With so many photo software programs available these days, and some of them quite inexpensive, it helps to know what features are available before you make your software choice.
First of all, decide how you are going to use your photo software. Are you going to be creating a website? Creating greeting cards, scrapbook pages, and that annual Christmas letter? Or managing digital photo albums of your family and your last vacation? There are photo software programs with features geared toward printing photos out, and producing hard media, and other photo software programs that feature tools to make web publishing easier.
There are some features that all photo software should include. Most of these center on the ability to alter or correct your photos with things like cropping, rotating, brightness, sharpness, or color balance. Most good photo software programs have some kind of redeye correction tool, vital to your portraits, but some do not.
Be aware of the file types that your photo software supports. This becomes important if you are using your photo software for Internet usage. Nothing is more frustrating than downloading a great photo off the web, and finding that your photo software will not support it. Another Internet-ready feature you will need in your photo software is the ability to reduce the saturation of your JPEG photos in order to use less memory. Photo software specifically aimed for web usage, like Ulead Photo Deluxe, will automatically offer this option whenever you save a photo.
Other features considered vital, or just useful, depending upon how you plan to use your photo software, are: albums, thumbnail viewing, ease of use, and the ability to add text to your photos. If you want to play with your photos, animation, cartooning, distortion, and other fun tools are available even on some of the cheaper software programs.