I must admit I nearly choked laughing at Mr Ashbees utterly awful article on computer enhancement of pictures in this months leisure painter. Point 1: Focus on Photoshop Now as readers might remember I got into this painting game from landscape photography and I do happen to be pretty au fait with the beast that is photoshop but old Brian here trys to give a step by step tutorial on how to use the thing. First error in my book is to say that you need 'A computer with image editing such as photoshop'. Now this sounds like a small and simple requirement, but let me tell you friends that photoshop is not a small friendly application for beginners to image editing - quite the contrary it's a big expensive, hairy and deeply unfriendly (and hugely useful and extremely powerful) piece of software. The entry level version is going to set you back a good £70 (list) and the real package upwards of £600 (list) and I would say the real package is probably worth the money. Anyway my point is to suggest that a beginner to image editing needs to go anywhere near photoshop is just crazy. Start with something smaller, friendlier and cheaper (ie free). Now I have photoshop but to do most of the stuff in Mr Ashbees article, most of the time I'd use picassa - which you can download - for free - from google. It's way easier to use and unless you're a pro / using RAW imaging 95% or the time it does the job AND it won't beat the hell out of your basic PC. There are many other freebies out there as... go to toucows.com and search for image editing... Point 2: Sep by step guide So the point I've made so far is that photoshop is not the right imaging package for a leisure painter. Now given that photoshop is dead expensive and people are not likely to just happen to have it lying around... why on earth bother to provide a step-by-step numptie guide on how to use it... Surely this article would have been far better showing people where to get freeby software from and then talk in generic terms about contrast, hue, saturation, effects filters, yah, yah, yah... and some better examples would probably have inspired more... Anyway IMHO a total waste of 3 pages ... and the REALLY funny thing is this all comes under the banner of 'New Technology' - image editing has been around since last century - it's hardly cutting edge. Sorry for the rant folks.... I won't buy it again so don't worry. Ade