Ladies and Gents,
Got myself a Canon 40D and a couple of lenses recently and and learning about photography, the excuse being two children and the desire to have some nice photos of them.

OK - my question is having grabbed RawTherapee, Paint, GIMP (+UFRaw) etc I now have a reasonable suite of software to manipulate RAW and convert and maniuplate jpg/tiff images. Is there anything I am missing between this set of freeware and say PS elements or Lightroom (leaving aside that fact I don't use a Mac) ???

I would imagine there is a whole load of stuff I can do in the full blown PS that I can't do now, but at £600 odd for a licence I won't be buying it soon/ever.

Any other freeware out there you think I should know about ?

Cheers
Chris

PS I got the 17-85 IS lens (so so) with the kit and bought the cheapo Canon 50mm f1.8 prime (excellent), - what's next ? I was thinking of the cheapo Canon 28mm f2.8 prime and maybe the 70-300 zoom ... opinions please !
The Sigmna 10-20mm ? The canon 70-200mm F4.5 (£450 at the mo)

[bulb763]

Sorry can't help with your Q, but if you do want PS or any other adobe product then you can get a substantial discount if you are a student and can prove it. For example I think the master collection (near enough everything) is ~£410 down from >£2k!

[Colin RedGriff]

The Canon raw processing software (Digital Photo Professional) always gets a good review to do the basic processing to tiff or jpg.

[stigmundfreud]

Colin RedGriff said:

The Canon raw processing software (Digital Photo Professional) always gets a good review to do the basic processing to tiff or jpg.

yep, I seem to always be banging on about it but it is the best RAW processor I've personally used to date.

[911newbie]

The Canon software is amazing indeed, have you tried Photostitch ?
I knocked out 360 degreess of wide angle pics of the garden the other day and it put them together in no time without fuss. (Shame doesn't work with raw format though).

I find RawTherapree slightly easier to use than Canon's own Phtotpro software, and has a few more bells and whistles.

I just wondered if I was missing some fabulous bit of freeware, or if PS elements was so much better I should cough up the £60 for it.

[chris.mapey]

Personally I'd say buy PaintShop Pro X2 (twelve) and use that instead of Photoshop CS2/3.

It's way cheaper (cheaper than Elements IIRC) - and does most (90%+) of what the "full" photoshop does.

I use Picasa for archiving shoots, and basic "tweaks" of snaps, and PSP X2 for nearly everything else (though it's not the fastest for RAW conversion, but that may just be my steam powered PC)

Remember if you are buying PSP X2, buy it as a download from the US site and pay in US$ not pounds sterling

You can download a free trial to see if you like it first as well.

Chris